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Home » Long Term Weight Loss » His Dark Materials buckles under the weight of its missing daemons (experts) – The A.V. Club

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Welcome to The A.V. Clubs Experts reviews of HBOs His Dark Materials. It is written from the perspective of someone who has read all three books in Philip Pullmans trilogy, and intended for an audience of viewers who have also read these books. While the main review will not actively spoil details from future books, there will be a spoiler-specific section at the end of the review, and the conversation in the comments will feature spoilers from all books in the series. For those who wish to avoid these spoilers, please visit our Newbies reviews.

When evaluating an adaptation, its impossible not to read ahead a bit as youre watching. The very function of these experts reviews is to think about the long-term ramifications of changes made by the television version of this story, even if the nature of episodic criticism means that Im also evaluating each individual episode as a piece of television drama.

Over the past few weeks, the tension between those elements of His Dark Materials has shown a bit. I wouldand did!argue that the past couple of episodes have essentially worked as pieces of television drama, but in the comments there was a significant conversation about the way choices made would impact future developments, and its hard to disagree in light of The Daemon-Cages. Its a pivotal moment in the conflict of the season, but one which is rendered inscrutable by a season-wide struggle to depict the human-daemon relationship in a legible way. As a book reader, our brains will subconsciously fill in potential gaps in the story logic being presented, and the show has been close enough to getting it right in the big moments in the past few episodes that its been able to skate by. But in the case of this episode, the shows attempts to generate tension and consequence come routinely undone by the cumulative effect of daemons being inconsistently and generally poorly depicted.

I understand that CGI is expensive. Its clear in this episode alone that the budget really wasnt enough to depict this show at its proper scale: just look at how the battle at Bolvangar is reimagined in close quarters, and the entire group of witches is trimmed down to just Serafina Pekkala. And so if the show is going to exist at all, then there needs to be sacrifices, and so it makes sense that there isnt going to be enough money to give every single character a clearly depicted daemon. Its understandable that shots will often be framed in a way that cuts out the daemons below, and that not every character will have a fully developed daemon of their own.

However, its unfortunate that none of the producers seemed to be aware of the problem this would create when they got to Bolvangar. Its a sequence that depends heavily on understanding the uncanniness of a person without a daemon in this world: its about Lyras fear of losing a part of herself, and her fear for the other children who could face this fate. But despite being mostly fine with the adjustments to Billy Costas fate in last weeks episode, the second Lyra joins the other children in Bolvangas cafeteria I realized the whole piece wasnt going to work. Only a handful of children have daemons, and none of them have any personality or dialogue with their humans. Outside of the poor girl selected to be separated as soon as Lyra arrives, none of the subsequent kids that are introduced are given daemons with any kind of identity. And so when Lyra breaks the news that the kids who disappear are being separated from their daemons, the actual meaning of that is lost because they might as well all be separated from their daemons anyway.

Now, Jack Thornes solution to this is to focus on the effect of the procedure on the children themselves. In other words, the threat is not the loss of the daemon and its connection, but rather the loss of awareness of your surroundings, becoming almost zombie-like. We see this with the Bolvangar assistants whose daemons were stripped away to ensure their pliability, and the show veers away from the books to suggest that the children themselves are being kept in Bolvangar along with their daemons, trapped in a separate dormitory and then eventually rescued by the Gyptians. The shows argument is that seeing these consequences of intercisionbeginning with Billy Costa, of courseprovides enough of a sense of danger and concern to fuel the episodes tension. But just because the audience knows that something bad could happen doesnt mean they truly understand the reasons its bad, and those reasons are what make the daemons such a powerful part of this story. Sure, The Daemon-Cages articulates that Lyra and these children are in danger, but the very specific idea of separating from your daemon needed to be understood on a deeper level than whats depicted here.

And there were numerous opportunities to explore it. Theres a brief scene of Pan and Rogers daemona conversing while their respective humans pretend not to know each other, but why not depict a whisper network of daemons, all spreading the word about the coming threat? Why is that the show never depicts other characters conversing with their daemons, so that they dont just seem like pets to everyone but Lyra, Serafina, and Lee? Why not give us at LEAST a couple of closeups of daemon-on-daemon fights in the midst of the battle at Bolvangar, instead of just occasionally throwing in a bird flying through the air as though thats the same thing? When literally no one but Lyra is seen having a close relationship with her daemon, and even that relationship is consistently underplayed (where was Pan during her encounter with Mrs. Coulter?), the very idea of a daemon is mostly irrelevant at the very moment when it was supposed to become absolutely pivotal. Would an average viewer even notice that the Bolvangar assistants dont have daemons, when so few characters seem to have them?

Lyras conversation with Mrs. Coulter is the most the show has actively talked about what daemons represent, but it felt trivializing to me. Marisa describes daemons as wonderful companions and friends to you when youre young, but asserts that they bring all sorts of troublesome thoughts and feelings. Its an effort to position the daemon as the source of dust, but the whole point of the story is that Lyra instinctively knows this isnt true. She knows that the daemon is part of her soul, and that their connection is not defined by sin but rather something far more profound than that, but do we as the audience know that? As Mrs. Coulter makes her argument for intercision as a concept, the show has failed to provide an alternative view of daemons to counter it, beyond simply the fact that we know taking away daemons turns kids into zombies and we instinctively dont want that to happen. Thats enough to create conflict, yes, but its a shallower conflict than the one depicted in the books, and could have been avoided if they had done more work building the human-daemon connection in previous episodes. I understand that budget constraints might have forced their hand, but the fact it wasnt a priority is disheartening, and fundamentally caught up with the show in this hour.

Mrs. Coulter is at the heart of the episodes other change, which continues the effort to move a significant part of her character development forward. In the books at this stage, I would argue were given no reason to trust her, or believe that she could be redeemed in any significant way. And while shes still the antagonist here, the episode goes out of its way to suggest that she is simply caught up in the doctrine of the church and her own shame over her affair with Lord Asriel, and experiences regret about what went down at Bolvangar when she (weirdly) eavesdrops on the reunion of the Gyptians with the kidnapped children. Its a choice that Im struggling with a bit: I understand where its coming from, but I dislike the idea that a non-reader would never question whether Marisa would save Lyra from the intercision at this stage in the story. And the fact that she slinks away without the sense that her position on this might have changed now that Lyra tricked her and destroyed her entire operation feels like a missed opportunity to reintroduce a sense of danger to a relationship that feels stripped of it.

As always, though, its important to remember that only book readers experience this as a stripping of meaning: non-readers wouldnt know the show is reframing the effects of intercision, or softening Mrs. Coulters edges. However, while I cant say for certain and a glimpse of the Newbies review suggests I may be mistaken, The Daemon-Cages feels like the point where the cumulative impact of the shows various struggles to articulate the central human-daemon relationship turned into something even a non-reader would recognize as being off, and takes what was once a climactic moment and turns it into just another stop on Lyras journey.

So, two notes here. First and foremost, my biggest issues with The Amber Spyglass boil down to my feeling that its on-the-nose pivot to being about love doesnt feel earned, so hearing Lee throw out the word during his chat with Serafina got my back up a bit. Ill admit it worked better on my recent reread than it did when I was in college and even more jaded than I am now, but back then it really soured me on the thematics of this story, and its why Im worried that the show will REALLY lean into love both for its efficiency and because it lets them sidestep the religious side of things more easily.

Secondly, though, I think its a shame that we lost the scene of Lyra letting all of the daemons loose from their cages and setting them free. Not only was it a pivotal scene for establishing the burden on the daemons as well as the humans involved in the intercision process, but it also offered a productive parallel to Lyras role in freeing the ghosts in The Amber Spyglass. I would hate to think that the scene doesnt exist solely because they didnt have enough money (or the right priorities) to depict it, but it just isnt the same for the Gyptians to be carrying the daemons back south with them. That was Lyras moment!

See the article here:
His Dark Materials buckles under the weight of its missing daemons (experts) - The A.V. Club

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Home » Long Term Weight Loss » His Dark Materials buckles under the weight of its missing daemons (experts) – The A.V. Club