'His Dark Materials' to be a BBC TV series

Cafe Society
41

Well, it will get better, they will add flying witches (and thus magic exists, and how is that explained?), armored bears and other cool stuff like the deamons you already saw. and then in book 2 they dump all that and get down to a boring insipid and dull attack on religion, which only gets worse in book 3. I mean, who wouldn’t want their own furry buddy who will talk to them and never run away or die? (Yeah it is possible to kill a deamon, but not easy, and they dont die of old age after a couple decades)

So unless HBO rewrites the material (entirely possible) you have a fun, engaging tween fantasy book turn into crap for the next two.

But I am watching because indeed the first book is fun.

42

But riddle me this- the spy fly found Lyra when she was on a small boat in a river. How does that mean they know know she’d up there in Norway or wherever?

43

I saw the movie and I read all three books. As it happens, it seems I have forgotten all the details of the stories. All I remember is enjoying the first book and disliking the rest.

So watching this series is like starting over anew, because I remember nothing.

I’m suitably impressed by the visuals. I really like Pan in weasel form especially. Ruth Wilson’s mouth is extremely distracting. Miranda seems miscast. Otherwise I’m finding it moderately entertaining.

One thing is that the scenes never seem to be crowded enough for all the humans to have daemons with them. I keep think “that all just looks like humans by themselves.” Usually a daemon seems only to show up for plot or dialogue reasons.

44

I’ve really enjoyed the last couple of episodes, now that they’ve gone north. Iorek is pretty great. I’m not thrilled with Lin Manuel Miranda as Scoresby, though. Doesn’t sound Texan at all, and doesn’t remind me of the character from the books in his attitude and manner. I liked the scene with Serafina Pekkala and Farder Coram. And Lyra finding Billy Costa was well done and as sad as I remember from the book.

45

I’m enjoying the series but the whole daemon idea seems very challenging to translate onto screen - real risk of Disneyfying what is a fairly dark narrative, big technical issues with continuity and maintaining the credibility of the idea, plus the voice casting is hard.

Iorek Byrnison’s voice is ten times better than the film but still wrong IMHO. It’s gruff but sounds too old and tremulous, despite the actor being quite young AFAIK.

It’s been ages since I read the books, are they transposing elements of the first two with Boreal’s visit to Oxford in this world? That’s working pretty well.

46

Pan in the form of a white fox or dog or whatever is absolutely adorable. He reminds me of Sasha, my beautiful fluffy American Eskimo (Spitz-type) doggie who died in 2003.

47

I had to look up to be sure she’s not related to Burn Gorman, from Torchwood etc. They both have sort of “froggy” mouths.

The daemons thing seems really impractical, as evidenced by the reporter lady and her butterfly.

48

Just watched episode 5. I read the first book years ago and I’m finding there was loads of stuff I’d forgotten. But I thought I remembered the bit where Lyra discovered the child who had been separated from his daemon clearly. As I recalled it that child wasn’t someone known to Lyra, he wasn’t the child of one of the Gyptians; am I right?

I also thought the introduction of Serafina was different, is the relationship with James Cosmo something written for the TV series?

49

Sadly, the realIorek is really down on his luck.

50

I’m really enjoying it at the moment. The soundtrack is magnificent, especially the intro. Which has fairly clever lyrics, too.

Susurros immortales audiunt,
Haruspices incipite parvuli,
Incipite parvuli procedant menses magni,
Incipite, incipite

They hear immortal whispers,
Begin, children, and read the omens,
Begin, children, for time passes quickly by,
Begin, begin

Which, along with Pullman’s books, references Virgil’s Eclogue 4.

The show itself misses a few beats, like the rather abrupt departure from the prison camp which wasn’t really set up? Like, oh, you have to go immediately on a hot air balloon and you’re not taking more than 1 adult, 1 armor bear and 1 small child to free your father from the prison of the panserbjørn?

Still, I think Dafne Keen should win like, not all the prizes, but like most of the prizes? What a great, young actress.

51

So we’ve now finally caught up to where the movie left off. They took three times as long to get there, which I love. Some stories need a proper pace to really capture subtleties and depth.

52

Like many in this thread, I read the books many years ago, and remember only sketchy details.

As for the show… it’s hard to articulate why, but I definitely feel like it’s much less than the sum of its parts.

Just about every individual element of it is excellent: the acting, the production design, the effects, the dialog, etc.

But overall, it just feels like a weird conglomeration of things stuck together for no real reason, which is a feeling I don’t remember getting while reading the book.
So far we have:
-Daemons, which are this super-fundamental part of the entire society… except that we rarely see them, rarely mention them, and don’t get a good idea at all of what they’re really like. Is talking to your daemon talking to yourself? Or your conscience? Can your daemon learn a joke you’ve never heard before and tell it to you? Can daemons be injured? When you’re getting onto a train do you have to make sure to hold the door a little extra so your daemon can get on too? What would happen if you didn’t?

-The alethiometer, which was manufactured by humans at some point, but only six were made? Can they not make more? This doesn’t generally seem to be a “we have lost all the technology of the great ages past” type of world. And Lyra seems awfully casual about revealing its existence to people she doesn’t fully trust. Even for people who can’t use them, aren’t they just insanely valuable?

-In addition, there are the following story elements that don’t necessarily really want to coexist in the same tale: “dust”, the church, the college she grew up in and its fight against censorship, her father, her mother, travel between worlds, the kidnapping plot, magical steampunk tracking bugs, and mystery of how her mother can be so far from her daemon, witches, armored bears, Lin Manuel Miranda’s character and his backstory, gyptians and their culture, the kidnappers and their motivations, and the OCD mother in our world.

It’s just too big and sprawling for any one part to grab our attention. Season 4 of Game of Thrones could have 6 or 7 storylines going on all over the world with different groups of characters. Season 1 couldn’t have.

And I just don’t think they have the tone really right. There’s so much inherent near-silliness in the world and all the goofy words the actors are saying, and they clearly want it to be absolutely grave and heart-rending and they want us to take it all super seriously… and it just doesn’t quite get there for me.

53

This was one thing the movie did well: show us a world in which, even in crowd scenes, every human has a daemon.

I’m guessing it’s purely a problem of budget; the movie could spend yea-many tens of thousands of dollars per minute of screen time; the series cannot.

But it’s a distraction from enjoying the series, for me–there are so few daemons visible. And as you say, even the main characters are without them unless there’s a particular reason for one to be shown. That doesn’t evoke Pullman’s world very successfully.

54

Yes, and if your daemon dies you turn into a vegetable.

They dont cover that, but apparently if your daemon gets too far away it dies, which means that you…

Yes. Look, Pullman wanted to write a diatribe vs religion to compete with the Narnia series, so he put all sorts of wonderful but not well thought out things in the first book. The next two are boring as all hell.

55

I sometimes feel like I’m the only one who enjoyed the entire series :D. And I remember slightly preferring the second book to the first.

Now I’m probably going to end up on some government list for admitting that.

56

I vaguely remembering my reactions to the books being:
Book 1: A fun and interesting book
Book 2: Expanded the scope a lot, still fun
Book 3: Expanded the scope so much, holy crap, wtf is going on here, wasn’t this supposed to be a children’s book?

I did enjoy book 3, but I do remember it being, let’s say, really something, and not necessarily in a good way.

57

I didn’t like the wheeled creatures. That was goofy.

58

I’ve never read the books so can someone explain why the separated daemons in their cages can’t be reunited with the children? That is really going to bug me forever if the series doesn’t explain it…

59

Normally, being physically separated from your daemon is fatal. So they’ve come up with a way to sever the connection between the person and the daemon. Having them stand next to each other wouldn’t automatically un-sever that connection. There’s no automatic way to reverse the process.

60

They aren’t simply separated; their connection has been cut, and it can’t be repaired.

As long as we’re on a brief book tangent, I’ll comment that I’ve read the two books he’s completed in his follow up series, The Book of Dust. The first one, La Belle Sauvage, takes place before His Dark Materials, and is a fun read but not all together memorable. The Secret Commonwealth takes place a few years after His Dark Materials, and was much better. It has good intrigue and suspense, and greatly cuts down on the WTF factor.