“His Dark Materials” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Six: “Malice”

“They consume what makes us human, so I just hid that from them,” Mrs. Coulter says of the spectres who eat people’s souls. “I suppress myself.” Would that we were all so lucky. Less an episode of television than a staccato succession of individual scenes — a series of unfortunate events, you might say—the penultimate installment of His Dark Materials’ second season puts all of the show’s characters through their paces, marching them relentlessly from one plot beat to the next over the course of its relatively brief 45-minute running time. Precious little humanity, in the form of the emotional and intellectual forces that actually drive people to do what they do, remains.

I reviewed this week’s oddly paced episode of His Dark Materials for Fanbyte.

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