His Dark Materials season 3 review: a serpentine plotline that’s well worth following
In His Dark Materials, Philip Pulman’s interpretations are as subjective as the belief systems he props up against each other. It makes for engrossing viewing.
The two-part finale of His Dark Materials, which HBO began airing in 2019 and which screens here on Foxtel and Binge, arrives with timing that’s odd and good and perhaps a little urgent. Books as theologically subversive as Philip Pullman’s celebrated fantasy trilogy are hardly the traditional stuff of the season, but the completed adaptation will be a gift to those who have followed it, or read the novels, or just want something without calories to chew over during their holiday break, should they be lucky enough to still be on one. Considering that season 2 began airing more than two years ago, bingeing the entire series is the way to go; Pullman’s epic, often tortuous storyline is best consumed in one glorious gulp.
But do it with some haste. HBO, by deleting content recently from its library (Westworld, for example), has broken the compact with subscribers in the US, who have always assumed they could watch whatever whenever. There’s no reason to think His Dark Materials will be removed anytime soon. Or that it will be around forever.
The umbrella title of the three novels (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass) comes from Milton’s Paradise Lost, a principal influence among Pullman’s litany of inspirations (Gnostic gospels, William Blake, Genesis, Revelation), which he used in portraying a war against God. Or is it? Lord Asriel (James McAvoy), a functioning mad genius, declares that the Authority — aka the Almighty and the object of worship of the Magisterium (see: Catholic Church) — is actually a counterfeit deity, a fallen angel like Satan who has seized power and created not the universe but its suffering. Season 3 involves, as one might expect, a climax of apocalyptic proportions. But it’s a long way there from Jordan College, Oxford University.
That fictional Oxford exists on just the other side of a kind of mystical scrim that separates our world from others and has been the lifelong home of Lyra Belacqua (Dafne Keen), who, in one of Pullman’s nods to classic 19th century literature, is presumed to be an orphan. She lives in a world that mixes the Dickensian with the scientifically fabulous and where daemons — beastly manifestations of an individual’s soul — accompany each person through life. Lyra’s daemon is Pantalaimon, or Pan, who is usually a snow-white ermine. (Until a host reaches adulthood, his or her daemon can choose any form it wishes, to serve a particular purpose.) The nature of the daemon reflects character, at least among the adults: Asriel’s is a snow leopard; Coulter (Ruth Wilson), the story’s lethal, scheming incarnation of evil, is accompanied by a vicious golden monkey. The daemon of the Father-President of the Magisterium (Will Keen, father of Dafne) is a lizard. As is he.
But it is the exploration of the mysterious, ethereal Dust that propels the abundant action and the story’s elaborate themes. Is Dust the most elementary particle of life? Is it sin? Is it grace? The interpretations are as subjective as the belief systems Pullman props up against each other.
The plotline is serpentine, which is apt given the copious references to the Garden of Eden. (The Magisterium thinks Lyra, as a fulfilment of prophecy, is a manifestation of Eve, Mother of Sin, and wants her dead.) It is beyond recapitulation, which is also why it has taken three seasons.
What has distinguished His Dark Materials among adaptations of young-adult fiction is not just fealty to story but mood and point of view. A rule of YA fiction is that the young have to be kept front and centre, and such was the case in seasons 1 and 2. It can be said without revealing much that season 3 spends too much time of its eight episodes on Asriel and Coulter and less on Lyra and her companion, the daemon-less Will Parry (Amir Wilson), who has come from “our” world and become the “knife bearer”: The slender blade he wields can cut through the tender fabric that separates the worlds through which characters travel in the series until the weapon shatters and is repaired by the armoured polar bear Iorek Byrnison (voice and motion capture of Joe Tandberg).
Iorek probably requires a bit of explanation. But so does Lyra and Will’s trip to the Land of the Dead, their “descent into Hell” as Scripture might put it, where they initiate a semblance of Judgment Day and establish Lyra as less Eve than saviour. It is important. But it is one bleak sequence and not a terribly engaging one, especially as the series is coming to a close.
It also needs to be taken in as part of the whole, just as Pullman’s three novels need to be read together. A mostly first-rate cast is thoroughly committed to the beyond-fantastical tale, though Lin-Manuel Miranda is not quite anyone’s version of the intrepid, cracker-barrel balloonist Lee Scoresby and Wilson, for all her ferocity, isn’t quite Mrs Coulter either. Ms Keen and Wilson are very strong, mostly splendid, and so are Andrew Scott, James Cosmo, Clarke Peters and other members of a vast supporting cast, including Simone Kirby, whose Mary Malone, a physicist from the Oxford in Will’s world, embarks on her own exploration of Dust, creates the amber spyglass and communes with the tapir-like mulefas. They’re one of the elements of the series that readers of the novels will find particularly ingenious, startling and/or endearing. But these same qualities can be applied to the entire series.
His Dark Materials, series 1,2,3, is streaming on Binge and Foxtel.