His Dark Material: The Enchanted Sleeper

Yes, I’ve at last made time for the third and final season of His Dark Materials, adapted from the novel The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman.

In all honesty, this book is not my favourite of the trilogy, and came as something of a disappointment after being utterly transported by Northern Lights and The Subtle Knife. As a thirteen-year-old, I had never read anything like them before. They were formative in teaching me that fantasy didn’t have to be set in Ye Old Medieval England. The metaphysical mysteries, such as the nature of Dust and the daemons, were captivating.

It is a rare thing to have been as swept up in a story and its implications as I was with those books, and they’re the type of story that fills any would-be writer with a kind of despair, as you know you’ll never write anything half as good. The way Pullman linked his own concepts (the daemons, the alethiometer) with the Biblical story of the Garden of Eden, and with the universal human experience of gaining consciousness, growing up and becoming an adult was – and still is – awe-inspiring to me.

Yet here, that story gives way to a treatise on Pullman’s personal outlook on life – not one that I found offensive, but which wasn’t presented in the text in a way I found convincing. I wasn’t hugely moved by the love story between Lyra and Will (I remember thinking on my first read: “oh, we’re going there”) and that romantic attraction is what saved the entire multiverse didn’t mean much to my aromantic soul.

Generally speaking, stories in which a hero journeys down into the underworld don’t pique my interest (hot take: you’ve read one katabasis, you’ve read them all) and to this day I’m rather incredulous that the entirety of Lord Asriel’s physical assault on the Kingdom of Heaven happens off-page in favour of Mary Malone telling the protagonists about her sexual awakening. We get absolutely nothing on how the actual war panned out (yes, you could argue that an Anti-Climax Climax was the point, but that doesn’t make it any less disappointing).

A lot of the material seemed completely superfluous (the Gallivespians, Lyra speaking with her Death), so many of the enticing philosophical questions that were raised didn’t feel like they were answered in any satisfying way (did we ever get a clear answer on what the Spectres were or why they attacked adults the way they did?) and a number of intriguing set-ups ended up going nowhere (it was repeatedly stated that Asriel couldn’t win the war without the help of the subtle knife, and Serafina is given fuck-all to do).

There was a chance that a television adaption could have alleviated some of these issues, but so far I’ve found this a rather toothless and over-explanatory take on the source material. Not bad by any means, but straightforward, workmanlike and diligent in ticking the boxes of Pullman’s story without exploring or deepening the text in any meaningful way. It could be a lot worse, but you only have to look at its (lack of) reception to realize it clearly hasn’t made that much of a splash.

Still, we’ve still got one more season to go, and having seen it through this far, I’ve no intentions of stopping now.

We start with a voiceover that pretty much lays out the whole premise of Pullman’s magnum opus: that God is not God at all, but rather an angel formed out of Dust (as all sentient life is, to one extent or another) and who presented himself as the Creator, Father and Authority of all that followed. The great war waged between Heaven and Hell was not – as we understand it – between God and Satan, the latter of which was trying to overthrow the rightful order of things, but between a God-imposter and Xaphania, an angel of greater wisdom who discovered his secret.

Naturally, the Authority won that round, and now all of sentient life is gearing up for a second try. The visuals here are nicely done, with all the angels rendered as spirits made up of shining particles, though at the same time there’s something a little demythologizing about actually seeing something that should be beyond the limits of human comprehension.

In any case, we get to see Chipo Chung in the role of Xaphania, the book’s most “pull lever for exposition and resolution and lip-service to the sacred feminine” character, taking over from Sophie Okonedo (who only voiced the character at the end of season two, so the change isn’t too glaring). I’m interested in seeing what they’ll do with this character, for – as you might have guessed from my description of her – she’s both insanely important to the story and yet utterly superfluous to the plot as-written.

She appears only a couple of times to explain things, but is essentially the brains of the whole operation, the individual who figured out the Great Lie perpetuated by the Authority, the instigator of the Great War both times it happened, and we learn virtually nothing about her. (My biggest question is why on earth Lord Asriel is in charge of the rebellion and not her. Did she recruit him? Did he seek her out? I suspect the Asriel-centric episode that we lost to Covid would have added some details in this respect).

I’ve also been intrigued by the fact that Pullman made it very specifically clear (and the television show even more so) that the Authority wasn’t the Creator. In some way, it kind of feels like he’s pulling his punches when it comes to the premise he’s laid out. That is, in a story that so often lauds itself as being about killing God, the truth is – that’s really not the case at all. It’s about killing God’s impersonator, which isn’t quite as audacious.

I’ve often wondered why he included this caveat. Perhaps because he believes in a scientific explanation of sentient life and so wanted to remove the concept of a Creator entirely, or perhaps because his beef is with organized religion and not the idea that a Creator may or may not exist (as Ogunwe says in the book: “there may have been a creator, or there may not: we don’t know”).

The show deals with this by having Ogunwe tell Asriel: “you cannot fight one’s Creator,” to which Asriel makes very clear that they’re not. Xaphania the angel uncovered the truth a millennia ago, shared it with a select few, and now they’re marching against the entity that has conned everyone into believing he’s the Creator. (Out of interest, this information is conveyed to the audience via Will learning it from Balthamos and Baruch in the novel).

I wonder if the show played it this way in order to avoid a degree of controversy from religious groups. Because contrary to what Ogunwe says, you can very much fight one’s creator, whether it’s your parents or a deity (I’m not saying you’d win, but you can fight), and the whole thing makes me wonder what this story would have looked like if the Authority HAD canonically created the entire multiverse.

As it is, I’m always bemused at the backlash this story has always gotten since its initial publication, as there’s really nothing in here that invalids any religion. The “good guys” simply take out a rogue angel that’s been impersonating God in another universe. If anything, it’s a story about removing lies and corruption from religious institutions (oh, maybe THAT’s what they’re upset about).

Okay, so back to the show. This episode is all about resetting the board, all the more so because the first two seasons were filmed back-to-back, and this one is now airing over three years after the conclusion of season two. The child actors are visibly older, and of course, whatever the Asriel-centric episode would have contained in regards to exposition now has to be metered out among the remaining episodes.

Lyra and Will have been separated, the former kidnapped by her mother, and the latter forced to watch his long-lost father die at the hands of a Magisterium agent (not a spurned witch, as in the book). Now Will is searching through the worlds for Lyra, using the subtle knife to cut doorways between them.

Though we never find out the exact details of how, Mrs Coulter has taken Lyra back to her world and is hiding out with her in a cottage on the Welsh coast (not a cave in the Himalayas, as per the book – we’ve got a budget to stick to!) She’s in a drugged sleep, and Mrs Coulter’s only contact is a deaf girl who – unknowingly – brings her the herbs required to keep her in that state. (I’m not sure if their communication is meant to be subtitled, but you can get the gist of what they’re saying to each other).

Lyra is having dreams of the Land of the Dead, and Roger is there, hilariously looking significantly older than when he died. On the one hand, sure – this couldn’t be helped, and I’m certainly grateful that we’re spared either a change in actor or any awful de-aging technology. But it also makes very little sense that Roger could keep on maturing after his death, and he was such a cute little boy that it’s very obvious he’s grown.

Meanwhile, Will is trying to evade two angels following him through the worlds, using the knife to cross through dimensions in quick succession. How do they keep following him? According to them, the knife attracts Dust and angels are made of Dust. This means that they’re also effortlessly able to read the alethiometer, which is powered by Dust and able to give Will the location of Lyra.

The were unable to do this in the book, and simply tracked Mrs Coulter back into her own world through physical evidence of her passage, which opens up a minor point of contention for me. Pullman’s rules on world-building were always a little arbitrary and often came down to what was most convenient to the plot, but weren’t angels and Dust entirely the same thing? Wasn’t this what they told Mary when she was hooked up to the Cave and they instructed her to “play the serpent”?

I suppose you could argue some form into more solid shapes and have separate identities, and in that case it makes sense they can use the alethiometer, provided they’re still connected to the greater “Dust network.”

In any case, the angels introduce themselves as Balthamos and Baruch, with one agreeing to accompany Will to save Lyra, and the other returning to Lord Asriel with the intel they’ve just gathered. It’s the year 2023, and so we’re left in no doubt that these male-presenting angels are lovers.

Skipping forward a few chapters, they come across good old Iorek Byrnison, who is fighting with some humans over the capture of a she-bear (sorry to keep doing this, but this motivation wasn’t in the book. There, Iorek is trying to settle his bears into a new home, which presumably would have been too expensive to render). Will gets to put into play his scheme with the knife, challenging Iorek to a fighting, asking him to surrender a piece of his armour, and then effortlessly slicing the sky-iron into bits. It’s a great moment, and reminiscent of what George R.R. Martin tried to do with the dragons – they’re the equivalent of a nuclear weapon; a game-changer that no one can stand against.

Iorek admits defeat, and a new ally becomes part of the rescue mission. This sequence was handled pretty well, though it’s a shame that Iorek’s line: “I cannot fight that” wasn’t allowed to breath a bit more, for us to be reminded of the sheer power and strangeness of what Will is wielding.

***

What’s Lord Asriel up to during all this? He’s in a gyrocopter (which crash-lands) and it’s soon apparent he’s trying to break someone out of prison with the help of the Gallivespians, who are just... there. Where’d they come from? Were they waiting for Asriel? Where’d they go afterwards? And why aren’t they riding dragonflies, which was the coolest part of their design? Seriously, they appear without any introduction or explanation whatsoever.

Anyway, the object of the rescue mission is a man called Ogunwe, another leader who fights against “the Temple” that Asriel wants to recruit to his greater cause. And hey, he’s played by Mr Eko from LOST! Haven’t seen him in a while.

His world doesn’t have daemons, though Ogunwe takes the talking snow leopard in his stride. Apparently it’s just a short jog down an underground corridor from the prison complex for Ogunwe to reach his basecamp (I... just... what?) and he’s reunited with his youngest daughter. They’re really situated that close to the prison? You could handwave it as part of an operation, as this whole sequence is filled with allusions to guerrilla warfare and drone strikes, but then why are children there?

Okay, moving on. Ogunwe introduces Asriel to his oldest daughter, who has clearly been severed. This world has no daemons, so it’s unclear what exactly has happened to her, but Asriel drops some more exposition about how her soul has been taken, and that Stelmaria is this to him. (But, how do we know the Temple did this to her? What if it was a stray Spectre, given she looks old enough to fall victim to one?)

But seeing his angle, Asriel makes his pitch: the Temple is just this world’s Magisterium, and it’s small beans. If they really want to make a difference, then they should be setting their sights higher to the Authority himself – only then are they really going to win this war once and for all. The whole sequence is very much designed to demonstrate Asriel’s powers of persuasion, and it ends when he opens a door between worlds to show Ogunwe the army that he’s mustered. Apparently, he no longer needs a child sacrifice in order to achieve this – or perhaps the energy from Roger’s sacrifice is still fuelling his machine.

***

Finally, we get a look at the inner workings of the Magisterium, and it’s clearly an attempt to give a face to the villains. Chapters like this existed in the book, so it’s not like they were ever perpetually off-screen (like Sauron in The Lord of the Rings) but the horror of the Magisterium as an antagonist was that it really was a nameless, faceless system that swallowed people whole. There was no one in there worth exploring in any great detail, they were all cogs in a self-imposed machine, and the point was they were all banal and dull.

The horror of them was in their mediocrity, so trying to flesh them out is a fool’s errand. Still, I’m interested in how the show tries to convey them. What glimpses we get is all very sterile and neat – their uniforms actually reminded me of something from The Handmaid’s Tale. I’m not sure I agree with that take; any depiction of the church should be old and stale and musty, to reflect its age and state of being in the world. Still, I can understand the aesthetic: the fact that it’s sleek and almost a little futuristic demonstrates that this is a relevant and contemporary power in this universe, much like the Empire in Star Wars.

Father McPhail arrives in Geneva to have some discussion about a banned book with an array of priests, apparently written by a heretic called Father Jerome. A quick Google search tells me this is a character from The Secret Commonwealth, though I’ve no idea if the author of this book is meant to be the same person, or if it’s going to be relevant to the story (maybe it’s a nod to the book-burnings undergone by churches over the centuries, just as Pullman touched on the covered-up paedophilia that took place in the Catholic Church in the chapter “Vodka”. It’s a sequence that’s been skipped entirely, having taken place between Will’s meeting with the angels and his recruitment of Iorek, so perhaps the heretical book conversation was invented to replace it).

It also gives us the chance to meet Father Gomez, who will have a much larger part to play later down the track (well, kind of. The truth is he’s taken out by a supporting character and the kids never even realize he’s a threat). His little subplot reintroduces us to the concept that Lyra is Eve reborn, and that she’s about to fall from grace once again. She therefore must be stopped at all costs, since the Magisterium has degreed that Dust is the embodiment of mortal sin.

Fra Pavel pops up again, the Magisterium’s reader of the alethiometer, and it seems that he’s about to be assassinated. But why would the church want to destroy this asset? Perhaps it’s because the portrayal of the church members’ daemons (insects and rats) isn’t enough of a giveaway that they’re the bad guys?

***

We’re off to a reasonably solid start. It’s engaging, if not riveting. All the allies are getting ready for the last big assault on their enemy, which means a fair amount of exposition in place of expensive visual cues, though I hope we actually get to see some of the battle and its aftermath.

The show’s attempts to expand out the edges of this story, such as dramatizing Asriel’s meeting and recruitment of Ogunwe, aren’t hugely successful, as they feel like they’re just there to pad out the screentime as opposed to deepening the characters or exploring the nuances of the plot. It’s extraneous, adding detail here and there but no real substance.

I’ve always had mixed feelings on Pullman’s tendency to “only tell the audience what they need to know.” Sometimes it works incredibly well, like how daemons are never explicitly referred to as people’s souls (unlike the show, which has Asriel spell it out) or the mystery of how John Parry drew Lee Scoresby to him by the use of his mother’s ring. Other times, it left me feeling incredibly frustrated at the lack of answers I was getting. I’m not entirely sure the books make it clear enough that Dust is consciousness or explained why precisely Spectres attacked those that had a surplus of Dust around them (ie, adults). Who were the people that were after Will at the start of The Subtle Knife? Who were the angels that instructed Mary to “play the serpent”? Why are the Spectres repelled by her presence?

There are some things that just need some added clarification, and hopefully the show will provide that.

Miscellaneous Observations:

It strikes me as vaguely funny that this decades-old epic that hinges on the concept of the multiverse would air at the same time as the height of that concept being explored in various comic-book movies (DC’s The Flash, various MCU projects, and the Spiderman: Into The Spiderverse trilogy). Multiverses are just all the rage these days.

Was it just me, or were Lord’s Asriel’s assembled forces, as glimpsed in the campsite at the end of the episode, not all that impressive? Where was the adamant tower and the sulphur lake and the volcanic forges?

This show’s lazy, trite dialogue has always bugged me. There’s just no bite to any of it, and some of it is downright stupid. I’m agape that Asriel’s first line this season was: “for goodness’ sake.” Really? REALLY? The avowed God-hater is uttering the watered-down idiom of: “for God’s sake”? How did that get past the first draft?

What were we meant to make of Father Gomez nearly touching Fra Pavel’s rat daemon? I almost want to say it was hinting at his suppressed sexuality, though perhaps it was merely meant to be unsettling.

This episode demonstrates that daemons can be awake while their humans are sleeping, as seen when Pan beseeches Mrs Coulter to let Lyra wake up from her drugged sleep. Later, Mrs Coulter appears to be sleeping when Lyra makes her thwarted escape attempt (it was a weird scene though, not just because the monkey simply sits there and watches her go, but because Lyra sees it watching her. Are we meant to infer that it woke up Mrs Coulter once they’d left?)

I would have regarded this whole sequence as pointless, except that Lyra getting knocked out by Mrs Coulter’s chloroform is witnessed by the little girl that’s been delivering food. Let’s see how this unfolds...

In her final scene, Mrs Coulter looks out across the ocean and says: “I thought he’d be here by now.” Is she referring to Asriel? Why would she expect him to turn up?

While I’m busy complaining, can I just reiterate that I hate the designs of the alethiometer and the subtle knife. They look so cheap and small and measly. Especially since their iconic depictions are RIGHT THERE on the book covers! Why would you deviate from these, especially when the text is so clear on what they look like?

I just found out that the actor playing Father McPhail is Dafne Keene’s real-life father.

As ever, I’m reading along with the book, and so far this episode has covered nine whole chapters. Obviously, there are some chapters that will be dramatized in later episodes (such as Mary meeting the mulefa and the introduction of Metatron) but a lot seems to have been permanently skipped: Ama visiting the holy man, Iorek visiting Lee Scoresby’s corpse, that weird interlude with Semyon Borisovitch.

Furthermore, a lot of the book at this early stage involves characters sharing intel: Serafina talks with Iorek, Asriel talks with Baruch, the Gallivespian spies talk to each other – even the cliff-ghasts get some unexpected information from some Arctic foxes. It remains to be seen how this exchange of information will be handled in the show, as there’s nothing more annoying than characters just knowing vital intelligence.

This episode was dedicated to the memory of Helen McCrory, who voiced Stelmaria in the first two seasons. She was a class act.