Last season’s finale recap was dedicated to the question of ends and means. We picked apart the motives of Lord Asriel, his limitless hubris, and whether his inability to exercise basic compassion or empathy for even his own daughter is a red flag when it comes to the justifiability of his holy war (verdict: 🚩🚩🚩). In this episode, we learn a lot more about what he plans to do with this so-called freedom of knowledge he fights for, and even now, before any of the big stuff goes down, it’s incredibly troubling. And it all starts with two angels plummeting violently into his war camp.
The torture chamber Asriel builds to “experiment†on Dust — and to interrogate the archangel responsible for killing Baruch just as our boy arrived with news of Æsahættr — is kind of like an atom bomb, isn’t it? One does not simply build a weapon like that in wartime and then disassemble it and burn the blueprints once the war is won. Asriel is positively vibrating with glee as he brags that he’s the first to actually weaponize Dust. (Technically true since the Magisterium’s General Oblation Board weaponized adamantine, Dust’s kryptonite, in order to perform intercision and eliminate the Dust connection altogether.)
“Perhaps you wanted to see if it is true, what Asriel has been doing to me,†speculates Alabas when Xaphania, the leader of the exiled bene elim, comes to see her kin in his adamantine-lined cell. “Don’t expect your rebels to follow a mortal who enjoys torturing angels.â€
As much as I wish ill upon him for what he has done to my sweet OTP, this immortal fascist makes a very strong point! Asriel doesn’t want to rule, but his vision of a scientific free-for-all — one in which he gets to keep playing with Dust and technology like this is no doubt just the beginning — is almost as terrifying as the “permanent inquisition†and “complete obedience†promised by the Authority and his regent, Baruch’s brother Metatron.
This is the guy we want to entrust with Æsahættr? The guy willing to “incarcerate every angel� If it weren’t for Stelmaria’s objections belying at least a little inner conflict — she chastises him for dismissing Lyra’s abilities and orders him to stop the machine when he gets carried away with his war crime — I’d say he is permanently irredeemable. (He also contradicts himself relentlessly when it comes to his daughter, first claiming that she’s talentless save for her alethiometer fluency — a literally singular gift! Then he’s assuring his council that she needs no protection whatsoever. Which is it, Belacqua? Is she unremarkable or exceptional? Just admit you neither know nor care about your kid!) This story began as a commentary on theocracy, but if things keep going the way they have been, we may accidentally end up with an allegory for the American military-industrial complex.
Thousands of miles away, Balthamos feels his lover’s death as though the wound were his own. It’s worth reiterating just how excellent Kobna Holdbrook-Smith is in this role. His grief is restrained, alien, yet bottomless; Will cannot possibly comfort him or even say the right words as the immortal lashes out, blaming the boy for the death of his partner of over four centuries. He does his best to carry on, even translating when they meet Ama in the woods near Mrs. Coulter and Lyra’s hideout, but it’s pretty clear that when he bails on Will in a panic mid-rescue, it’s not just because this is a “human matter†— his anguish has caught up to him. Book fans might have known this was coming, but it almost hurts more to see it maintained onscreen. (It’s a bury-your-gays moment, to be sure, albeit 22 years in the making.)
Amir Wilson is still doing a stellar job balancing Will’s own grief with his hard-won ability to keep functioning under extreme stress. He’s such a serious and competent kid — easily sniffing out Mrs. Coulter’s bluffs (in the books, he makes a great point: “Of course she’s lying. She’d lie even if it made things worse for herself, because she just loves lying too much to stopâ€) — that it’s easy to forget he’s still reeling from his estranged father’s death, not to mention the guilt of having left his mother in his own world. It’s what ultimately allows Coulter to get the best of him, no matter how good his plan was to extricate Lyra.
In his defense, she’s got a few decades on him, not to mention a lot less integrity, even if she is scrambling like a cornered animal. It’s fascinating, if unnerving, to watch Marisa Coulter pivot from strategy to strategy like the psychological savant she is. When Will doesn’t succumb to plan A — “manipulate Lyra’s knife-bearer into helping us outrun the Magisterium forever, conveniently giving us unfettered access to the multiverse in the process†— she and the golden monkey are forced to move on to their plan B: “manipulate the incels of the Magisterium with grievous, self-inflicted injury into believing Lyra’s knife-bearer has kidnapped her in the nick of time.â€
And even then, while Father Luis Gomez’s fresh-faced, psychopathic calm finds her at the end of her rope, she’s still the mother of all survivors, able to change tack in the moment. When she spots Will returning, cutting a door from a neighboring world to sneak Lyra and Pantalaimon out behind her back, it’s an opportunity to brain the poison-tongued priest with the same stone she had the golden monkey wallop her with minutes before — and just as Gomez was deploying the same “You’re stronger than you think†mind game she’d tried on Will earlier.
Alas, in her desperation and triumph, she finally girlbosses too close to the sun and gets under Will’s skin with comments about his mother — a bit too well. His concentration slips as he attempts to cut them to safety, and Æsahættr catches and shatters. In besting Will, she has doomed them all. She knows it, too, even as she points Gomez’s gun at Will — and especially as Lyra, finally awake from her sojourn in the land of the dead, moves between the muzzle and her friend. She’s got that look on her face again: the steady-eyed, burning accusation she has perfected while she’s been all but powerless. It forces Marisa, who isn’t actually a psychopath like Gomez, to hesitate long enough for Agent Salmakia, the Gallivespian spy, to spring from the shadows and knock her out with her poison spurs. She has been embedded with the Magisterium forces on Asriel’s orders, tasked with guarding the children until Asriel himself can roll up in his intention craft to seize the knife from Will.
However, since none of these people ever seem to want to take children seriously, they’ve gravely underestimated Will and Lyra’s collective ability to squirm their way out of a trap. (It’s not Salmakia’s fault, of course. Gallivespians live only about a decade if they’re lucky, and what are the odds that she’s ever even met a human child before this?) Combine Iorek’s efficient mauling of every single ground troop the Magisterium drops with Ama’s last-minute act of heroism and Will’s heartbreaking ease with a gun and our little Eve and her Adam are outie 5000 before Asriel can zoom over in his intention craft to scoop them up. Too bad, Bad Dad. So sad.
Of course, we can’t end the recap without checking in with our cozy mystery heroine, whose story has barely begun: intrepid scientist Mary Malone. (In case anyone is thinking of rebooting Murder, She Wrote … Simone Kirby is right there.) As it happens, she stepped into Ogunwe’s world last season, and she’s basically been vibing ever since, exploring, map-making, attempting to communicate with Dust via her I Ching yarrow sticks. Even when she stumbles upon the former hideout of Ogunwe’s Resistance, where just two of his people, two sisters, have stayed behind in the wake of Asriel’s Pied Piper campaign, the three women basically sit around and chat about their shared interests. All three are apostates from their respective religions, the sisters having escaped the temple because it outlawed reading and writing for girls.
In narrative terms, this is likely meant as a secondary case for Asriel’s war. Look at all the people this war is going to benefit! It doesn’t quite come across this way, though. Let’s avoid conflating young women’s desire for basic human rights and dignity with a billionaire’s megalomaniacal crusade to maintain access to the most powerful substance in the universe. It’s almost 2023; we know better than that by now, right?
Field Notes
• Those overgrown houses in the shots bookending the scene with Mary and the two Resistance fighters are so obviously miniatures, and I want to see them IRL so badly.
• Far and away, the most annoying thing about Asriel is that he is played by this guy. When he spots Alabas’s tell and says, “Oh, ho ho ho. Oh, now that’s interesting†and then brags about murdering Roger five seconds later? Jail. Right to horny jail, sir.
• Daemons aren’t made of Dust, as Asriel claims. In the books, we learn that the human-daemon connection attracts Dust — in adulthood specifically. If daemons were made of Dust, children would be “sinful†from birth, and we’ve established that the Magisterium wants to “sever†them before puberty to keep them free from “sin.â€
• At one point when Lyra wakes from one of her many sedations, she tells Pan she traveled to the land of the dead, and he says he “couldn’t follow her there.†I hate to continue picking apart this show’s hack job on daemon-related canon (did you see Ama’s daemon even once this episode? Did she so much as gasp when this boy appeared out of nowhere without one? Does Will really just scoop Pantalaimon into his jacket as though that’s not the biggest taboo in this universe?), but if you couldn’t tell from this bit of foreshadowing … there’s a really good reason why it matters. And we’re going to get to it very soon.
• Fun fact for all my fellow godless heathens: Metatron’s former name, Enoch, is pulled directly from the Bible. He’s the father of Methuselah and the brother of Azrael. Philip Pullman’s books are full of cute little academic Easter eggs like this.
• A “waking medicine?†Ama, that plant is cocaine and we all know it.