His Dark Materials: The Botanic Gardens

And we’re done. All things considered, this was a decent ending to a fairly by-the-numbers adaptation of one of my favourite book trilogies, but at every turn it seemed to lack the vision of Pullman’s work. The show hit all the major plot-points, had a solid cast who knew what they were doing, featured relatively good visual design (costumes, set design, cinematography, etc) and seemed to understand the underlying themes – but there was simply no X-factor to the proceedings; no passion, no conviction.

In a way, this is because so much of the His Dark Materials trilogy is unfilmable. Not only is it well-nigh impossible to demonstrate the profound bond between a daemon and a human being without the insight that text can provide, but because ultimately the trilogy in its entirety is a theological mystery that contains an alternative spiritual worldview to Christianity and is solved through careful thought, research and discovery by its myriad of characters.

That naturally doesn’t translate well to a visual medium, best seen in the fact that the story’s emotional climax isn’t a no-holds-barred CGI battle between two massive opposing forces, but the sexual awakening of two preadolescents.

Because of that, this episode in particular feels more like an epilogue than a culmination of all the plot-threads that the show has been weaving for the past three seasons, the physical battle having already been won in the previous episode. It’s an unconventional ending to a deeply unconventional story, one that’s broken plenty of the rules of narrative structure along the way (there, we don’t even get a clear answer regarding who won the battle between Asriel and Metatron’s forces – only that the Magisterium’s power in Lyra’s world was weakened long after the fact).

This “wind-down” episode encompasses the last seven book chapters, yet given the stakes of the story as-written thus far, it’s tasked with the need to reestablish the central narrative issue: Dust is flowing out of the world and somehow our main characters must find a way to stop it.

Reading along with the novel at the same time, I found myself trying to get a fix on the fairly complex scenario that Pullman has laid out, and what it means in relation to his philosophical worldview. The truth is, it’s really not all that clear as to why any of this is happening. We’ve ascertained that Dust (or Shadow-particles, or dark matter, or sraf) are particles of consciousness, but why exactly is it disappearing? What’s it got to do with the subtle knife and the Spectres? Why do the latter only attack adults? And how is that linked with settling of daemons into one form and the concept of original sin? Why is Lyra known as the second coming of Eve, and why is that important? 

Because I’m a huge nerd, I’m gonna try and break all this down. To do so, I need to quote extensively from the book. As Mary watches the flow of Dust through her amber spyglass, she notices two different movements in the sky:

One was that of the clouds, driven across the moon in one direction, and the other was that of the stream of Dust, seeming to cross it in quite another. And of the two, the Dust was flowing more quickly and at much greater volume. In fact, the whole sky seemed to be flowing with it, a great inexorable flood pouring out of the world, out of all the worlds, into some ultimate emptiness.

Slowly, as if they were moving themselves in her mind, things joined up. Will and Lyra had told her that the subtle knife was three hundred years old at least. So the old man in the tower had told them. The mulefa had told her that the sraf, which had nurtured their lives and their world for thirty-three thousand years, had begun to fail just over three hundred years ago.

Suppose that all this time, little by little, Dust had been leaking out of the wounds the subtle knife had made in nature.... The subtle knife was responsible for the small-scale, low-level leakage. It was damaging, and the universe was suffering because of it, and she must talk to Will and Lyra and find a way to stop it. But the vast flood in the sky was another matter entirely. That was new, and it was catastrophic. And if it wasn’t stopped, all conscious life would come to an end. As the mulefa had shown her, Dust came into being when living things became conscious of themselves; but it needed some feedback system to reinforce it and make it safe, as the mulefa had their wheels and the oil from the trees.

Without something like that, it would all vanish. Thought, imagination, feeling, it would all wither and blow away, leaving nothing but a brutish automatism; and that brief period when life was conscious of itself would flicker out like a candle in every one of the billions of worlds where it had burned brightly.

Okay, so that’s what is at stake, and what Lyra and Will must prevent. Making matters worse is that every time Will makes a window with the knife, he creates a Spectre, which are described by his daemon as: “a little bit of the abyss that floats out and enters the world.” In the show, it’s Xaphania who elaborates on this, and it was nicely foreshadowed back when Iorek reforged the knife, telling Will: “What you don’t know is what the knife does on its own. Your intentions may be good. The knife has intentions too.”

(It also makes for a nice bit of irony – that the only weapon which could kill the Authority was also the very thing making everything exponentially worse for the continuation of Dust).

So three hundred years ago the philosophers of the Torre degli Angeli accidentally forged the subtle knife, and began to use it like a child might play with a machine gun, having absolutely no idea how truly dangerous it was. This neatly explains the existence of the Spectres – who are naturally concentrated in number around Cittàgazze, where most of the windows were cut – and a reason as to why Dust would be leaking out of the world.

And yet this sentence caught my eye: “The subtle knife was responsible for the small-scale, low-level leakage. It was damaging, and the universe was suffering because of it... but the vast flood in the sky was another matter entirely. That was new, and it was catastrophic.”

The problem is, Pullman never actually explains why this is. Why is Dust disappearing from the worlds in such vast quantities? He makes it clear that it’s not just due to the windows cut by the subtle knife, but then neglects to give an explicit answer to the new puzzle he raises.

By my reckoning, it’s due to the recently opened abyss. Is that the answer? Honest question. Because he does say that Dust is falling into the void when the children spot it during their sojourn through the land of the dead, which is presumably exacerbated by the bomb that the Magisterium set off. I think that’s the answer, right? That’s what the wiki says, and it seems to fit the timing of the Dust’s accelerated flow.

(I suppose I just find it a little difficult to square this circle with the fact that the mulefa trees have been slowly dying across the course of three hundred years due to a few windows cut by the subtle knife. It feels like it should take more than that to disrupt an entire eco-system, and so all this time I’ve been assuming something much more dire had happened in the distant past. But no – I checked the chronology and Mary only notices the more intense outward flow of Dust towards the sea after the Magisterium bomb detonates). 

In any case, we have our basic cause-and-effect explanation. The worlds are losing Dust because of the subtle knife (a process hastened by the Magisterium’s bomb), and need something to draw it back towards living matter – as Mary thinks to herself, the mulefa have the oil and seedpods to reinforce it and create a symbiotic relationship. A correlation tantamount to that “feedback system” needs to manifest.

This is where the prophecy regarding Lyra and Eve comes in. In a good original line, the show has Mary ponder the problem out loud, telling the children that: “in theory Dust is drawn to thought, to creativity, so... some great discovery” might attract Dust back to the world, which helps put this whole thing into greater context. For here, the great discovery that brings Dust back into the world is Lyra making the conscious decision to act upon her love for Will.

The crux of the matter is Pullman’s argument that Eve eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was not a bad thing, but rather a brave choice to embrace life in all its complexity; to leave the garden of childhood innocence in order to experience what it is to be a fully-formed adult, with everything that entails, for good or ill.

Mary’s role in all this is that she “plays the serpent” by introducing the children to the concept of romantic love; she essentially “tempts” them with the joy of physicality and maturity and experience. There’s an old saying that nobody knows how to fall in love until someone tells you how, and this is what Mary does when she tells the children why she left the church – to embrace life instead of locking herself away from it, after recalling the memory of her first kiss at a party, which involved a boy offering her a piece of marzipan.

The analogy plays out in two directions: harking back to Eve offering the apple to Adam, and Lyra lifting a “small red fruit” to Will’s mouth. 

This material is just so rich in its meaning and implications. Earlier we had Mary explain the nature of Dust to Lyra and Will, telling them that it’s not original sin as the church has decreed, but consciousness born of experience. But of course the church is afraid of it, as it not only carries sexual connotations, but opens up a person’s mind to new ideas and freedom of thought. It all fits together beautifully.

That said, I’m frustrated that a lot of Pullman’s details are missing, like Atal telling Mary their version of the Eve story, in which a snake tells a young mulefa girl to place her clawed foot in a seedpod, thereby opening her up to the experience of Dust. Or when Lyra gets embarrassed at the thought of washing herself front of Will, even though she had no qualms about bathing naked with other children back in Oxford (because of course, what is the first thing Adam and Eve do after eating the fruit? Become self-conscious about their nudity and clothe themselves). Heck, they didn’t even dramatize the moment when Lyra puts the fruit to Will’s mouth, even though a strawberry was right there.

So I was surprised that they kept the part when Lyra loses her ability to read the alethiometer, which is an important part of the worldview Pullman sets up: as a child she could use the device effortlessly, through the grace afforded to her by her innocence. Once she hits maturity, this ability is lost to her – just as daemons will eventually settle into a particular shape; just as Spectres are only visible to adults who are attacked for their abundance of Dust. She can only regain it through hard work and careful study... you know, all that boring adult stuff.

I will always be impressed by what Pullman has constructed here: a philosophy that incorporates religious dogma (the story of Genesis), universal human experiences (the process of growing up), scientific discovery (dark matter), and his own personal inventions (daemons, the alethiometer, Dust). It’s an incredible feat of imaginative engineering, and I don’t think I’ve ever read anything like it before or since.

But, here’s my big caveat. The big emotional climax to this epic tale hinges on the fact that the entire multiverse is saved... by adolescent heterosexual romantic love.

Look, I can’t deny that Pullman doesn’t set up for this revelation. But still, let me count the ways this bothers me.

Firstly, I was never really sold on the Lyra/Will love story. Reading this for the first time as a child, I recall being a little taken aback at the romantic development between them, and before you say that shipping was never my thing anyway, I was never immune to it. I was up until the early hours of the morning in the throes of agony over Taran and Elionwy in The Chronicles of Prydain or Daine and Numair in The Immortals quartet. But for whatever reason, Pullman’s grasp on romance didn’t resonate, and the big moment between Will and Lyra came with a sort-of: “huh, okay” from me.

Second of all, that it is a display of eros – passionate and physical desire – that is portrayed as the only thing strong and profound enough to literally save the world from extinction. Look, I realize that not every story can (or should) take into account every single human identity on the planet, and neither am I saying that experiencing eros is a bad thing... but asexual and aromantic people everywhere are rolling their eyes at the implication that they’re missing out on something of world-changing importance with this dramatic climax.

Finally, having set up the trilogy’s conflict as the oppressive church versus the free-thinking nonbelievers (in broad terms) Pullman is essentially asking us to believe that religious people have never experienced guilt-free desire or physical enjoyment. Yes, I realize that in children’s books there are going to be generalizations in order to get the point across, and yes, religious organizations throughout history are pretty notorious for having hangups about sex.

But by making the pinnacle of human experience that of romantic/sexual love, and insisting that religion is something that exists to tamper down on this impulse, Pullman has constructed an either/or dichotomy that I just don’t believe is true. No worthwhile person of faith believes that desire is sinful. Has Pullman heard of the Song of Songs? And some of the poems written about Christ by seventeenth century nuns are downright erotic! You can find spiritual ecstasy in all kinds of physicality, and it’s absurd to think that adhering to a religion would deprive you of that.

(If you want to get really technical about it, it wasn’t the act of love that got Adam and Eve kicked out of the Garden of Eden, it was the fact they disobeyed a direct order from God: they ate the apple after being told not to. Before that, they were very much expected to “be fruitful and multiply.” Granted, Pullman does lean more towards this reading, what with Eden being treated as a metaphor for childhood, and Eve being lauded for her bravery – or “disobedience” – in choosing to eat the apple and gain knowledge, but the link he makes between this and the church’s disapproval of sexuality is pretty tenuous when it comes to what’s actually written in the Bible. And yes, I do realize that he’s working in broad strokes for the sake of getting his point across).

On a more prosaic level, I could never quite grasp how Will and Lyra’s act of love manages to stop the flow of Dust into the abyss. I mean, I know what happens and I can grasp how it fits into the story of Eve and Adam, but it’s still a bit wishy-washy, operating on a Doylistic symbolic/thematic level rather than a logical Watsonian one. People fall in love all the time, so why are these two special? What makes Lyra, of all people, Eve? Who came up with that?

In summation, I’m afraid this particular development doesn’t 100% work for me, and since it’s the emotional climax of the trilogy in its entirety, that’s a little disappointing.

***

There is one final dangling thread: that of Father Gomez, who has entered the mulefa world and tracked the children across the grasslands with the intention of assassinating Lyra before she can fall into mortal sin. Thankfully, a Chekhov’s Gunman in the form of Balthamos is lurking in the trees, and as Gomez takes aim, the angel seizes his spider-daemon and crushes it, thereby killing Gomez as well.

Their confrontation is as awkwardly staged and anticlimactic as pretty much every single other dramatization in this adaptation. In the book, this skirmish involves Balthamos grabbing Gomez’s daemon and running away into the forest, with Gomez gasping and writhing in pain, and Balthamos terrified and frantic, and Gomez finally trying to overpower his foe before he trips into a stream and Balthamos drowns him with the last of his strength. It’s hectic and confusing and ultimately a redemptive scene for Balthamos, who was still guilt-ridden after abandoning Will in the wake of battle.

But since none of that happened in the show, it come across as just kind of pat. They’ve never done justice to these intense action sequences before, so hey, why start now?

(I did like that Gomez was using one of those tracker beetles though; it made sense to reutilize them in this way. In the book, it’s his daemon that’s the beetle, and they’re just tracking Lyra with what feels like sheer dumb luck).

***

So, after the multiverse is saved by the burgeoning love of two adolescents, the universe throws them a curveball and ensures they can’t be together. There’s been some foreshadowing along the way – the illness of John Parry, the implicit dangers of leaving windows open – but it still comes across as a Diabolus ex Machina. Bittersweet endings are more memorable than happy ones, I suppose, and the combined forces of Xaphania, Serafina, and the children’s daemons have to break the news to Will and Lyra: all of the windows between worlds must be closed in order to prevent the formation of more Spectres and the leakage of Dust, but because a person can only thrive in their own world, the young lovers must part permanently.

No, they can’t have one little window open just for the two of them. No, the giant window that lets the ghosts out from the land of the dead doesn’t have to be closed, but it is the only exception. No, Will can’t keep the knife whole so that at the end of his life he can go visit Lyra one last time. No, there’s not going to be any logical explanation as to why people waste away if they’re not in their own universe. Pullman is going to make this happen, no matter how many potential loopholes you can come up with.

I liked that here, Xaphania is the one to break the news, and that Mary and Serafina separately try to walk Will and Lyra towards their inevitable decision to part ways. Ironically, they have to make an adult decision to lead rich and full lives, where it was their love for each other that made them adults in the first place. They know neither one could bear to watch the other one waste away after only a few short years, and the actors did a pretty good job at making their Together In Death promise once they journey back through the land of the dead and dissolve into atoms at the end of their lives. 

In a shame that the show didn’t follow the book in bringing back the gyptians to escort Will and Lyra back to their homes (or at least the location in which Will could cut back through to their homes), as it would have been nice to see John Faa and Farder Coram again, but I suspect Covid limitations struck again.

They throw in a few final details, some of which I’d forgotten about: Mary seeing her own daemon, a chough (I could have sworn it was a heron), Serafina giving Kirjava her name (it means “mottled” in Finnish apparently), Xaphania congratulating Mary on “playing the serpent well” (confirming it was her that directed Mary on her quest back when she communicated with Shadow-particles in her laboratory) and the teenagers making their promise to visit the Botanic Gardens every year in each world to be with each other.

It was a good choice to depict Will reuniting with his mother on-screen, as the book finishes his story with Mary inviting him to her place for a cup of tea, though there were some odd choices too: Kirjava is apparently always visible to Will, which would surely raise some questions with the rest of the world, and there’s a montage of the windows throughout the multiverse being closed simultaneously, as though it’s happening automatically with the destruction of the knife instead of a centuries-long mission that Xaphania’s angels are going to undergo.

Finally, it chooses to end on the bittersweetness of the parted lovers instead of Lyra’s affirmation that they have to build a Republic of Heaven in their own worlds, with underlying text filling us in on what happened to the pair of them in the years to come: Will becomes a surgeon and Lyra learns to reread the alethiometer, setting up a potential sequel series (though I doubt it’ll ever come to fruition).

Personally, I’ve always found text-written epilogues explaining what happens to fictional characters a little corny (though it’s fine when dealing with real historical figures), and that this whole thing ends with a chipper “that’s another story!” was definitely not the best note to go out on.

Great split-screen effect though.

***

So, that’s that.

If you’re been following these episodes reviews from the start, then you’ll know that I wasn’t hugely impressed with this adaptation, though it works well enough and is undoubtedly going to be the last one we’ll get for a very, very long time. It was certainly better than the 2007 film, though the irony is that this story needs a movie budget in order to capture its scope – and the runtime that television can accord it for the sake of its complexity and nuance. Perhaps animation would have been the best option?

At the end of the day, I feel that Pullman has written something that is largely unfilmable: a theological mystery that involves the Book of Genesis, the act of growing up, his own invention (such as daemons and Spectres) and complex philosophical arguments. I mean, I can see why the giant armoured bears and the gunslinging Texan aeronaut would have gotten producers excited, but the truth is they’re never what the story was truly about.

My main criticism about this adaptation was that it was so by-the-numbers. Dialogue felt like it was written to be portentous trailer footage. No one has much in the way of chemistry. The aesthetic was all wrong somehow – too clean and bright. Pullman never loses sight of the mystery or wonder of either the alethiometer or the subtle knife, nor the implication that two children are wandering around with the equivalent of two nuclear weapons – in the show, they’re just funny gizmos. There was no urgency or dramatic tension to any of it, and so many of the scenes are awkwardly staged.

An example of the former would have to be all those scenes at Asriel’s basecamp, in which dozens of extras just faff around in the background. This place should be as busy as a hive, with a sense of grave discussion, of tense anticipation, of a sword being held above everyone’s heads; not a bunch of generals and soldiers and entire armies standing around having little chats and tinkering with equipment; all just plodding along with a shrug.

As for the latter (awkwardly staged scenes), I was totally struck by the image of Will and Lyra, having just learned that they’ll be forced to return to their worlds and part ways forever, sitting by the campfire... on opposite sides. I mean, come on! A person who has just discovered their loved one is soon to be torn from them would never sit like this! They’d be wrapped in each other’s arms for comfort! It’s all just so ill-conceived, so empty.

The most annoying thing is, that there was plenty of room in a long-running adaptation to fix some of the issues in Pullman’s work. He’s not hugely interested in the logistics or outcome of the epic battle between Asriel’s forces and the Clouded Mountain, but more intimate moments where he can explore his characters and the philosophies that guide them (more words are devoted to a Gallivespian trying to pry a key off a keyring than in explaining anything about how the war is going to be waged or won). This show was a chance to add some stabilizing context to some of Pullman's more vague or outlandish ideas.

I know this sounds like nitpicking, but Pullman’s vision is so huge and rich and detailed that I’ve appreciated the opportunity to write about it in-depth for the first time since university. My fixation on trying to parse it all out is fully meant to be a compliment. The fact that he trips a little at the end of his story is due to leaving so many details opaque, and what makes the trilogy so difficult to adapt is because it’s so jampacked with ideas. Pullman gives us so much to discuss and ponder, but he also could have stood to make things a bit clearer – and it’s a shame the show didn’t take the opportunity to do that in lieu of him (I’m still mourning the loss of the missing Asriel-centric episode, which we lost to Covid).

But for the foreseeable future: this is it. Our definitive adaptation of the His Dark Materials trilogy.

Miscellaneous Observations:

Shout out to Lorne Balfe for his beautiful, soaring score. It’s mostly noticeable during the opening credits of each episode, but there are plenty of glorious motifs and worth listening to in its entirety.

In the book, Lyra never discovers what happened to her parents, although Xaphania fills Serafina in and she promises to tell Lyra the truth whenever she decides she wants to know. Here, she realizes that the pair of them are dead and gets a brief chance to process her complicated feelings for them.

As mentioned, I was disappointed that the book omits the gyptians from the final chapters, but reading along with the book, I was surprised that even it omits any poignant interactions between Serafina and Farder Coram.

That Mary’s epiphany was brought on by her attraction to another woman was perfect and wonderful, and I bet Pullman is kicking himself that he didn’t come up with it himself. For the first time in this show, I felt genuinely moved at an innovative adaptive choice.

I’ll leave you with this factoid, which pretty much sums up my feelings as to this show as a whole: that there was no amber spyglass in the adaptation of The Amber Spyglass!