His Dark Materials: Malice

This was very much a penultimate episode, with almost all the characters making an appearance, and an underlying sense of things coming to a head. (Though it does make me wonder where the Asriel-centric episode would have been placed had it been completed in time).

Mary is exploring Cittàgazze, so is Mrs Coulter and Lord Boreal, Lee and John Parry have also crossed through the doorway into that world, and Lyra and Will are joined by Serafina and the other witches, who take them up into the hills (in the book it’s because that’s where the alethiometer is directing them. Here…I guess they’re just trying to reach higher ground?)

All the strands are coming together…

These last few episodes have been pretty solid, and at least one customer at the bookshop was raving about the season as a whole. Like me, he didn’t particularly like season one, but out from under the shadow of the ill-fated movie, and perhaps dealing with slightly less complicated subject matter (the first season suffered for not really capturing the bond between human and daemon) this take on The Subtle Knife has worked really well.

As expected, the witches finally show up, and though they’ve completely jettisoned the scene in which they see the Spectres ambush the convoy of people, we see Ruta Skadi take to the skies after the fleet of angels, and Serafina come to the rescue of Will and Lyra after they’re hunted down by the feral children.

As is this show’s terminal tendency, most of the suspense and drama is completely sucked out of the sequence: no longer do Will and Lyra make their escape out the back of the building, no more does Lyra sprint ahead while Will cradles his injured hand, too weak from blood loss to even attempt a run, no exhausted climb up the belvedere and misjudged effort to escape via a window, no onslaught of witches’ daemons and arrows falling down upon them. Did anyone think Lyra and Will were in any real danger?

Ah well, I should be used to it by now. It’s a pretty anticlimactic rescue, but the scenes that follow cover the basics: Will’s hand is still bleeding, the witches’ spell can’t heal it, Serafina is troubled, and the whole gang is moving towards… something. It’s John Parry, but I’m not entirely sure they know that yet. There are some really sweet scenes between Will and Lyra as they each looking after the other in their own ways, though I missed the book scene when Will talks to Pan (not knowing that it is a rare thing for someone to speak to a daemon that’s not their own) and he confesses that Lyra is the best friend he’s ever had. Perhaps Jack Thorpe thought they hadn’t quite reached that point yet…

But, hang on a second… why are Lyra and Serafina acting like they’ve never met before? Did they… not interact in season one? Am I misremembering things given that they very much met each other in the first book? I don’t have the energy to go back and check the first season episodes…

***

All of this Mary Malone material is unique to the show, though I had to jump ahead and flick through a few chapters of The Amber Spyglass to see how it matched up. My bad, I was under the impression that she goes through the window and straight to the world of the mulefa, but it turns out she does wander through the city of Cittàgazze, protected from the Spectres, before finding another window.

For now the show is letting us see how she responds to this new reality, and there are some beautiful moments in Simone Kirby’s performance: unknowingly sitting beneath the Tower of Angels, lifting her face to the sky, the image of angel wings expanding behind her; or coming across the beach where Lyra and Will once sat, realizing that someone is following her.

The someone is Angelica and her little sister, and the show takes the chance to redeem them a little when they respond to Mary with a barely-concealed desire for a mother figure. I may have gotten a little teary-eyed when the younger girl asks for a hug (even if I was afraid for a second there that Mary would end up with a knife in her back). Let’s be thankful it was Mary they stumbled onto and not Mrs Coulter.

Kirby really is putting in a great performance: with little more than her acting to go on, we can tell that Mary is a careful and methodical scientist, but also a woman with enough calm and compassion to “tame” feral children with an offer of food and words of kindness. This whole scene was genuinely affecting.

***

Finally, the Magisterium and Mrs Coulter scenes bring us back to the question of Lyra’s “true name”. In another riveting (/sarcasm) scene between Father McPhail and Fra Pavel, the two trade exposition regarding the nature of Lyra’s destiny, though I’m profoundly grateful that they stopped short of actually saying the Wham Line onscreen. (That said, they dropped enough hints that most newcomers would be able to figure it out for themselves).

I was actually under the false impression that Lord Boreal was the one that divulged this information to Mrs Coulter, but I had remembered wrongly: it turns out she finds out from another witch, one who witnesses her poisoning of Boreal, and is so wrapped up in the scene that she falls into Mrs Coulter’s trap. Given that Boreal is murdered here without a witch in sight, it remains to be seen how it’ll play out in the show’s final episode.

Instead, Mrs Coulter’s big moment was to do with how she asserted her will over the Spectres. In The Amber Spyglass, Pullman does his usual trick of just informing us of this fact and expecting us to go along with it, but I’m glad the show took the time to depict and justify what would have otherwise felt like an incredibly lazy cheat.

That she’s able to master her fear and present herself as having no humanity at all also foreshadows her interaction with a certain angel way down the track, but even on its own terms, this was a compelling scene. The effect used to portray the Spectres is extremely good, setting them apart from Dementor and Ringwraiths with their watery forms.

I got a laugh out of Boreal closing the door behind Mrs Coulter on noticing that she was going to try her luck with the Spectres, and knew instantly that he was a goner the moment he described her as his “equal”. Dude, you’re barely in her league, and she knows that better than anyone.

So it’s goodbye to Ariyon Bakare as Lord Boreal, a very different take on the character than what’s depicted in the books, but who was given a fair amount of unsettling charm and menace in his significantly expanded role. He was always going to fall to the machinations of Mrs Coulter, but I’m thankful the scene played out with far less sexual innuendo than in the book, instead being slow and creepy and yet – oddly peaceful at the same time.  

Miscellaneous Observations:

The point of the children attacking Will and Lyra is not only to demonstrate that children can be just as dangerous as adults (that in fact, the mob is deadly whether it’s a gang of feral children or a well-organized body of religious fanatics) but to draw a comparison to Will’s childhood, something that’s missing here with the exclusion of the scene in which he describes how his mother was attacked by a similar group of children, which in turn led to the cultivation of his ability to blend in with his surroundings so as not to attract the attention of any authority figures as he assumes the role of “adult” in his relationship with her.

Obviously the show chose a softer tract, with Angelica and her sister meeting up with Mary and reverting back to children in need of a mother. I wonder how they’ll be dealt with in the coming episode, as by this point in the book, their role was over and down with.

On that note, it’s taken me this long to realize that the girl with Angelica is in fact a Gender Flipped Paolo, her little brother in the books.  

I’m not sure why they added that touch of mistrust between Serafina and Will over the latter’s injury, but during my read-through I did notice that Pullman subtly foreshadows John’s ability to heal Will’s hand. Thematically it’s a father/son moment of connection, but in his conversation with Lee, John does mention having made an ointment with bloodmoss, which is what finally closes the wound.

What a gorgeous shot this is: 

Source

A few episodes ago I was a little confused that Giacomo Paradiso was calling the subtle knife by a different name, and wondering if this was an invention of the show itself. Nope, it’s in the book – in fact, it’s actually the name of a chapter: Æsahættr. Which means “god-destroyer”. Um, spoilers.

I still miss the witches’ cloud-pine broomsticks.

Why are the security measures suddenly missing from the window in Oxford? Boreal and Mrs Coulter pass through with no sign of any tents, guards or barriers. Especially bizarre since the last episode insinuated that Boreal was the one to put them there in the first place.

The John/Lee scenes were pretty good, especially the gag with the matches. Heh. And suddenly the budget goes up in order to accommodate a terrible lightning storm, a flock of attacking crows, and a balloon careening into a… oh no… a gulch.

But as Lee himself says: “These are the cards we’ve been dealt. Time to play them.” See you in the gramd finale!