“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.

Watching Mrs. Coulter navigate this brave new world and the people she encounters in it is the episode’s greatest pleasure. Coulter herself, however, is not any sane person’s idea of a pleasure. She’s so openly and obviously vicious and deceptive that Lord Boreal’s hamfisted attempts to impress and seduce her with his (other)worldly ways make him look more like an out-and-out moron than an overambitious suitor.

But it does engender some fun reactions on Coulter’s part: choking back boredom as she sits curled up on his couch in bare feet while he plays world music to set the mood; marveling at the presumption it took him to buy her a change of clothes in order to make her look more at home in Will’s world; silently bristling at his unthinking sexism regarding the women of this world’s perceived arrogance; responding to the pass he makes at her with “If you actually got me, you wouldn’t begin to know what to do with me.” He’s so eager to ignore all this that when she asks him for information about the spectres haunting Cittàgazze, he seems to believe the game is afoot once again. No subtle knife required here — the line between horny and stupid is pretty thin.

I reviewed last night’s episode of His Dark Materials for Fanbyte.

The knife business is well and good, and it obviously will be a major factor in Lyra and Will’s adventures moving forward. But as is so often the case with this series, it’s stronger television when humans make sincere contact with other humans, not when knives make contact with interdimensional planes. You can see Will’s trauma over accidentally killing a burglar last season written all over his face when he’s forced to fight Tullio. You can feel the frisson of unarticulated attraction and affection when Lyra’s daemon Pantalaimon violates her world’s taboo and brushes up against the injured Will to comfort him.

You get the sense that for all her prophetic destiny Lyra is still just a kid trying to do the right thing when she walks backwards up the stairs in their hideout so she can drop off some towels for Will without spying on him in the bath. When they say goodnight to each other using their full names, it’s like the verbal equivalent of doodling your crush’s name on your notebook. It’s a small, endearing bit of business that, in terms of emotional impact, puts all the angels and witches to shame.

I reviewed last night’s episode of His Dark Materials for Fanbyte.

In general I pride myself on being able to follow dense, tangly narrative. What kind of critic brags about feeling otherwise, I’ve often wondered? If you can’t tell one house in Game of Thrones from another, or one mafia underboss in The Sopranos from another, that’s hardly anything to crow about like it’s the show’s fault rather than yours. But His Dark Materials’ narrative is such a latticework of deception and competing-but-overlapping quests for various magical items and people that trying to read it as an actual story about actual humans governed by actual human-behavior patterns is a punishing task. (Seriously: When they figure out that Lord Boreal has stolen the alethiometer, why on earth would Will and Lyra just show up at his house and walk up to the front door?) This story, these characters, need room to breathe. Watching them run up and down various narrative staircases isn’t enough.

I reviewed last night’s episode of His Dark Materials for Fanbyte.

This is what I keep bumping into as I think about this show: I don’t think that the villains have the complexity and nuance that would merit their share of screen time. Coulter is a completely transparent liar who’s personally unpleasant to be around; the men of the Magisterium are varying degrees of toady, fanatic, and coward; Boreal is like a dastardly Dr. Who baddie. The more they all puff themselves up, the harder it is to take any of them seriously, or to desire any more time in their company. The whole show feels off-balance as a result; outside of Will and Lyra and maybe Mary (it’s a bit too early to tell), no one behaves in a way that feels recognizably human, and the whole thing feels like it would fall apart if looked at too closely.

Compare all of them to the care with which Mary is introduced. We first see her as she attempts to take care of a family of wrens outside her office window. She and Lyra share tea and cookies, but the cookies are stale, probably having sat forgotten in a desk drawer for months. After Lyra’s visit, Mary tells a colleague what happened over beers. She feels like a person, not a parody of religious extremists crossed with the iconography of the Empire from the Star Wars franchise, nor a Coulter-esque figure of permanent, obvious mendacity. More Marys and fewer eeeeevildoers would go a long way towards making His Dark Materials appointment viewing.

I reviewed this week’s episode of His Dark Materials for Fanbyte. Less mustache-twirling please!

“I don’t need a stand-up bath, do I?” asks Lyra Silvertongue (Dafne Keen). A young traveler between worlds, she has just learned of the marvelous technological achievement known as a shower, and she’s skeptical.

“That’s one question you don’t need to ask the alethiometer,” replies her daemon Pantalaimon (a shape-shifting animal companion voiced by Kit Connor). He’s referring to the magical, golden compass-like device she uses to ascertain the truth. And sure enough, a couple of sniffs of her own B.O. later, Lyra winds up hitting the stand-up bath.

As the joint HBO/BBC adaptation of novelist Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series enters its second season, small humanizing moments such as these take on added importance. Written by series creator Jack Thorne, the show’s second season premiere, “The City of Magpies,” is weighed down by dialogue consisting largely of arch declamations and great big gobs of exposition. Reminding us that the show’s protagonist is basically a middle-schooler who’s gone days without bathing and could use a good scrub-down is a small but vital way of keeping things down to earth when everything else is up in the air.

I’m happy to make my Fanbyte debut with my review of His Dark Materials‘ second season premiere. I’ll be covering the show there all season long, so stick around!