His Dark Materials Episode 01: Lyra's Oxford

IT'S POLAR BEAR TIME Y'ALL

Well, not quite. First we need to head to Oxford.

The first episode of The Beeb's big-budget His Dark Materials adaptation is finally out. I'm going to be covering every episode, with each post consisting of a review (for normal people), followed by a more in-depth analysis (for awesome people). The analysis sections will contain spoilers for both the episode in question, future episodes, and all of the books (and thus potentially the entire rest of the series, depending on how closely it follows the source material), but the reviews won't spoil anything besides the current and previous episodes.

With that out of the way: what did I think of the first episode?

Episode Review

Adapting the beginning of Northern Lights for live action was never going to be an easy task. As I stated in my big review of the books, the opening of the trilogy is strangely slow-paced for a children's novel and takes a while to really tie the different plot threads it opens with into something coherent. In addition, any first episode needs to do a lot of heavy lifting in terms of explaining complicated ideas to the audience (more so, I would argue, than your typical "here are a bunch of kingdoms" high fantasy story).

Given all of that, Lyra's Oxford on the whole does an impressive job. It does stumble occasionally, both in ways that any adaptation was probably going to and in a few new ways invented just for the show, but overall it's fast, engaging and fun, and does a great job of capturing the magic of the book's setting without going over the top with it like the movie sometimes did.

The episode diverges pretty significantly from the source material in some very key ways, as discussed in the analysis section below. I personally am not a stickler for fidelity and often like adaptations to differ from the original; live action TV is after all a very different medium to a written novel, and if the story needs to be changed to fit the transition, it should be. Pretty much all of the alterations seen here are sensible, at times even fixing problems found in the book. This gives me a lot of confidence in the showrunners going forward. My hope, based on this episode, is that they're going to strike a good balance between slavish devotion and changing things just for the hell of it.

This is an expensive show--I believe it's probably the most expensive thing the BBC had ever done, although as with most TV production I don't think they financed it themselves--and it certainly looks like it. The daemon special effects are easily as good as those seen in a big-budget movie; in fact, apart from one shot of an airship and the interior of a huge Magisterium building everything on screen looked Hollywood-quality.

That said, there have obviously been concessions made to the relatively smaller budget of a TV show. The daemons look great when they're on screen, but that doesn't actually happen all that much. The daemons of background extras are pretty much non-existant, and even Pantalaimon sometimes only chimes in as an off-screen voice. This is regrettable and will make some future plot developments less impactful, but it was probably unavoidable. Gotta save that CG money for the polar bears.

In terms of the cast, the show has the same willingness to diverge from the source material as the writing. Several of the actors are pretty wildly different from how their characters are portrayed on the page, and while this doesn't work so well for some of the smaller members of the cast (more on that below), all of the principal performers do a good job of re-interpreting their roles.

One of the big problems with the movie is that Lyra was severely softened, and I was a bit disappointed to see that something similar has happened here. It's not as bad as before--the episode opens with Lyra stealing and quaffing down a bottle of wine--but she's still noticeably had her sharp edges sanded down. To be fair, this could be a case of the writers adapting the character to the performer; the only time I felt Dafne Keen tripped up was when she tried to emulate Lyra's rough speaking style from the book--her accent is just too posh to make it sound convincing. The Lyra of the TV show overall feels like she's spent more time inhabiting the rarified confines of Jordan College than she has getting into fights with gangs of street urchins.

Unsurprisingly, the episode is at its weakest when it's ploughing through exposition. Several aspects of the setting (mostly around how daemons work) are re-explained several times in a way that feels redundant, and any scenes that just exist to convey information to the viewer feel rushed and heavy-handed. The scene where the master of Jordan College waffles to a colleague about the prophecy surrounding Lyra is recreated faithfully, and is just as clunky as it was on the page, if not more so. Lord Asriel's presentation to the scholars also suffers--James McAvoy noticeably speeds through his dialogue, as though he was instructed to keep the scene under a certain time limit by any means necessary.

I'm hoping these problems will fade after this episode; once all the pieces have been put in place, maybe the show will be allowed to relax and settle into its rhythms.

It's evident that some of the same concerns that sank the movie--concerns over budget, over the viability of the story to appeal to the mainstream and the relatively slow opening of the book--were shared by the showrunners. But unlike the suits who chopped Chris Weitz's film to pieces, they're responding to those concerns in a measured and thoughtful way, rather than with flailing five-alarm panic. I sense a fundamental confidence in the source material that the production of The Golden Compass always lacked.

I'm still concerned about some of the expectations surrounding the series--in particular, the way it's being positioned by the media as the next destination for Game of Thrones fans is completely baffling--but this first episode gives me hope that it's overall in good hands.

Analysis

Get out ur alethiometers, it's time to speculate.

First up, how about that opening sequence? Pretty cool, right? Let's watch it again:

As mandated in the Prestige TV rulebook, it mostly consists of close-up shots of objects being formed out of some sort of substance (Dust, in this case), although things get a little more interesting towards the end. Let's go through it bit by bit.

(If you weren't expecting this level of over the top detail and are having second thoughts, now's your chance to hit the back button and spend your evening doing something more productive).

The intro opens with two golden lines flying towards each other, resulting in an explosion. This obviously represents, like, the Big Bang. Or something. The explosion is quickly followed by a very intriguing sight: angel wings. They don't appear at all in the first book, but it seems angels are going to be featuring in later seasons.

In the His Dark Materials universe, angels work a little differently than they typically do. Rather than being messengers of God, angels are beings of pure Dust; since Dust is thought to be the substance that grants consciousness to inanimate matter like the human brain, they're basically non-corporeal minds. Angels very explicitly did not create the universe/multiverse and don't know who or what did any more than humans do. A very long time ago, an exceptionally old and powerful angel took on the mantle of the Authority and usurped the position of God in the Church of Lyra's world, as well as other Churches (and perhaps secular institutions as well) across the many universes.

The fact that angels are showing up after a big primordial explosion is I think meant to represent the idea, floated later on in the trilogy, that they were one of the first conscious entities in existence, if not actually the very first.

The intro then moves onto the alethiometer being formed out of Dust. This may be intended to be more literal than it appears; who created the alethiometers and how is unknown, although The Book of Dust may get around to explaining it (as of the writing of this post, I haven't read The Secret Commonwealth yet).

Note that the specific alethiometer symbol that gets the most attention is the alpha and omega symbol. The intro at least isn't being coy with the religious allusions.

Speaking of the alethiometer: it's square now, or at least the round bit is set into a square case. The alethiometer being circular has held steady across every single prior depiction (the first book is called "The Golden Compass" in America for a reason), so this is a pretty bold choice. I personally think it looks neat.

There's some text engraved around the middle, which wasn't in the books. It's shown several times both in the intro and the episode itself, but I haven't been able to work out what it says.

This next bit was tricky to screenshot, but we see some sort of coil of metallic wire (no idea what that's about) transform into...why, I do believe that's the subtle knife. It's a knife that can cut through anything, including the barrier between universe. Will gets it in the second book.

I really hope this the actual design they're going to use, because it looks extremely cool.

A silhouette of Lyra, surrounded by Oxfordian architecture with an MC Escher twist, is viewed through some sort of golden-yellow glass. Perhaps some sort of magnifying lens made out of amber. An amber spyglass, if you will.

Nothing analysis-wise to say about this, other than it's a pretty cool visual. This could be a number of mountainous regions that play prominent roles in the story, or it could just be generic scenery.

This is probably the most interesting part of the intro. My first guess was that the boy on the upper right is Roger, but...what if it's actually Will?

It was announced a while back that Will had been cast, which seemed remarkably early even given that the second season has already been greenlit. The actor (Amir Wilson) is a relative unknown compared to Dafne Keen, which implies that they were probably either holding auditions or scoping around for someone to play the part well before the announcement dropped. The only reason I can see for being so hasty is that Will is going to show up this season, possibly in a cameo at the end of the last episode. Exciting!

If that is Will, the framing of the two characters here is just rife with symbolism: perhaps representing the fact that Lyra and Will are currently separated in different universes, and after briefly coming together will become so again (and then maybe be reunited once more, if you accept the more optimistic takes on the end of the trilogy/The Book of Dust brings them back together).

Lastly, we have my favourite bit of the intro: multiple parallel worlds, stacked on top of each other in bands. Lyra's version of Oxford and the north (not actually another dimension, but whatever) are pretty easy to work out; the bottom one is probably an early look at Citagazze, the setting of half of The Subtle Knife. But between Lyra's Oxford and the north is somewhere very different. Now, you really have to pay close attention, but keen-eyed viewers will notice that this appears to be the real world.

This is actually the show playing its hand pretty prematurely. While parallel universes are brought up early in Northern Lights and discussed multiple times throughout, the fact that the characters are actually going to be visiting them is a pretty major twist that comes right at the end of the book, and the fact that one of those worlds is going to be our one doesn't become apparent until the start of The Subtle Knife.

Anyway, thanks for stopping by for this in-depth analysis! I know that went on a bit long, I'll try to be more concise in future.

Oh wait, the episode.

It opens with a short text crawl explaining that the story takes place in a parallel world, that the magisterium are the bad guys and what daemons are. I feel like the first two are unnecessary--both become pretty apparent just from watching--but the last is bit more justified.

The episode really wants to make sure the viewer gets the whole deal about daemons being able to shape-shift in childhood and what that signifies, including by inserting a whole scene not in the books just to really hammer it home. To be fair, it is kind of a complicated setup to convey just through dialogue ("so everyone's got an animal that's their soul, and it takes a specific form, except when you're a child it can be anything, and then it settles on something specific when you become an adult, and") and the show's special effects budget doesn't seem to have stretched to actually showing daemons changing much--I think there's only one, blink-and-you'll-miss-it shot of Pantalaimon transforming.

Before we leave the opening text, note how the "H" in "Human" is cut in half like the show's title treatment. At several points, the word "child" is similarly cut. "Severed", you might say. Oh ho ho ho.

With any adaptation, you always wonder how much it will stick to the source material and whether it will have the freedom to get a little wild. His Dark Materials answers that right off the bat by opening with...the end of La Belle Sauvage, where Lord Asriel delivers Lyra to a flooded Jordan College via helicopter. You can even see someone else hand Lyra to him before he gets out of the cockpit, which is presumably Alice, the character who's holding her in this scene in the book.

I appreciate this level of winking at the fans, but this part is probably the biggest mis-step in the whole episode. It's totally unnecessary, will probably confuse viewers unfamiliar with the source material, and feels really abrupt and clunky.

During the conversation between Lyra and Roger about their daemons settling, Pantalaimon is in the form he'll eventually settle on at the end of The Amber Spyglass. Sneaky.

This cut-away to Lord Asriel taking his photograms photographs of the Northern Lights immediately set off alarm bells, as it reminded me to a similar cut-away that the movie used to avoid any scene of characters not engaged in action scenes for more than thirty seconds. Not to worry though, it's the only bit like this in the episode and overall I think it serves the purpose of giving Asriel's arrival at Jordan a bit more narrative scaffolding.

Speaking of which: Asriel's presentation to the scholars is different from the books. He explicitly ties his research in with fighting back against the Magisterium in the name of freedom of knowledge and is lambasted by the scholars for heresy because of it; amusingly, the movie made pretty much the exact same changes to this scene. I think I can see why: as written in the book it's kind of a dry way to open a children's adventure story, and it takes a long time before you find out why any of this is actually relevant to the larger plot.

The other big change is with Grumman's head, presented to the scholars as Asriel's ace in the hole to get them to fund his expedition north. Here, he speculates that Grumman was killed by the Magisterium and appeals to the scholars to push back against the Magisterium in response; in the book this isn't stated and Asriel makes a big deal of the fact that Grumman had undergone trepanning prior to his death. The trepanning thing isn't addressed again until well into The Subtle Knife (and doesn't really go anywhere anyway), and you come away from the scene not really sure why the head clinches it for Asriel. As such, I thought this was a smart bit of re-writing.

(I'd like to float a theory that TV-Asriel is going to be revealed to have killed Grumman himself just to pull off this maneuver, which would be totally in keeping with his character)

Lord Asriel's relationship with Lyra is quite different in this episode. In the book, he's pretty much entirely gruff and curt and doesn't seem to have any affection for her at all; here, he's clearly struggling to hold back his paternal instincts (oh yeah spoiler, he's her dad) and there's a nice scene where he carries her up to bed after she falls asleep in the wardrobe, and we see that she has every postcard and letter he's ever sent her stuck to her bedroom wall.

Of all the changes evident in the show so far, I think this is by far the best. It adds a large amount of depth to Lyra and Asriel's relationship, it handily explains why Lyra is so eager to traipse off to London with Mrs. Coulter, and it will serve as some handy character motivation later on, when Lyra assumes she's supposed to bring the alethiometer to Asriel with tragic consequences.

(Although note that despite this dadening of Asriel, he still almost breaks Lyra's arm when she knocks the glass of Tokay out of his hand--and the scene is even more violent than it's described in the book, to a kind of shocking degree. Just in case you needed reminding that Asriel is not meant to be a good dude).

Here's a big change from the source material: instead of Mrs. Coulter, the Oblation Board's main child kidnapper is a completely new character: a "singing man" with a creepy bright-eyed fox.

I suspect the main impetus behind this was to turn the fact that Mrs. Coulter is a big garbage person into a twist. In the book, you see her kidnapping children before Lyra even meets her so you know right off the bat that she's bad news, whereas here the show drops pretty big hints that she's not to be trusted, but doesn't outline exactly how. This is another case where the show and the movie are both making similar alterations to the source material.

I'm very intrigued to learn more about Fox Guy, though. He seems vaguely similar to the villain of La Belle Sauvage, who was also a dude with a scary-looking daemon and a habit of enticing children...although that guy is also stated to be a paedophile who recently got out of jail for molesting kids. I'm assuming the show will not be using that particular character trait.

To my surprise, the Gyptians are fully present and are referred to as such (this has led at least one reviewer to mistakenly think they're supposed to be Egyptians). They even get a far bigger role than they did in the book, with their plotline about searching for their missing children running parallel to Lyra's story.

From a purely narrative perspective I think this makes sense, but it shines a spotlight on some of the uncomfortable facts about what exactly the Gyptians are meant to be. In the books, they're a vague collection of stereotypical attributes associated with Roma, Sinti, Irish Travellers and similar communities, mixed in with a hefty dose of the Noble Savage trope (or whatever its equivalent in this situation would be). In my original post about the books, I wrote about why this made me kind of uncomfortable.

In the show, the Gyptians just sort of come across as a random assortment of working-class folk who are vaguely living apart from the rest of society. The show tries to give them their own distinct culture (we first see them during an adulthood ceremony that wasn't in the books), but it doesn't really commit to this enough.

I actually think this is one case where the show's otherwise-commendable diverse casting might have backfired. The source material Gyptians, like their real-life inspirations, appear to be a distinct ethnic group; this pretty obviously isn't the case here, which seems to reframe them as more of a culture or way of life that anyone can join. Which is fine in theory, except it wouldn't really be obvious that they are a separate culture if that wasn't explicitly stated.

Additionally, some of the specific wrinkles the episode adds to the Gyptians are kind of odd. John Faa is referred to as the "western king"; when he's introduced we see people bowing to him, and the Oxford Gyptians decamp to London at the end of the episode because he orders them to, over some objections.

This isn't really what the Gyptian culture of the book is like. I always got the impression that Faa was a respected dude who had led Gyptian mercenaries in battle, and thus was someone all Gyptians would listen to if he came forward to speak on an issue, but he didn't have any literal authority (and certainly wasn't a king). Also, Northern Lights makes it pretty clear that the Gyptians are organized primarily into large family groups, which operate independently and sometimes antagonistically, only coming together as a unified whole during times of crisis like the child kidnappings, so the implication that they have these little regional fiefdoms is strange.

I suspect this may be an attempt to distance them from their real-life roots and into a completely fictional culture, such that Pullman's romanticism around them won't seem as strange. Or alternatively, it's a sneaky attempt to exploit Americans' well-known fetish for monarchy by shoe-horning the word "king" into the setting. Who knows!

The question on everyone's mind: are they going to "go there" with the religious stuff? And the answer is...yes. Partially.

No, the Magisterium aren't explicitly stated to be the principal religious authority in Lyra's world, but the one Magisterium goon we see is wearing something that looks very much like a frock and priest's collar, is addressed as "father" and reports to a bishop. And they're opposed to Lord Asriel because his ideas are heretical. And Lyra's tutor guy cautions her against saying certain things about God, because "the magisterium wouldn't like it". And their logo is very noticeably cross-shaped (as opposed to the movie, where it was just a stylized "M").

How much more explicit do you need to get?

If you remember my first trailer post, I was unable to pin down who the guy on the right was. It turned out he's sort of an original character and sort of not.

In the book, Lyra meets a guy named Lord Boreal at Mrs. Coulter's house party. Boreal is implied to be well-connected with the upper echelons of the Magisterium and gives Lyra some hints about the activities of the Oblation Board and Dust. Later, in The Subtle Knife, he steals the alethiometer from Lyra using shenanigans and then gets poisoned by Mrs. Coulter. Overall, not a particularly important character (I recognized the name, but had to consult a wiki to remember what he actually did in the story).

His role has apparently been expanded greatly for the series: in this episode he's tasked with discovering what Lord Asriel is up to. I suspect this may have been done to combine several minor bad guys into a single character.

Some pretty significant changes have been made to the order of events vis a vis Roger's disappearance and Mrs. Coulter. In the book, Roger goes missing before she shows up and then Lyra is so captivated by her and the idea of going north that she literally forgets about him for a time, which always struck me as an obvious bit of fudging on Pullman's part.

In the show, Lyra meets Mrs. Coulter first and convinces her to bring Roger to London, after which Roger is taken by Fox Guy (possibly on Mrs. Coulter's orders, to stop him from coming with them, which would be a delightfully villainous twist). Mrs. Coulter then promises to use her power and influence to find him once they're in London. In the book, Lyra starts to get suspicious of Mrs. Coulter because Mrs. Coulter keeps stringing her along with the promise of taking her to the north; I assume finding Roger is going to be the broken promise here.

The meeting between Lyra and Mrs. Coulter is where the fleshing out of Lyra and Lord Asriel really pays off. In the book, the way Lyra is just instantly smitten with her and agrees to be whisked off to London so she can be made into a pampered pet is blatantly out of character, to the point where Pullman has to invoke Mrs. Coulter's airy-fairy seduction powers to partially explain it. Now, it comes right on the heels of Lord Asriel blowing Lyra off and stirring up all of her resentment over not having parents, so you can totally see why this woman who swans into Lyra's life and offers to be her surrogate mother right at that particular moment would be Lyra's ultimate weakness.

Before we move away from Mrs. Coulter though, I have to highlight how the show has a grand old time dropping fat clues about her imminent villainous turn; I think about half of her dialogue to Lyra can be read as sinister double entendres.

As mentioned in my review, I thought the principal cast all did a good job, even when they differed from how they're described in the books. Two exceptions come in the form of Farder Coram and John Faa.

Coram in the books is a spindly old man who's afflicted with some sort of neurological disorder; he does the whole "frail of body, sharp of mind" trope and teaches Lyra how to use the alethiometer for the first time. Here, he's a big burly dude who actually looks pretty much exactly the way I pictured John Faa. This seems to fundamentally alter the character in a way I'm not sure I like.

John Faa, meanwhile, is a strange case. As mentioned before, he's been turned into much more of a concrete authority figure than he was in the book. To be honest, I'm not sure the actor is really pulling this off--they're clearly going for a grand, regal presence, but he just comes off as a normal dude. In the book John Faa is a seasoned mercenary and military leader who fights with a big warhammer; I'm having trouble picturing this guy doing that.

I didn't get around to it in the review, but one pleasant surprise with this episode is how much humour is in it. My fear, expressed previously when discussing the series, that it would try too hard to be dour and serious appears to have been unfounded.

The funniest part of the episode: Lyra, trying to use the alethiometer for the first time to find Roger, yelling at it like it's a phone and Siri won't understand her question. God damn zoomers and their gadgets--in my day, we rescued our kidnapped friends the old fashioned way.

*

Wow, that ended up being way longer than I planned. Too long, actually--I've exhausted myself. Future installments will hopefully be shorter, since I won't be reacting to every single aspect of the production every time.

See y'all in London next week. That Mrs. Coulter sure seems like a trustworthy person.