His Dark Materials Recap: Hold On to What’s Real

One of my favorite things about television is that it’s a group project. A book or a script may start in one mind, but then other people — additional writers, directors, actors, etc. — get their hands on it, and they just might see themselves in the material. Paper dolls become three-dimensional human beings when stuffed with real hearts, real minds, real guts. There are depths and details to characters that simply cannot be plumbed by even the wisest authors if they haven’t been there. Philip Pullman created Lyra and Mrs. Coulter, but he could not have anticipated some of the nuances that girls and women found in the characters that weren’t explicit on the page. These readers stitched together dialogue and statements of fact with their own emotional experience. It’s why diversity at every level is so essential to Hollywood’s future. When it works, it’s magic.

We’ve seen that magic work several times in this show. We watched it happen with Mrs. Coulter, certainly. We watched Amir Wilson do it with Will Parry. Hell, we’ve even seen it, to an extent, with James McAvoy’s Asriel Belacqua, Will Keen’s Father MacPhail, and Simone Kirby’s Mary Malone. These characters have gotten an infusion of something extra from their new stewards in front of and behind the camera — trauma and rage, loneliness and stubbornness, charm and egomania, shame and lust, intelligence and empathy.

But as fans and newcomers alike seem to be noticing, the same cannot really be said about our protagonist, Lyra. I don’t believe this is any fault of Dafne Keen — as we’ve seen multiple times over, she’s a tremendous actor more than capable of doing this character justice. (She was cast just a year after her ferocious turn as Laura in Logan. My kingdom for that hellcat’s energy on this show.) But her character feels as if it has been taken for granted by everyone else, and I’d wager the predicament she’s in now is a direct result of her shaky foundation from the start.

We’ve spoken here before about Lyra’s sneaky-little-shit beginnings and lack thereof in the show. We can definitely see the pain and vulnerability behind Will’s combative stubbornness; it makes a person want to fight people on his behalf, to protect him fiercely while he’s busy growing into the person he’s meant to be. There’s a knowing there — someone outside Amir himself who can both show and care for the vulnerable child he starts as.

Lyra never gets that. In the books, she starts out as a cheating, whimsical fibber, an unloved kid who was never read bedtime stories and so had to make them up for herself. She found agency in leading her caretakers and peers around by the noses with fantastical lies. She grifts because it’s the only way anyone is going to give an 11-year-old girl in a bustling university the time of day. (She grifts well because it’s in her blood.) You can see her soft parts; her imperfections break your heart a little, and you root for her to evolve.

The Lyra of the show is charming, sure, but she’s not a liar; she’s just … a brat? Or so we’re told — we’ve experienced her through the eyes of others, be they other characters or the show’s creators. We get none of the Lyra she doesn’t want people to see, the vulnerability that makes fandoms bare their fangs to protect their little cinnamon rolls. When viewers of this show do feel that way for Pantalaimon, it’s often a result of Lyra’s mistreatment of him.

That absence — of softness, of evolution — is why a newcomer might hear the harpies’ whispers and condemnations in this episode and think, Hey, these vultures are making some good points. It’s why one might remain unmoved by Lyra’s uncanny resistance to those whispers, an ability more “the One” than hard won. It’s why one might mistake the “real stories” that finally turn the tides for mere commentary on the power of storytelling. In the show, this sequence just feels like that age-old writer’s self-indulgence wherein we mythologize and justify our own jobs by infusing it with magic on the page or screen. But that’s an exploration for the next recap.)

Here’s how Pullman says Lyra’s supposed to grow here:

Lyra learns to her great cost that fantasy isn’t enough. She has been lying all her life, telling stories to people, making up fantasies, and suddenly she comes to a point where that’s not enough. All she can do is tell the truth. She tells the truth about her childhood, about the experiences she had in Oxford, and that is what saves her. True experience, not fantasy — reality, not lies — is what saves us in the end.

Without the text, you’d never know this was supposed to be a major turning point for a girl who romanticized her life to survive even when her real life became an adventure itself. You’d just see a girl who’s ready to give up the moment her dead friend doesn’t rejoice when she arrives to save him.

Plenty of factors could have created this pileup — fear of patronizing a little girl, of allowing her character to be vulnerable and messy and unlikeable, ironically creating something even more unlikeable. But I think there was a serious lack of knowing too. It doesn’t seem as if the right people were there with Keen at the outset, unpacking exactly what makes Lyra so wonderful and lovable beyond how smart and stubborn she is. Perhaps nobody understood her until it was too late. By the time women’s names started appearing in the writing credits, over halfway through, perhaps the damage had been done.

They’ve at least been able to make some magic with Mrs. Coulter and Mary Malone, whose arcs supplement the sense of fulfillment lost in the world of the dead. There always seems to be some male-shaped X factor waiting to jostle a brilliant Marisa Coulter gambit offtrack. She hasn’t earned redemption yet, much less relatability, but there’s something almost comedic in how thoroughly her talents have been consistently and violently overshadowed by the massive egos of men, both mortal and immortal. In this episode, she convinces the show’s Oppenheimer to take back her atomic bomb, knowing full well it will mean her death, with words alone (passing the Bechdel test again in the process). She defuses a magic bomb she herself helped design. She fist-fights the horny pope and wins (thanks in part to Agent Roke, of course. His lordship deserved better than this ignominious end). If it hadn’t been for a literal deus ex machina instigated by her godforsaken ex-boyfriend, Marisa would have pulled off a mission on par with all your favorite spy thrillers. The bomb is sent to Lyra anyway by the skin of MacPhail’s horrid little martyr teeth, detonated by some freak aftershock after Metatron’s proclamation about putting the multiverse in Dust time-out.

We wouldn’t learn what this actually means until next time if not for Mary, the one character having anything resembling a good time. She’s finally been introduced to the mulefa community, and it is truly, redemptively delightful. The mulefa are as enchanting as their literary counterparts, if not identical. They use their precious seedpods more like staggered rollerblades than the lined-up bike wheels of the books, holding one in a front claw and one in the opposite back claw and sort of skating back and forth. Their young also kick the cracked pods around like soccer balls, which is absurdly cute. And the seedpod trees form more of an interconnected treehouse; it feels implied that the mulefa use this megatreehouse in this version (although it’s unclear how the quadrupeds get up there — the mulefa of the books think Mary is bananas for attempting to climb them).

If you’re a chronic overthinker who hasn’t picked up the books, it’s worth reading about the ecosystem here for its own sake; in a nutshell (or seedpod?), the trees, which live symbiotically with the mulefa, who use their seedpods as wheels until they crack open; they then plant the seeds on the trees’ behalf and use the oil that remains on their bodies, particularly their claws. As Mary learns through observation — our very own alien Jane Goodall — the oil (chau) enabled the mulefa to see Dust (sraf), and thus develop humanlike consciousness. She makes the connection that sraf is Dust only when she sees the substance through chunks of an amberlike substance she finds in a pond with some of the oil smudged on its surface.

She’s come to understand and speak the mulefa’s language enough to learn that Dust pollinates the trees and to understand what she sees when she looks through her amber spyglass from above: Dust is leaving this world, sucked up into the sky from the seedpod tree canopies. Her friend Atal is very blunt, almost shamanistic, when she says, “Mary, that’s the reason you’ve been brought here.” She’s been uncertain and flapping in the breeze for weeks and weeks; saving a world from annihilation seems like a tall order. But we know and love Mary so well now. It’s easy to believe in her.

Field Notes

• Father Gomez finally sets out on his original path, on the trail of Mary “the Serpent” Malone, equipped with a rifle, a spy-fly, and a lifetime of preemptive penance pre-absolving him of any mortal sin.

• I regret to inform you that Lee Scoresby is here — if only to offer his Scarecrow-esque good cheer and services as liaison for the rest of the dead. Lyra is surprised to see him (in the books, Iorek relays the news, which he knows because he ate his corpse), but now at least she’ll get to say a proper good-bye.

• Laughed out loud when Mary surfaced that absurdly perfect, practically made-to-order piece of amber she uses for her spyglass. She’s a scientist! She could’ve handled a little whittling and polishing!

• I had to see it — now so do you.