The Golden Compass/His Dark Materials (BBC One Series)

I gotta say that I feel that how heavy handed the anti-religion message is in the series gets way over stated. It's there, sure, but at least for me it never takes over the narrative. It mostly just informs how the world works. Present but doesn't get preachy. The reason people keep bringing it up because it's often the first thing you hear about the series when it's discussed, so attention is drawn to it, which makes it more discussed and the circle goes on. I think Narnia in the same situation form the opposing side.

Also, this series and Narnia tonally have very little in common, even if they are deliberately thematically related, so the compulsory bringing up of the other, that even I lapsed to, gets rather tiresome.

What is not controversial, I'm pretty sure, is not that the books are liked less the further in the series you go. I still consider the first book to be pretty much a masterpiece in its genre. The second one is good, but just suffers in comparison, especially since Lyra is much more engaging a lead than Will. Also Lyra's world is just that great.

The last book suffered from the whole "Whelp, now I gotta bring all these tangled threads to a neat botwie somehow and I have no idea how to do so in 500 pages"-syndrome, so it just feels oh so rushed.

Luckily, I feel the first book works just fine on its own, even if it leaves you desiring for a continuation.

Edited by GabrieltheThird on Nov 7th 2019 at 7:56:05 PM

I watched the first episode of the series and gotta say, I liked it so far.

As for the books, I join the company of those for whom the first book was the most enjoyable. I especially hated the latter half of the second book when it got anvilicious, and for the infamous Shrug of God about them having sex or not. If you never intended them to (Lyra states in the sequel series it was only a kiss I believe), then write it that way instead of baiting and trying to shirk accusations of a squicky relationship between 13 year olds by saying "it's up to your imagination and they are both the same age anyways".

Also, Mary's role never really made sense to me. She's supposed to be the one undermining and ruining Lyra, right? The Serpent? All her much-foreshadowed temptation boils down to is "I like marzipan and China".

Okay, having finally watched the first episode, I enjoyed it a lot.

I luckily have never watched the movie so I could go into this with a fresh mind without comparing the actors, which is good because Dafne Keen absolutely sells Lyra. The other actors I currently feel more uncertain about but I'm optimistic that they'll settle into their roles given time.

I know it's probably a budgetary constraint, but I'm a bit disappointed they couldn't give most background characters an explicit daemon somewhere or at least accommodate for this constraint somehow, it's probably going to soften the impact of having people explicitly without daemons and its effects in this world (should I spoil this??) later on.

I watched the first episode. It's not very fast on its legs, the brick-wall-thick exposition drags the pace down a tad and the characters end up feeling more like pieces moving in a chessboard rather than actual characters. I also don't quite jive so far with the confused aesthetics of the world where characters swing back and forth from wearing Edwardian-esque clothing and just straight up denim.

That said, it does feel like a fairly inventive and interesting world so I'll keep checking out.

Feel like this should have its own trope page soon enough.

I missed the first episode. Any advice on where to find it?

Ok I watched episode two and now that I know to look out for it it really is distracting how few people, especially in indoor scenes, have daemons.

okay I think revealing Lord Boreal's multiversal crossings this early on was a bad choice because it really dampens the gradual reveals of the first two books

ngl the Magisterium is pretty bland-looking in this adaptation

There were two shots with Lord Boreal where the bird flies over him and his daemon crawls through the skull's eye which were so on the nose in intent I love it

I really need to reread the books because wow are there several sections that I do not remember.

Episode 3, framing a lot of the episode around Ma Costa and Lyra was a good choice.

What didn't work quite as well was the heavy focus on Coulter and Boreal because they seem to be really rushing through to get to material from the later books. They've already revealed Will this early on and hinted at the raids that open book 2 so I'm very unsure of whether they're going to do Subtle Knife in this season or not.

I do think Coulter's Daemon works the best so far on-screen, Pan just isn't quite cutting it.

Ok so now Pan is missing often too, nice. I don't know why but now that it has been pointed out it really does bother me when daemons are missing...

And I feel bad that it does because in the first episode, which I saw before checking the reactions here, I didn't even notice it.

Edited by akanesarumara on Nov 20th 2019 at 5:40:22 PM

Even the show seems aware of the chronic absence of Daemons, like with Boreal's accomplice asking where the Hell is his Daemon (and Boreal giving the Author's Saving Throw of sorts that his Daemon usually stays slithering inside his suit jacket).

Alas that's the price of being TV show,it means having a shoestring budget in comparison to a film.Before anyone says "Game of thrones!" there's no way in heck they're getting similar budget treatment

My school did a production where they used puppets for the daemons,maybe they could have used something similar

That’s the inevitable trade off for television Fantasy/Science Fiction adaptations. A serialized television format is generally a lot more flexible than a two hour movie format would be, but often are limited in how they can actually pull off the effects heavy fantasy elements, due to budget and time constraints.

Edited by megaeliz on Nov 20th 2019 at 9:40:51 AM

Episode 4 is the first episode where the exposition I think was genuinely mishandled and had misplaced priorities. But on the flip side, this is an episode where Keen and Wilson have really slipped into Lyra and Coulter.

I still have no clue on what to make of Lin-Manuel Miranda as Scoresby but he's had a pretty decent showing so far. Iorek is pretty much perfect imo.

tbh even though the armored bears were the main draw for hype, I'm actually way more excited to see the witches because they have such a particular mystique about them.

A question, I know ordinary animals can't sense daemons, but how about armoured bears, can they sense daemons?

No, because in the books Lyra was able to fool the Armored Bear King into thinking she was Iorek's daemon.

Oh man, I've started watching this. His Dark Materials was one of my favourite series as a kid, and everything is coming back!

I love the visual worldbuilding in this, and the contrast between pseudo-Victorian Oxford, the 1930s Art Deco aesthetic of London and the stark, modern brutalism of the Magisterium.

The casting is brilliant too; Lyra and Roger in particular just seem like they were born for this role. But the way they retooled Mrs Coulter's character was amazing— making her strong suit not beauty and seduction like in the books, but really playing up the superficial charm, manipulation and deceit. I feel that they're trying to emphasise how she and Lyra are Not So Different.

OK, finished watching this, and I must ask: The scene in the last episode where Mrs Coulter is stroking her demon, am I the only one who felt like she was having a 'special moment' with herself?

Season 2 trailer. Release timeframe is this fall.

I was worried they might not have had season 2 filmed before COVID hit, looks like we’re okay.

To my understanding, they kept the filming going as soon as series one wrapped to make sure the leads didn't grow out of their roles

I did hear they cut the season to 7 episodes rather than the planned 8 because they weren't quite done.

Scenes are commonly shot out of order, so it's hard to tell what this means. It could just mean they move episode 8 to season 3, or it could mean they condensed the season down to 7 episodes and the end of 7 will have the climax that was supposed to be in 8.

It also might be less a literal episode was cut and more that a plotline or so was cut down and that meant runtimes for the other episodes might have gotten squeezed for the pacing; HBO doesn't have the inherent time limit of 'x' mins because of TV Scheduling.

I also remember a few other HBO shows being pitched with one or two more episodes than they wound up having because the pacing and editing worked out better. I believe Chernobyl was going to have another episode and they ended up pacing it better without it and cut things down. Or I might be thinking of a different show.

And, frankly, it's sometimes better to over film and cut down. You can trim the fat off meat, but you can't add more than what you already have, y'know?

Edited by InkDagger on Jul 28th 2020 at 4:49:05 AM

How much involvement will HBO have had with the filming for season 2? I know that season 1 was pretty much all done by the BBC, so I’d assume that the BBC is largely still in creative control.

Oh, I didn't mean to imply that HBO does this. More those were examples off the top of my head of shows that original had x episode counts and then dropped to y later in production.