His Dark Materials Episode 04: Armour

WHO’S READY FOR POLAR BEARS?

Episode Review

This was, moment for moment, probably the most entertaining episode of the series yet. That’s heavily down to one thing: Lin Manuel Miranda as Lee Scoresby, aeronaut extraordinaire.

Miranda’s casting was by far the most controversial when the series was being filmed, given that he’s much younger than the character is described in the books and was percieved as lacking the cowboy-esque grit that made Sam Elliott’s turn as Lee so memorable in the movie. Miranda is also known far more for his stage and musical exploits than screen acting, leading some to fear a poor performance from what’s supposed to be the most charismatic person in the story.

And true enough, this version of Lee is quite different from what fans of the books are used to imagining: looser, goofier and used more for comic relief. I don’t care though, because he’s awesome. Miranda absolutely nails it, especially during the comedy bits, but he proves perfectly capable of getting serious when he needs to (which is important, given, uh, things that are going to happen next season). Dafne Keene also bounces off him wonderfully; every time the two are on screen together in this episode is brilliant.

On that note, Keene contninues to shine. Lyra finally has more agency to go off and get into hijinks in this episode, and that freedom is used to show us a very important facet of her character: being a conniving chancer who doesn’t take orders from anyone. In fact, some smart rewriting lets this aspect of her personality come through even more than it did originally, as she uses a combination of skullduggery, manipulation and bald-faced lying to secure the services of Iorek and Lee for the Gyptians. Here we also get an important reminder that Lyra is still a child despite everything she’s wrapped up in: you really get the sense from Keene’s performance that while she sees the utility of having a big armoured bear on hand, a large part of her fervor for getting Iorek on board is that she thinks hanging out with a talking polar bear would be totally rad.

And it mostly is, except for the “talking” part.

As I’ll beak down in the analysis, I’m super impressed with the visual design of Iorek and the CG used to bring him to life; however, I’m really not a fan of the voice Joe Tandberg is doing for the character. He adopts this throaty, growly way of speaking that makes Iorek sound less like a talking bear and more like a grumpy old man. It also sounds sort of cartoony—in that it’s the kind of voice I could imagine being given to a minor character in a Disney movie about polar bears—which leads into one of my other criticisms of the episode.

The series’ portrayal of Lyra’s world up until this point has been a bit more sobre and realistic than either what the movie went with or the deliberately vague descriptions of the book, and this combined with the frequent cut-aways to our world has given the series a somewhat more grounded feel all round. This is proving to be something of a problem now that we’re getting into the more fantastical elements like the bears and the witches, and even Lee’s comedic stylings; there’s just a bit of a mismatch in tone that makes these elements not sit together entirely comfortably. Mrs. Coulter’s meeting with the bear king at the end of the episode in particular felt oddly fairytale-esque next to everything we’ve seen her doing up until now.

Granted, that is to an extent the point—the north of Lyra’s world is meant to be full of strange wonders and magic—but that discordant note is still present.

Some other, although lesser problems I had with this episode: it’s the first one that felt like the material being adapted wasn’t quite enough to sustain an entire hour of TV and thus dragged a bit in the middle, and Mrs. Coulter’s revalation about her plans concerning Lord Asriel came a bit out of nowhere (to be fair, this plot point feels the same way in the book).

Overall though, entertaining stuff. The show’s creators have fully earned my trust at this point, and I look forward to the second half of the series where all the fun, dark stuff happens.

Speaking of which: we’re now at the halfway point, having covered the four episodes that reviewers were given to evaluate the series with before release. So, how’s it doing? Is it finding an audience? Is it finding the rather large audience that it presumably needs to in order to justify its relatively high cost? Are we going to get a third season covering The Amber Spylgass?

That’s a hard question to answer, mostly because we don’t know what the expectations going in were. The first episode came out of the gate very strong in the UK, pulling in over nine million viewers across TV and streaming, making it the strongest debut of the year on UK television. So, yay! However, the second episode saw a very substantial drop—as in, it dropped by two million viewers. Episode three then dropped by another 500k across streaming and TV broadcast.

Like I said, I can’t say whether that’s something to be concerned about. If nine million people was the break-even number for the show then that big drop is bad news, but if nine million was way above expectations then it’s probably got a lot of wiggle room to either retain its current audience or start building a bigger one.

HBO numbers for the US are a trickier proposition, partially because I’m having some trouble finding accurate ones (Wikipedia seems to only be listing TV numbers, not streaming). Apparently the first episode got around 700k across the channel and HBO Go, which sounds low but actually looking at the rest of their lineup isn’t necessarily; Game of Thrones got millions and millions of viewers every week, but that doesn’t seem to be anywhere close to the norm for the channel.

And of course, a lot of TV series have a general trend where they start out with a certain viewership, shed viewers towards the middle and then people come back on towards the end (which I’ve never personally understood—are people checking back in just to see the last episode?). It’s possible we’re seeing this trend but with a bigger initial loss thanks to the level of hype around the show’s premiere drawing in more people, some of whom decided they weren’t interested.

Ultimately, until someone involved with the show says something, this is all speculation. I suspect that if a third (or fourth—the producers have discussed splitting The Amber Spyglass across two) season is forthcoming, it’s going to need to get the go-ahead soon so Dafne Keene and Amir Wilson won’t get too old to play their parts (this was apparently a big reason why the second season was greenlit and filmed so rapidly).

Regardless of what happens, we are at the very least going to see the entirety of the first two books adapted, and to be honest that covers by far the best parts of the trilogy. Although at the same time, I’m really curious to see how the show would handle The Amber Spylgass given how wierd and untidy that book is.

Analysis

When it comes to the design of Iorek, the show had to get two things right: he has to be both a proud and fierce warrior-king who’ll totally mess a dude up, and also be a big adorable fuzzy-wuzzy. I feel like they absolutely nailed it on both counts. All of the bits where he interacts with other characters were totally convincing, which bodes well for the big polar bear showdown in the second last episode.

I like how the show emphasises the fact that the panserbjorn, while possessing intelligence and a mentality close to human, aren’t actually human and are therefore inherently kind of alien and intimidating to deal with. We see this in much of Iorek’s body language, and also in Mrs. Coulter’s negotiations with Ragnar where she is—for the first time in the story so far—temporarily unable to charm or manipulate someone into doing what she wants.

The show continues to not give a single fuck when it comes to emphasising the religious angle to the Magisterium: Trollesund’s oratory prominently features the Magisterium symbol in stained-glass window form and Mrs. Coulter’s wrangling with Iofur Raknisson links baptism with Magisterium membership. In fact if my recollection of Northern Lights is correct, I think this is actually more overtly anti-religious than the source material.

Speaking of Iofur: hello Iofur! You’re showing up to the party a bit early. Nice lower jaw you’ve got there, it would be a shame if anything happened to it.

I like how you can tell that underneath the fancy armour he’s noticeably less thicc than Iorek, thus indicating that our boi Iorek is the one true king of the polar bears (I’m normally a staunch anti-monarchist, but will make exceptions when the monarchy in question involves polar bears fighting each other. If the British royal family adopts this practice, I promise to say nice things about them on twitter).

Trollesund was brought to life via a big open-air set in a quarry in Wales (which you can actually see on Google Maps). The depiction of the town is a bit dingier and more dismal than the way it’s described in the book; there, it seems like there are some nice buildings—like the house of the witch’s consul—that aren’t delapidated shacks.

A fun addition to the series is some more of Mrs. Coulter’s sparring with the Magisterium, who book readers will know she has a distinctly on-again-off-again relationship with, veering between true-believer zealotry and utilitarian pragmatism depending on which would be useful to her at any given moment. I like that the series has thus far not depicted any of her manipulations as taking the form of outright seduction, a change which I hope contiues going forward.

This bit between Lord Boreal and Fra Pavel, the Magisterium’s alethiometer reader and another minor character making an early appearance, is interesting. Boreal blackmailing Pavel by threatening to reveal his “filthy predilections” immediately made me assume a certain meaning given that the dude is an evil priest, but then I noticed that Boreal’ body language in this scene almost looks flirtatious, albeit in an extremely aggressive way. That, plus the fact that they seem to know each other already, made me wonder if something else entirely isn’t going on here.

I don’t believe the Magisterium’s views on homosexuality were ever touched on in any of the books. Given that they’re basically the Catholic church but with all the dials set to eleven you’d assume they’re not big fans, but we don’t actually know that. It would be interestin if the show intended to explore this topic.

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