If I felt like His Dark Materials was going to grapple with Asriel’s crimes and weigh them against his liberatory potential, a la Game of Thrones forcing you to confront Daenerys Targaryen’s bloodthirstiness even after she’s fought against an existential threat to humanity, or even a la The Lord of the Rings showing you the horrible shit that went down in the Shire while Frodo and friends were off questing, that would be one thing. But there’s no sign that this is the case, any more so than it was in the novels, in which Asriel and Coulter alike are given a free heroism pass more or less for being sexy — and how can you trust this show to wise up when, as seen in this episode, it’s capable of fucking up so many fundamentals?

If it seems like I’m being hard on a basically well-intentioned and well-made show… well, I probably am. Because I want to like the damn thing! I’m in the liking-things business, I wouldn’t even be a critic if I weren’t. As a matter of preference, I’m particularly in the liking-fantasy and liking-killing-God business, so you’d think this would be right up my alley. You almost have to try to screw that up… and yet screw it up His Dark Materials has. This despite lively and game performances from Dafne Keen, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Amir Wilson, Ruth Wilson, Will Keen, and Simone Kirby. This despite — and I can’t stress this enough — being about one randy British aristocrat’s mission to find and kill God. To get an enthusiastically lapsed a Christian as me to root against this clown is an achievement in and of itself. But that’s the story of His Dark Materials, I think. It makes the impossible feel far more laborious than any fantasy worth its salt ought to do.

I reviewed the season finale of His Dark Materials for Fanbyte.

“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!

Lyra Silvertongue and her friend Roger Parslow have been through a lot: being kidnapped, narrowly escaping a magical lobotomy, meddling in ice-bear politics, staying one step ahead of the ruthless Mrs. Coulter and her Magisterium goon squads. Now they’ve reached the mountaintop sanctuary of her father, Lord Asriel, whose experiments with the substance called Dust have marked him for death. Faced with all this trauma and turmoil, what do these two brave souls do?

They make a blanket fort.

Of all the beautiful, terrible things we see in His Dark Materials‘ season finale (titled “Betrayal” for reasons that will be apparent), this is moment that lingers the most. For all their courage, Lyra and Roger are still just kids. When they want to feel safe in this strange stronghold, they build a little fortress of their own, eating sandwiches while reminiscing about how their friendship has changed their lives.

And nothing drives home the horror of what happens afterward than the sight of Lyra frantically reentering the blanket fort at one end and emerging from the other side, alone. Roger is nowhere to be found.

I reviewed the season finale of His Dark Materials for Rolling Stone.

Something very strange happens when they finally meet Lord Asriel. When he sees Lyra, he pretty much flips out. “I did not send for you!” he shouts, seemingly on the verge of panic. Then he lays eyes on her little pal Roger, and his whole demeanor changes. “I am very pleased you came,” he says to the boy. He sounds like a spider who’s discovered a fresh fly in his web.

Lyra has escaped every enemy, survived every skirmish, journeyed to places of great danger and lived to tell the tale. (All this, and she helped overthrow the king of the ice bears to boot!) Now that the young woman can give her alethiometer to her father, as she believes she was chosen to do, her quest should be at an end. That’s how a traditional fantasy story would work, you know? But there’s something about Lord Asriel’s voice, and the look in his eyes, that hints at horror to come.

I reviewed this week’s episode of His Dark Materials for Rolling Stone.

If there’s one phrase that sticks in the head after tonight’s episode of His Dark Materials (“The Daemon-Cages”), it’s “the tyranny of sin.” Uttered by one of the scientists who oversees the cruel, child-abusing “intercision” technique in the cold Northern prison known as Bolvangar, it explains nearly everything we’ve seen Mrs. Coulter and the sinister agents of the Magisterium do.

After all, if you truly believe that the planet is suffering under the boot-heel of original sin, is there anything you wouldn’t do to “free” it? Isn’t a sacrifice of the few for the many, as Mrs. Coulter puts it, worth the price?

The answer depends on whether you believe in the concept of sin to begin with. In this fantasy world, of course, the concept is equated with an actual physical substance called Dust, which in turn is associated with human souls in animal form, known as daemons. But what if you don’t buy into the notion that there’s something corrupt in the human heart, which only church and state can destroy? Then you can see Bolvangar for what it is: a facility for the torture of innocents.

It’s all very heavy stuff to wrestle with, and this episode is uncompromising in its depiction of the traumatized, zombified children left in the wake of the villains’ grand experiment. It’s also unflinching in showing us the excuses adults will cling to — sin, science, the need to follow orders — in order to justify their cruelty.

I reviewed this week’s episode of His Dark Materials for Rolling Stone.

There is something inhumane, in the most extreme terms possible, about separating children from those they love the most. It robs them of the kindness, care, and security that they need so badly in this cruel, dangerous world — or other worlds, for that matter. Any movement based on tormenting kids in this way, any system that uses the power of the state to kidnap and traumatize its youngest and most vulnerable subjects — that’s the stuff of fantasy villainy. The evil is so clear cut you can write storybooks about it. “It’s worse than anything,” Lyra says.

“It’s about control, isn’t it,” Scoresby replies. “Because if you can remove someone’s soul, you can do anything.” So it would seem.

I reviewed this week’s episode of His Dark Materials for Rolling Stone. It’s relevant.

Compare and contrast His Dark Materials‘ core cast with that of The Golden Compass, that ill-fated attempt to kickstart a movie franchise from Phillip Pullman’s book series. Replacing Nicole Kidman with Ruth Wilson as Mrs. Coulter? You’re simply swapping one gifted, gorgeous actor with another. James McAvoy subbed in for Daniel Craig as Lord Asriel? Two intense guys with piercing gazes — it works. Recasting Scoresby, the hard-charging Texas adventurer played by Sam Elliott, with … Lin-Manuel Miranda? It takes some chutzpah, to say the least.

So far, however, it works. Showrunner Jack Thorne appears to have realized that there’s no way to outdo Elliott in the cowboy department, so he’s taken a radically different tack. The Hamilton impresario plays Scoresby as a more playful kind of adventurer, with a bright smile and breezy disposition that befit his side hustles as a trickster, a card sharp, and a pickpocket. He may not be the kind of guy you want by your side in a shootout, but there’s a decent chance he could swipe your enemy’s gun and save you the trouble.

I reviewed this week’s episode of His Dark Materials for Rolling Stone.

The show is called His Dark Materials. But who are we kidding? It’s all about her.

HBO’s latest fantasy epic struck gold when it cast Ruth Wilson as its villain, Mrs. Coulter. In lesser hands, the sinister head of the General Oblation Board and leader of its “gobblers” would be a one-dimensional child-stealing monster, with the occasional glimmer of doubt or remorse. But thanks to The Affair actor, she emerges as a full-fledged human, overwhelmed by her own emotions even as she overpowers everyone in her path.

I reviewed this week’s episode of His Dark Materials for Rolling Stone.

But — and maybe this is just Ruth Wilson’s rich performance bringing out these notes in the character — Coulter has moments of softness as well. After she gives Lyra a bath, we see her lingering by the tub with a sad look on her face, like she can see her regrets in the soapy water. When she uses her daemon to abuse Lyra and Pan, she cries afterwards, as if she’s sorry she did it. And when she returns from an outing to find Lyra studying diligently, or at least pretending to, you can see her affection for the girl take her by surprise. Her monkey, an indicator of her true feelings, actually reaches out to tenderly pet Lyra’s daemon.

In other words, if Coulter is a monster, she’s cut from the same cloth as Cersei Lannister: awful in general, but with a serious soft spot for any child she thinks of as her own.

I reviewed tonight’s episode of His Dark Materials, aka The Ruth Wilson Show, for Rolling Stone.

Question: What does your daemon look like? Is it a ferret, a fox, a monkey, a regal snow leopard? In the world of His Dark Materials, the joint BBC-HBO adaptation of Phillip Pullman’s hugely acclaimed young-adult fantasy series, everybody’s got a literal spirit animal — magical creatures called “daemons” that function like having an external animal-shaped soul you can run around with and talk to. As a way to engage the audience, daemons rank right up there with Harry Potter’s Gryffindor-to-Hufflepuff sorting matrix, or Game of Thrones’ great houses, only even more personalized. And if HBO pulls off yet another swing-for-the-fences fantasy adaptation properly, you’ll want one of your own.

I’m back at Rolling Stone to cover His Dark Materials this season, starting with my review of the series premiere.