His Dark Materials Episode 08: Betrayal & Season 01 review

With its eighth and final episode, His Dark Materials moves into territory that fans have been waiting more than a decade for: the end of Northern Lights, which the 2007 movie bafflingly decided to save for the (never-made) next movie. The adaptation here isn’t perfect, but it offers a visually stunning rendition of the book’s infamous downer ending that doesn’t pull any punches and hits all the desired emotional beats, even if some of the creative choices weigh it down slightly.

Let’s address the biggest flaw first: Will’s story. I’ve flip-flopped back and forth over whether the decision to pull Subtle Knife material into the first season was a good or bad choice, and overall I have to lean, very slightly, towards the latter. Cutting between Lyra’s world and real-world London just overall doesn’t really work for me as someone who’s familiar with Lyra’s story without those impositions, and while it may well end up working in the second season’s favour, that’s not the season I’m reviewing.

I did say I’m leaning slightly towards the decision being a bad idea because I actually like how the Will-centric parts of the story were executed just fine; Amir Wilson in particular is very promising as a co-lead to join Dafne Keene. It’s just when it’s interspersed with the rest of the plot that it becomes a problem.

The show’s other flaw lies with the dialogue, which can occasionally get a little clunky, particularly when the characters need to deliver exposition. At times it’s warm and lively, while elsewhere it can feel artless and mechanical. This is a problem that crops up in the first episode and persists all the way through the series, probably due to the fact that Jack Thorne, primary writer of Harry Potter and The Cursed Child, wrote all eight episodes. He’s a lot better here, but I’m still glad that season two brought in more writers rather than relying solely on his somewhat inconsistent talents.

The dialogue issues go more noticeable in show’s second half; this, combined with some occasional—and relatively minor—pacing issues lead me to prefer the first four episodes to the ones that followed. In the early episodes the story feels more relaxed and has more time to stretch out, whereas later on I feel like it’s getting squeezed a bit by the necessity of hitting plot points and delivering information to the viewer (to be fair, some of this stems from the book, which is at times structured very oddly and feels like it was partially made up as it was being written).

Going back to this episode specifically, I appreciate that the series decided to depict Lyra crossing between worlds through a tear in the fabric of reality in a very quiet, sombre way. It would have been easy to go for a more adventrous, “epic” feel, and maybe that would have been more emotionally satisfying, but on balance I feel that the downbeat approach was truer to both the story itself and the tone that the series has so far been employing.

Actually, that kind of summarizes my feelings on the season as a whole: there were probably more purely entertaining ways to handle the source material that would have felt closer in tone and style to Northern Lights, but my approach to adaptations has always been that if I want to re-experience the original, I can just go back to it. The people handling His Dark Materials made some daring choices, and while not all of them landed, I appreciate the fact that they were taken. Roll on season two.

Blog Note

No episode analysis this time since it feels a bit redundant now that we’ve reached the end. Writing this post series, as much as I’ve enjoyed it, took a lot out of me due to my ongoing medical problems, so I’m going to take a whole month off blogging to recover. I’ll see you all at the end of January for more internet fun-times.