Is it better to be a villain or a martyr? As we finish this series — some of us for the first time, others for the millionth — I keep coming back to this question. To Eve, and what it means to retell her story.
The His Dark Materials books are informed by so many sources, but author Philip Pullman has made no secret of his devotion to John Milton’s Paradise Lost; the title itself is pulled from the epic biblical poem. One can neither read the books nor, now, watch this series without understanding the commentary herein. The prophecy itself is pure ideology: “The love of Eve shall heal the Earth, and all the worlds shall feel it. Nature will be restored. Hope will spark in darkness as innocence turns to experience, and all will be in harmony once more.†Dust, consciousness, experience, sensation, passion, love — these are not sins. They are essential to our survival. And whoever would keep us from them, be it a hypothetical creator like the Old Testament God or (more likely) an organized religion here on earth, seeks to keep us in chains. Eve — the villain created by men — did not doom the human race. She liberated it.
But at what cost?
Lyra and Will, our Eve and Adam, defeat death before they ever set foot in Eden. They are 13 years old and have betrayed their own souls to sabotage a false god’s tyranny before they’ve even hit puberty. And then they do. Mary Malone’s hallowed marzipan story is delivered beautifully, in Simone Kirby’s delivery, in the elegant choice to make the lover a woman and in the teen actors’ performances afterward. (Amir Wilson, in particular, does a spectacular job with the sudden switch from intense kid protagonist into awkward-teen-who-just-realized-what-a-crush-is. Their brief courtship is blindingly middle school, and isn’t that just the best?) The pair are transformed by their love, awash with Dust so vibrant that it bleeds through the multiverse as an aurora shining in broad daylight.
Their dæmons return to them at last, thanks to a nudge (and a naming) from Serafina Pekkala. Will meets Kirjava, and Pantalaimon finally — FINALLY — gets a proper snuggle in Lyra’s arms. (I burst into tears. Did you burst into tears?) And though it’s not explicit onscreen, the text ought to be here: When Will reaches out to touch Pantalaimon’s pine marten form, and Lyra puts her hand on Kirjava, Lyra knows “that neither’s dæmon would change now, having felt a lover’s hands on them. These were their shapes for life; they would want no other.†For a brief moment, the four of them know Paradise.
That should be enough. But it isn’t.
Serafina Pekkala pronounces the prophecy fulfilled, but the prophecy is bullshit. If it were true, Lyra’s love for Will, the love of Eve, would heal the Earth itself. But the prophecy conveniently left out what comes next. That someone must pay for the humans — men — who flew too close to the sun when they created Æsahættr. In their quest for knowledge, in their Dust-fueled passions, men like Asriel Belacqua took too much, stabbing the multiverse repeatedly across three centuries. It’s been bleeding out ever since, explains Xaphania. The wounds create plagues, Specters, and all manner of darkness. To fix it, the knife must be broken, and all doors — save one, supplemented by some nebulous unspoken pact among humankind to be very, very smart and compassionate — must be closed forever. And that means Eve must not just love, she must sacrifice everything.
And she does lose almost everything, short of her life (though she even lost that, for a time). Her mother and father, hideous though they were, are dead. Her best friend is dead. She’s irreparably damaged her relationship with her dæmon. Iorek Byrnison and the panserbjørne love her, but for obvious reasons, Svalbard would never truly be home. Serafina Pekkala promises to watch over her as a sister, but — apologies for the mild spoiler here — in The Secret Commonwealth, the sequel set when Lyra is 20, reveals that the witch queen does not show her face even once over the next seven years. Lyra loses her ability to read her beloved alethiometer. And she is permanently torn from the arms of the only person who has ever truly known and loved her. Will at least has his “new†dæmon and his mother; he has Mary Malone, who can comfort him with gentle, kind wisdom like, “I know it seems romantic to die for love, but it’s much more romantic to live for it.†They vow to find each other in death — their beautiful, heartbreaking promises lifted almost verbatim from the text — but once that window is zipped closed, Lyra and Pan are alone, deposited back into a world that despises women even more than ours does. (Yes, even without the Magisterium. She goes on to attend St. Sophia’s College and not Jordan College, her actual home, because the university does not admit women scholars.)
See, in destroying one bit of patriarchal religious dogma, Pullman’s retelling upholds another. Eve may no longer be the downfall of humankind, as the Magisterium and the unfortunately late Father Gomez believe so ardently. But she does become Christlike in the end. She must sacrifice herself — her happiness, her love, her free will — for the sins of men. Metatron and the Authority may no longer be dictating the rules, but Lyra is still forced to submit to a system that does not afford her kindness or self-determination. “There are fates even the most powerful have to submit to,†Xaphania tries to explain as the surviving angel dumps the worst possible news in the laps of two teenagers who surely must deserve even a few more days of peace. It’s cold comfort as Will closes up the final window and we’re left with Lyra in a silence that catches in our throats like a missed step.
The epilogue leaves the question of whether we’ll return to the sequel series up in the air. The outlook isn’t great, to be honest (especially amid all the tumult at HBO). If it doesn’t happen, that might be for the best. But if it does … if, over the next seven years, a bitterness brews in the heart of Lyra Silvertongue, that bitterness isn’t merely understandable. It’s justifiable. If she must live her life as a martyr — working to regain a shred of what she’s lost, lingering on a lonely bench, year after year, in more unbearable silence — let her be a righteous one. Let her be furious. Let her — and Pantalaimon and us — have that much.
Field Notes
• Father Gomez’s death is just as abrupt but a lot clearer in the text than whatever happened here with Balthamos. (Does murdering Gomez cause him to die? Does he simply choose to disintegrate and find Baruch once his task is complete?) In the book, Balthamos drowns Gomez, which allows the priest’s dæmon to bite and poison him.
• If Atal’s “tell them stories†mandate felt like a forced echo of the Theme™ from an earlier episode, that’s because it was: In The Amber Spyglass, Mary actually witnesses the ghosts emerging from the land of the dead, and she overhears one of them echoing Lyra’s instructions as she emerges into the sunlight. That’s how the idea is seeded — not from some prescient proclamation from her (let’s be real, heavily Native-coded) friend.
• Here, it seems as though the alethiometer simply stops working for Lyra, which is odd, since it canonically runs on Dust and doesn’t actually care if you can understand it. (That’s why functionally illiterate readers like Fra Pavel are able to ask it questions and then pore over its answers with textbooks.) In the book, Lyra simply loses her ability to innately interpret those answers — like a language she’s suddenly forgotten and now must relearn.
• I adored Lyra’s wardrobe in theory, but I think it took a lot away from the character in practice, especially toward the end of the series. Even in good faith, it’s hard to imagine Mrs. Coulter ever having time to obtain and tailor couture for a growing teen while on the run from everyone on multiple Earths. It’s a true tragedy that Lyra never got to be the feral little beast she was meant to be.
• Speaking of, I worry that they decided not to have Lyra cry over the likely death of her parents because it was out of character. People cry when their abusive parents die! It’s a thing! Allowing Dafne Keen to freak out a little more — whether in the moment with the golden monkey in the last episode or in the pond this episode — would have made her confused grief so much more real than a monologue and a single tear.
• “You were a nun? Like a nun nun?â€
• I love how hard these two ultraserious kids who scowl through 90 percent of the series smile in the moments after they kiss. Completely unrestrained joy. Grinning little fools. Top-rate stuff.
• Mary’s dæmon is an alpine chough, a bird belonging to the crow family that, according to Wikipedia, “may nest at a higher altitude than any other bird.â€
• Actual LOL at Mary offering them literal fruit the morning after the marzipan story.
• Hey kid, want to cry a little more on your way out? In the book, the mulefa know about the window from the land of the dead. When Mary and the children leave — on the Gyptian boats with John Faa and Farder Coram rather than on foot — they show the humans that they’ve planted a grove of their seedpod trees around the ghosts’ doorway: “Because it was a holy place, they said; they would maintain it forever; it was a source of joy.â€