Like so many epics of its kind, His Dark Materials is about the decision to be more than your origin story. Not just to grow but to truly see where you came from — in this case, to see your parents (who made you) and all of their sins and imperfections — and to choose a different path. A better one. Because you want to and because you can.
For Will, that means forgiving his mother for parentifying him and his father for leaving and realizing he isn’t responsible for their failures. (“I’m not just my dad’s son, you know,†he tells Lyra in the last episode. “My mom always said, ‘If your friend needs help, you should give it.’â€) For Lyra, the child of tyrants, it’s a bit more complicated.
Anyone who has been reading these recaps from the beginning is, by now, sick of my little tantrums about this, but we need to talk about it one final time: the dæmon thing. From the outset, these characters have had crushingly little physical contact with their dæmons. It makes sense from a logistical, technological perspective — CGI is expensive, and it’s a lot easier to create illusions when you minimize the tactile element — but not at all from a narrative one. Because as we see in “Lyra and Her Death,†your relationship with your dæmon is — and I cannot stress this enough — everything.
How much love and respect you and your dæmon have for one another is a reflection of who you are. The severed nurses at Bolvangar had little white dog dæmons that trotted at their heels obediently like pets, and that was supposed to be chilling, because they were no longer a part of one another. In the TV adaptation, for all its merits, everyone’s dæmon is a trotting little white dog. In the land of the dead, where Pantalaimon once cowered at Lyra’s breast, curling himself up and soothing her — as he was meant to throughout this story — he now trails behind her like a kicked puppy. The abandonment of Pantalaimon on the dock — far and away the most devastating moment in the entire story (don’t think this means I wasn’t sobbing along with you) — feels a bit more like when the family in Homeward Bound leaves Shadow, Chance, and Sassy on that farm than it does like the literal destruction of self it’s meant to be. (Remember back at the start of season one, when it was prophesied that Lyra would “betray†someone close to her, and by the end of that season, we assumed that someone was Roger? Well, it turns out it wasn’t Roger.)
Without that affectionate background, it’s hard to see the difference between what Lyra does to Pan and what Mrs. Coulter has done to her own dæmon. The golden monkey can stray far from Marisa’s side, not because he’s severed but because she hates herself. She hits him as a form of self-harm. His nonverbal savagery is a product of years of twisted abuse, suffering, and neglect. (In the books, when they’re hiding out in the mountains with Lyra, he makes a hobby of pulling the wings off of live bats.) Lyra’s sacrifice should hurt, because she doesn’t treat Pantalaimon like shit. Even when they argue, they cuddle and show affection like anyone with a little inner strength might self-soothe or treat themself on a bad day. (Their little out-of-focus snuggle in the last episode was lovely and should have been the rule, not the exception.) In this version of the story, the betrayal is about the heartbreak of adulthood and mortality — the beloved dæmons of our lives must make room for our inevitable deaths.
Without all that, the betrayal instead becomes a fated tragedy. Lyra has been following in her mother’s footsteps all along — disrespecting and dismissing her dæmon more and more until, finally, she’s ready to cut that last string, choosing her death over her life, martyrdom and regret over growth. This Lyra, physically estranged from her soul from the start, is learning a different lesson. And I’m sorry to say that the damage is done. They may escape the land of the dead and outfox her mother, but there will be no coming back from this rift — unlike Will, she’ll never be able to fully outrun the ghost of her parents now. (Not really a spoiler: That pine marten is Pan’s final form — a symbol of betrayal fated to haunt the pair well into adulthood.)
Beyond this disappointing shift, this episode does offer a few gems. One is the valiant, if desperate, 3-D chess match Mrs. Coulter seems to have finally lost with the Magisterium. After fleeing the psychosexual drama that is Asriel Belacqua, bullying her puppet pope into sparing her daughter is practically getting back to basics — albeit with significantly more urgency. She’s back to her old tricks, whipping up Father President MacPhail’s repressed libido and deepest darkest insecurities until he’s literally panting after her, shoving his ring in her face when she gushes over his “abstinence.†(Did we all notice her little head nods as he paces behind her as though she’s impatiently waiting for him to get to the part when he convinces himself she’s on his side? Chef’s kiss, truly, Ms. Wilson. Exquisite.) She even has the unexpected allyship of Agent Roke after he loses contact with Asriel.
In her desperation and haste, though, she has finally made one too many miscalculations. She did not anticipate MacPhail coercing her former employee and co-opting her own intercision technology to build a bomb that uses DNA to seek out its victim and blow them to smithereens. She underestimated Father Gomez’s zealotry and the lengths he’d go to neutralize her as a threat — including, somehow, figuring out that the key to spooking her would be to invoke her mother (the terrifying Madame Delamare, though we don’t actually learn her name until Philip Pullman’s prequel-sequel trilogy) and “offer†her a trunk full of her old clothes.
And while she may be able to run circles around the junior priests and parry Gomez’s jab à la that one Uruk-hai in The Fellowship of the Ring — by grabbing the sword (or dress, in this case) with her bare hands and making menacing eye contact as she pulls it deeper into her gut (wears it) — in the end, she’s hopelessly outmatched. The blackmail of one woman, brilliant though she may be, is ultimately no rival for the patriarchal institution that is multiple little rat-boys joining forces to deploy the army of holy warriors with automatic weapons at their disposal. She managed to burn one piece of the lock of Lyra’s hair — which they stole from the locket she used to titillate MacPhail, extolling his virtues compared to the man who gave it to her — but someone had the bright idea to save some as backup. Now they might use her technology against her to power the bomb that remains fixed on her kid. (Quick question: Can magic bombs even find someone in hell?)
The other bright light this week: Mary finally meets a zalif! (Zalif is the singular form of mulefa.) A young one, apparently, since they’re on all fours, sans wheels. The diamond pattern of the mulefa’s legs seems to be another crushing, if unsurprising, casualty of book-to-screen adaptation. (I suppose we should let up on the CG artists at some point. Apparently, the VFX supervisor reasoned that it would be “too weird.†O ye of little sraf!) I am just too happy to finally see these beautiful weirdos to linger on it. The mulefa have always felt like quintessential sci-fi aliens — a foil to the assumption that other intelligent life in the universe must be bipedal humanoids that consume, strive, war, and destroy. Their joyful, collaborative way of life, not to mention their genuine devotion to preserving their own ecosystem, could not be arriving at a better time.
Field Notes
• Paddington callback! “Feels like we’re in a horror film,†observes Will. “Why would you want to watch a film that makes you feel horrible?†Lyra asks. “You make a good point.†“I liked the film with the bear.â€
• Finally passed the Bechdel test: Coulter and Dr. Cooper talking about the machine’s inner workings. (Lyra talking with her own death shouldn’t count, imo.)
• I can’t tell if it’s the direction, the writing, or what, but somebody behind the camera is positively obsessed with passive-aggressive physical intimidation. Coulter gets into MacPhail’s personal space in the exact way Father Gomez did with Fra Pavel’s rat dæmon — getting just close enough, without ever actually touching, to tip someone off balance.
• The whole Coulter-MacPhail dance is twice as horrifying if you think about the fact that Will Keen is Dafne Keen’s dad IRL. This show’s got issues.