Okay, so I have to correct two things from prior episode reviews. One is that Lord Asriel didn’t murder that angel after all, he apparently just sort of forcibly sent him back to the Authority’s throne room in order to deliver a message. The other is that the mulefa do utilize the oily seedpods to roll around on, even if the designers couldn’t find a way to replicate the diamond-shaped skeleton described in the book.
So that’s something of a relief, even though it’s unclear how exactly the mulefa are using the seedpods. You’d still need some sort of opposable claw to use as an axel, which doesn’t appear to be the case here – instead, they’re using seedpods as a form of roller skates. I’m not sure that looks better than what Pullman described in writing, but the episode I watched unfortunately didn’t come with any subtitles, which presumably would have helped explain the symbiotic relationship between the creatures, the pods, and the trees.
I’m glad the gigantic flora is present and accounted for, but there’s no sign of the distinctive roads, and I doubt we’ll see the tualapi at this late stage. Also, Mary finds the titular “amber” just lying in a body of water? It was a relatively important plot-point that the amber was made from tree resin that Mary shaped and refined with her own hands – though I suppose given my first paragraph, I should give the show a chance to depict this in the next episode.
But the mulefa chapters are fairly crucial in the book, as they not only help break up the nightmarish hellscape of the other chapters, but the mulefa culture essentially encompasses every single philosophical idea that Pullman has about the world. I definitely heard the word “sraf” being mentioned, and Mary explicitly linked it to Lyra’s Dust at one point, but it’s a shame all this material was (presumably) considered too weird for the show to delve into in any great detail.
The mulefa babies were cute though.
***
Over in Will and Lyra’s considerably darker and grimmer storyline, they’re huddled together on a boat as they make the long, cold journey across to the land of the dead (like, the proper place, not just the waiting rooms). They’ve had to leave Pan behind, but Will is suffering too – he has a daemon, though he can’t see or talk to it, and he had to abandon her on the shore as well.
The ferryman gets a little of the monologue Pullman wrote for him, about how everyone must cross the river sooner or later, but I’m disappointed it didn’t include the part about the wealthy. (To quote: “the rich ones are the worst, snarling and savage and cursing me, railing and screaming: what did I think I was? Hadn’t they gathered and saved all the gold they could garner? Wouldn’t I take some now, to put them back ashore? They’d have the law on me, they had powerful friends, they knew the Pope and the King of this and the Duke of that, they were in a position to see me punished and chastised. But they knew what the truth was in the end: the only position they were in was my boat going to the land of the dead, and as for those kings and popes, they’d be in here too, in their turn, sooner than they’d wanted.” Why’d they cut out such a gloriously savage takedown?)
They reach the shore, and we get some nice visual/audio details. The ferryman disappears back into mist, and Lyra’s call echoes around the empty space. Finally, a sense of vastness in this desolate place, which after all, is housing the spirits of every single person that ever existed. I also liked the chilling sight of the wall made of people’s shoes and other belongings, which is unique to the show and deeply unsettling, as well as the faraway cries of the harpies well before we actually see them.
They actually hold off on the harpies for longer than the book does, which involved a brief tussle with one at the wall when Lyra offers to tell it a story and is subsequently attacked for telling lies. This is a deliberate lead-in to Lyra later making a deal with the harpies: that they’ll give the dead safe passage to the window leading to the world above in exchange for true stories about the lives they’ve led – an important distinction that Pullman makes, which is all part of his humanist outlook on life. As human beings, we’re responsible for living the life we’ve been given with all its sensory pleasures, and hiding away from any of it is the closest thing to sin we can commit.
(As the book!ferryman says: “there’s others who longed to be dead when they were alive... killed themselves for a chance of a blessed rest and found that nothing had changed except for the worst.”)
Sadly, this element seems to have been lost, though I wonder if it was given a brief nod by the foreman calling Lyra a “liar” in the previous episode. In the book, the harpy screams “liar” so long and loudly that it echoes back off the walls “so that she seemed to be screaming Lyra’s name, so that Lyra and liar were one and the same thing.” It would appear screenwriter Jack Thorne wanted to give a nod to the homophonic link between those two words in some capacity.
The show has Lyra and Will meeting the ghosts almost immediately, and so the search for Roger Parslow is on. A little girl tries to help them, but the evil whispers of the harpies (still off-screen) make her turn her back pretty quickly, just before Lyra is distracted by visions of Pan. It’s unclear what exactly is meant to be happening here – it’s new to the show, not something that the harpies seem to be doing themselves, and Lyra's separation from Will is resolved in the very next scene. Okay, moving on...
In the distance, walking away from her, she spots Roger and – oh dear, they really should have filmed these scenes in advance. Like, during the shooting of seasons one and two back in 2017, even if it had required Lewin Lloyd to act opposite a green-screen to account for Dafne Keen’s inevitable two-years-later growth spurt. Because Lloyd is now clearly, obviously, blatantly much older than he was the last time we saw him, which doesn’t feel like something that should happen when your character is dead.
They even lampshade it by having him tell Lyra: “I’ve changed.” Um yeah, you’re taller than she is now, even though the last time you interacted she was towering over you. I suppose the alternative was recasting, which I wouldn’t have wanted, but it’s a shame this whole thing couldn’t have been filmed in one big go since the whole damn story technically only takes place over a matter of months.
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| This was like... three weeks ago. |
But in any case, Lyra gets the chance to apologize and assuage her guilt, and we get maybe the slightest trace of a love triangle when the two take hands, Roger says: “I do wish things were different”, and Will conspicuously stands between them. This was brushed upon in the book as well: “Lyra began to explain, quite unaware of how her voice changed, how she sat up straighter, and how even her eyes looked different when she told the story of her meeting with Will... but Roger noticed, with the sad, voiceless envy of the unchanging dead.”
I saw a couple of commentators complain that it was far too easy for Lyra to have found Roger given the vast scope of the place, and they’ve got a point – again, the book has it take a while for the two to reach each other, several hours in fact, in which the dead spread the word until it reaches Roger and the Gallivespians (from their vantage points atop their dragonflies) are able to guide them to each other.
It's at this point Will and Lyra come up with the idea of a massive jailbreak – to use the subtle knife to make a window and free everyone. Good plan, but they’re so deep underground that Will can only cut into bedrock. The harpies start up with their vicious taunts again, and we get our first good look at them.
Oh dear. I think an actress in facial/body prosthetics would have worked better than this. Remember the Dochraid from Merlin? Put a pair of wings on her and they would have had the perfect harpy. This? Looks like a turtle. Like Morla the Ancient One in The Neverending Story.
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| The Dochraid from Merlin |
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| Morla's evil twin sister |
In any case, Lyra fends them off by simply not letting them get inside her head (uh, whut) and encourages Will to do the same. Their plan is now to get to higher ground and cut through to the living world, taking Roger with them – by force if necessarily.
But it doesn’t come to that, as Lyra reminiscences with him about their time at Jordan College, which he responds to. Their laughter even turns on a nearby lantern, which doesn’t make any sense, but the symbolism works just fine. She realizes that other ghosts have gathered around, wanting to listen to her stories... except she doesn’t continue, instead she and Will relate the plan to them all.
Naturally the ghosts ask what will happen to them if they reach the living, outside world again, and some express fear at the thought of simply disappearing. But an elderly woman steps forward and says that religion and the church told them that they should spend their lives in prayer and silence, and that life itself went to waste around them as a result. As such, they should go, in an “anything is better than this” way.
In the book, it’s a bit more complicated. Lyra consults the alethiometer and can tell them honestly that they’ll dissolve into Dust, and the old woman who steps forward is a young woman who the text tells us “died as a martyr” (I always wondered if she was meant to be Joan of Arc) who convinces those around her that they should follow Lyra: “even if it means oblivion, friends, I’ll welcome it, because it won’t be nothing, we’ll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves, we’ll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze.”
She’s confronted by the ghost of a monk, who denounces Lyra and insists she’s sent from the devil, and that he and his followers are experiencing paradise, something that can only be seen by the holy and righteous. It’s kind of an inversion of the scene in C.S. Lewis’s The Last Battle where the dwarfs insist they’re stuck in a smelly, dirty stable while the rest of the characters look around and see beautiful streams and fruit trees, and it’s an odd little moment since the monk then disappears entirely from the story.
But some tension is missing to this scene in the show, because in the book, Lyra doesn’t want to attract the attention of the harpies again. But since the show hasn’t established their hatred of lies and their attraction to the truth, it doesn’t lead to the creatures being captivated by her tales and the subsequent treaty the dead can now make with them. This is too important to not be covered in the show, but they’re holding it off for now, and the scene ends with Lyra launching into another story about Jordan for the benefit of the ghosts, which is enough to convince them to follow her. A harpy flies down into their midst, but they just stare it down and it flies off.
“I don’t think they can hurt us if we can hold on to what’s real.” Thorpe is nudging at Pullman’s thesis statement, but never quite spells it out clearly.
And hey, it’s Lin-Manuel Miranda back as Lee Scoresby, though no sign of John Parry for now, even though (yes, in the book) the men work together to save Lyra from the bomb by cutting her hair... look, it’s all a bit complicated and judging by the end of this episode, they’re not going to handle the problem in the same way.
Scoresby goes off to “round up the stragglers” (my dude, there are billions upon billions of ghosts in this place) and they continue on their way, with the bomb as the cliffhanger that closes the episode...
***
Which is a good enough segue into Mrs Coulter’s arc, which plays out so differently here that I’ll spare you my endless “in the book” comparisons. Suffice to say it involves a protracted action sequence involving a stormy night and a zeppelin, so it’s little wonder that they changed it here for budgetary reasons – though it works out quite well given what the show has already established.
Mrs Coulter has been arrested, but Lord Roke is still in play, hovering over Doctor Cooper as she’s escorted to the bomb preparations. Despite experimenting on children and separating them from their own souls, the good doctor appears to be having second thoughts about blowing one up. Hey, I guess everyone has got to draw the line somewhere.
In her prison cell, Mrs Coulter is looking at her life, looking at her choices, while tensions brew between Father MacPhail and Gomez. Again, there’s some unsolicited touching of another person’s daemon, when MacPhail attempts to reach out to the golden monkey, and for calling him out, Gomez gets a slap round the face. In contrition, Gomez comes up with an idea: that he’ll go out into the world as a failsafe in order to make sure that the second Eve is never tempted into sin.
Holding off on this mission and integrating Gomez into papal intrigues was a good idea (in the book, he’s chasing after Lyra right from the start) and even though they drop the whole concept of pre-emptive absolution (look it up, it’s horrifying) we get this pretty cool shot of him with the mural:
Can’t figure out what that writing is though. Something in Latin?
It also strikes me as interesting that Mrs Coulter and the monkey are being kept very far apart, in completely different rooms, yet no one has yet commented on the fact that they can be that far away from each other and not cry out in pain. The books often hinted that Mrs Coulter had the same ability as the witches (and eventually Lyra herself) to separate from her daemon, but it’s pretty much confirmed in the show, even though no one explicitly comments on it. Perhaps they just see it as another example of Mrs Coulter’s freakish nature?
Roke and Mrs Coulter have exchanged intel: he has enough poison to take out the guards, and she knows that Cooper is on the fence and frightened. She’s led to her execution chair but doesn’t miss a beat before starting to work on Doctor Cooper, playing expertly on their prior relationship and the horror of what they’re about to do, as well the danger she’s in and the fact that none of this is the will of the Authority. “When we created this technology together, you believed you were doing the right thing. We all did.”
(Okay, I have to believe this is bullshit, because Mrs Coulter knew exactly what she was doing, she just didn’t care. You can’t justify what you did to those kidnapped children).
You have to admit, it’s Laser-Guided Karma that Mrs Coulter is about to be taken out by her own intercision technology, and just to rub salt in the wound, Father MacPhail decides to mansplain how it all works. But his weird monologuing clearly makes Cooper even more uncomfortable, and Mrs Coulter naturally refuses a final blessing.
It’s at this point we get a scene in which the captive angel returns to the Regent Metatron to tell him Lord Asriel’s plans, something I feel that Metatron should have probably known already, being a divine creature and all that. He dismisses the threat of the subtle knife, though Alarbus insists that Will hasn’t been corrupted like the bearers before him (hmm, does that mean that Will’s innocence in carrying the knife poses more of a threat that the philosophers of the tower? That’s an interesting thought, given what happens later on...)
Metatron decides to send a warning... which means that even though Lord Roke comes to the rescue and Doctor Cooper refuses to go through with detontation and Mrs Coulter prevents Father MacPhail from making the intercision on himself by defusing the bomb, it still goes off when Metatron intervenes. Does he just... set it off with his mind? It’s a bit unclear how this part plays out, though I suppose all we need to know is that the bomb is now racing toward Lyra's location.
Which brings us full-circle back around to her story and the next episode...
Miscellaneous Observations:
Reading along, I was once again struck by how little the Gallivespians do, to the point where it’s unsurprising the show cut them entirely. They are the ones that sort out the details of the deal between the harpies and the dead (with the former escorting the latter in exchange for stories) but that’s obviously nothing the kids can’t do by themselves, and they die almost immediately after the window is cut into the upper world.
The show also cuts the minor reveal in the book that Lyra has known all along that there was a witch/gyptian prophecy about her, having eavesdropped on Doctor Lanselius back in Trollesund, which is another understandable omission. It doesn’t add much to the story, and honestly, I think Pullman retconned her awareness of it simply to remind the reader of its existence.
Roger tells Lyra: “when you didn’t come, I lost all hope. Forever.” Uh, Roger – she DID come. She’s literally standing right in front of you. Book!Roger had a. total faith that Lyra would make her way to the land of the dead and b. that she would break all the ghosts out. But sigh, visual mediums just gotta milk that conflict. Thorne also can’t resist sneaking in the dreaded “we’ve got to get out of here” line.
What did Gomez take with him? One of the spy beetles?
Mrs Coulter is given an interesting line as she faces execution: “you’re worshipping a lie... you and others like you will never be free.” Does this mean that Marisa now agrees with Lord Asriel on theological matters? Because I don’t think she’s ever been a true believer (her motivation has always been power and acquisition) but at the same time, she seemed genuinely shocked at what Asriel told her about the true nature of the Authority.
Another intriguing bit of dialogue is Metatron announcing: “You think Dust can make you gods? Let’s see how you fare without it.” Er – I don’t think anyone has openly decreed that Dust will make them gods? And how exactly does he plan to destroy it? Is he referencing the Abyss? Is that why he sets off the bomb?
After writing all this up, I checked an online script to get an understanding of the unsubtitled mulefa parts, and they do establish that the trees are dying and that it’s imperative Mary learns how to see Dust, which she does through the oil-covered stone. But heck, does this mean they’re going to cut out the amber spyglass, which is the actual title of the book?
So, there’s been a little rearranging and a few omissions and shortcuts, but Will and Lyra’s Katabasis basically matches up with the journey they took in the book. It’s a little disappointing the show didn’t follow Pullman’s clear thematic narrative: that Lyra makes up stories, that she bonds with the dead by telling them of true life experiences, that the harpies respond to this (specifically that she’s telling the truth for a change) and that they can therefore make a deal with the ghosts based on this type of storytelling – but to be fair, they might cover this in the next episode. They just haven’t really laid the groundwork for it.
But...
Awwwwwww.
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