His Dark Materials: The Clouded Mountain

It’s the penultimate episode, and unsurprisingly it has the sacrifice of Lord Asriel and Mrs Coulter (along with their daemons) as its centrepiece, though it also tries to dramatize some of the Final Battle that the entire show has been leading up to, with mixed results.

The problem is that in the books, Pullman himself had zero interest in exploring the physical outcome of this war. Lyra and Will ran across the battlefield in search of their daemons, and that’s all we ever see of it. The focus is instead on the defeat of Metatron and the (deliberately) anticlimactic death of the Authority.

But that doesn’t fly in a visual adaptation, especially since we’ve spent the better part of this season watching the multitude of soldiers in Asriel’s camp preparing for battle. The audience expects to see them actually fight.  

So with the Clouded Mountain approaching in the sky above Asriel’s encampment, his forces get ready for the inevitable conflict. There’s lots of hustling and bustling, witches hover in the sky above, Ogunwe hugs his daughters (aww), and Xaphania lays out the stakes, which are glaringly obvious for anyone that’s been paying the slightest bit of attention thus far: “The Clouded Mountain draws closer.  The way forward now depends on Lyra. If Eve survives the Fall once more, all worlds will be liberated. But if Metatron can control the children or their daemons, the future is his forever.”

Thanks for that.

Legend of the Seeker: Fury

My original plan to write up one review per week isn’t exactly working out for me, but I’ll continue to press on whenever I get the opportunity. Rest assured, I’m still enjoying this season and I’m going to see this little project through.

If last week’s episode was important filler, then this one is just plain filler, wrapped up in a Very Special Message about the cycle of violence. This is going to be a quick one.

Legend of the Seeker: Broken

It’s the “Cara reckons with the trauma of her past” episode, which we all knew was coming, and is unsurprisingly built around the typical tropes of a Courtroom Episode. We learn more about her past, she learns more about her past, Kahlan deals with her own feelings regarding a Mord Sith in their midst, and it’s all wrapped in the trappings of a legal procedural.

His Dark Materials: Betrayal

Here we go, the final chapter of the first season, which not only completes the first book in the trilogy, but also manages half the first chapter of the second. And what do you know, the show finally finds its groove in its last moments.

What immediately caught my attention was the echo of the Master of Jordan College's words in the "previously on" segment, about how Lyra will suffer a betrayal but that she will be the betrayer. When I read this book for the first time at age thirteen, I assumed (as this show apparently does) that Lyra unwittingly taking Roger to his doom at Lord Asriel's hands was the betrayal the prophecy referred to.

Actually it isn't, as Pullman makes very clear in The Amber Spyglass when Lyra... okay, I won't give it away for those that don't know/have forgotten; suffice to say the betrayal is yet to come, and the eventual reveal never worked for me anyway, simply because I believed the betrayal had already taken place.

And don't say that "leading Roger to his death wasn't a betrayal because it wasn't Lyra's fault", because the real betrayal certainly takes liberties with the meaning of the word as well. But we'll get to that when it actually happens.

Xena Warrior Princess: Hooves and Harlots, The Black Wolf, Greeks Bearing Gifts

My rewatch begins to heat up a little, with one really good episode, and two that might be more mediocre than not, but still have some solid scenes amidst the dross.

It's clear at this early stage that the writers are still figuring out Xena's backstory – at this point the working theory is that she went off the rails about a decade ago, but has plenty of friends from before that time who can call on her for help in times of trouble. It's a far cry from what we'll see later on, in which Xena is little more than a feral animal during her conquistador years.

Still, all three involve strong, interesting female guest-stars, and the arrival of the Amazons in particular introduces an important recurring culture within the mythos of the show.

Orphan Black: Gag or Throttle

So far this season has been solid but also a little ho-hum – until now! Suddenly things have been kicked into high gear, and for the first time I felt the writers were paying attention to the story as it unfolded, rather than gathering the pieces together for the show's final act.

This was the long-awaited Rachel-centric episode, and though we've had glimpses of her upbringing before, this delved much deeper into her past, her psyche and her relationship to the show's themes of female autonomy and nature vs nurture.