Yeah, I felt like there should have been at least a quick scene explaining where everyone’s off to next.
And regarding the daemons I agree that they should be more visible generally, and more front-and-center when it comes to the main characters. The audience needs to see more demonstrably how important the connection is between the humans and their daemons, so that the severing of the connection between them takes on more significance.
That said, I really liked this episode. I think it built the suspense well leading up to Lyra and Pan in the device and their last minute rescue by Mrs. Coulter. The final scene in the balloon was pretty cool, from Serafina’s talk with Scoresby, to the cliff-ghasts attacking.
I haven’t read this thread as I was avoiding potential spoilers but just wanted to give my thoughts on this.
As a family we’ve saved it to watch on the BBC iplayer as a bit of a Sunday afternoon familly treat. None of us have ever read the books so we came to it completely cold and all we had were the sumptuous trailers to tempt us.
so my general thoughts are…eh?
I just couldn’t get a grip on this at all. I’ve only seen the first episode but it seemed to throw people and concepts at you in the assumption that you know what it was on about. I’m none the wiser. It looks lovely, money has clearly been spent but none of it seemingly on storyboarding how you bring a layperson up to speed, I’m not even sure what it is about, if anything. Some parts of it seemed to just be presented without any explanation. The girl’s ferret seemed to change shape and colour without comment, at least I assume it was the same creature, is that important? I don’t know, maybe I’m not supposed to. There also seemed to be a huge amount of significance and danger implied by the character conversations that went totally over my head.
I’m not a thick person, I don’t need every plot point spelling out and I’m perfectly happy dealing with ambiguity and also have the patience for a fantasy world to be built and explained but honestly, it was a bit of a slog and left me with no compulsion to watch the second episode (If anything, the trailer for ep2 just confused matters more, apparently bears are involved and the “north” is dangerous). Perhaps those that have read the book can flll in the knowledge gaps and consider it a great adaptation but it is doing nothing for me.
I thought they did address this in dialogue. When someone is born es daemon can change forms at will. Some time around adolescence, es daemon “settles” into a single, unchangeable form that reflects something about es personality.
The first episode introduces the Gyptians who were holding a party celebrating the settling of a young man’s daemon. It was a sign that he had entered adulthood.
I don’t recall it being put like that, I was listening carefully but the dialogue was often muffled quite badly. I didn’t see any animal change from one form to another. In one scene there was a white ferrety-thing, the next there was a brown one. Confusing, was it the same creature? and all the family were much the same. The animals can talk as well but that wasn’t made clear until some way in but until that point there seemed to be dialogue coming from nowhere, Also, if everyone has an animal companion…where were they all? And what were the Egyptians all about? Is Egypt relevant? A kid goes missing and they set off for London in boats? The plot points just seemed to spring out of nowhere fully formed.
It is possible that it all makes sense on the screen to those who’ve read the book but all four of us that haven’t were left scratching our heads. It was not an engaging opening episode for us, there was nothing in there that makes me wonder what happens next.
And I say this as someone who has no problem understanding “Primer” and has just finished the last series of “The Man In The High Castle” I can take a bit of tantalising confusion if I trust that I’m in safe hands, I’m just not convinced that this is the case here.
The television series, apparently, didn’t budget for showing every human with his or her daemon (animal companion which is roughly analogous to a “soul”). But they are supposed to be there.
The movie The Golden Compass, if you ever see that, does a better job of showing this aspect of the story’s world.
The Gyptians are supposed to evoke our world’s Gypsies. The idea behind the entire book series is that there are parallel worlds, and Lyra’s world has many similarities to our world–but everything is at least a bit different.
I’m interested to see that reaction, as I have no way of judging how well the show did in presenting the world of the books (which I had read years ago). Apparently, not too well.
IIRC some explaination was spooned out over the next few episodes, but in a spoiler-free summary, in that alternate reality, the human soul is external to the body and takes the form of an animal. That isn’t a girl and a talking ferret, that is the two parts that make up the girl. The soul can shift between forms as the mood or circumstances fit up until puberty, when the form becomes fixed. When these people listen to their inner voice, it is somewhat less “inner”, and everyone else sees and hears it. Souls don’t eat or poop or catch diseases or anything, but can be conventionally injured–anything that hurts your soul hurts you, anything that kills your soul kills you. Not explicitly stated on the show, but souls tend to be the opposite gender of the person–the souls of male characters are voiced by females, and vice-versa. Everyone in that reality on the series is supposed to be like that, but the Beeb was too low-budget or too half-assed to show most other souls most of the time.
And a bit of a spoiler, there is a cool scene in one of the early episodes where Lyra’s soul is being attacked by a (fixed) adult soul, and it keeps morphing between different animal forms on-screen to try to gain the upper paw.
And of course our word “Gypsy” is itself derived from “Egyptian.” It is very similar to how in The Man in the High Castle people called the Japanese “Pons” instead of “Nips.”
Well it may end up explaining it all and representing it all very well once you get through it but it isn’t doing a great job of holding my interest long enough to want to get there. The construction of it doesn’t really work well for this non-reader of the books. If it is not intended for the non-reader then I’ll just let it go I think.
And I see that the word is “Gyptians” not “Egyptians” which may be true to the book but the difference was inaudible to me on screen and their nomadic nature was barely touched on until they took off on their boats. They seemed to be living in a fortified town up to that point, the ring ceremony thing that they did made it seem like it was something just for them which was confusing.
Same with the big churchy thing in London which must be significant, same with the university and scholars. Same with the dust, Same with something a “gobbler”, Same with the city in the dust, same with the magisterium, Same with an attempted poisoning, same with a decapitation, same with the compassey-astrolabe thing. There seemed to be an assumption that we just accept the significance of everything that was happening and join the dots but there was a *huge *amount just thrown, very prettily, on screen and it lost me quite quickly. The trailer for ep2 just made things worse as it seemed to bear no relation to what had happened in ep1 and just seemed to throw even more stuff into the mix and offered no real hint that stuff would start to come together.
I think I saw that trailer and eventually realised that it was a trailer for the entire series, not just episode 2. Which would indeed be confusing. And some of the important dialogue/vocabulary is mumbled.
Now you are getting into complaining that all the plot points for the whole book/season aren’t explicitly spelled out at the very beginning. How is what you are describing different from any story set in a fictional settting?
Exactly. These are all mysteries to be solved as the series continues.
With respect to the Magisterium question, you can see that it is some kind of authoritative entity run by priests. That’s really all you need to know at the start of the story. By the time you get to the daemon splitting laboratory, it is revealed that the Magisterium believes that destroying a a person’s daemon will prevent sinful urges.
What you aren’t told—and what isn’t critically necessary to know—is that England is ruled by a theocracy, and the Magisterium is Essentially the Catholic Church.
The Gobblers—at the beginning when the children are playing, they talk about being afraid of being abducted by Gobblers. All you need to know at that point is the may or may not be a legendary or real threat called Gobblers that some people believe abduct children. And then a child is abducted.
When Lyra is at Mrs. Coulter’s house, you are shown her discovering that Mrs. Coulter is the head of the General Oblation Board (G.O.B.) and Lyra deduced that these are the Gobblers, the Gobblers are real not mythical, and Mrs. Coulter is in charge of them. So all that is laid out for you on screen.
Not at all, drama, even fantasy drama, shouldn’t need to spell everything out for the viewer and I’m a fan of “show, don’t tell”. If you do it skillfully enough the viewer will be able to join the dots themselves (the drama becomes all the more powerful for it) and the mysteries you dangle will entice us to keep watching. Heck, I’m even happy for major plot points to remain forever completely unexplained. No, my problems with ep1 were.
They were neither showing nor telling with enough skill and they tried to do far too much.
I don’t know what I’m supposed to already know or what I’ve just missed through mumbled dialogue or poor construction overall.
There were huge elements of enforced jeopardy and apparent significance which just fell flat, I didn’t know why I needed to care. e.g. There was a flood during which characters carried on as if the water wasn’t there, the attempted poisoning seemed to come from nowhere and go nowhere. Or when McAvoy’s character is talking about “dust” and photographs and everyone is aghast for some reason apparently but a severed head of a colleague was no big deal.
It felt rather *rushed *, slapdash and uneven to me. If I’m expected to have read the book beforehand or get people who have to fill in the gaps for me that seems like a bit of a misfire. If I’m expected to stick with it to the end in order for the director to triumphantly pull it all together then it is doing a poor job of tempting me.
Perhaps, but it has to earn the right to do that. I’ve watched lots of convoluted dramas with mysterious reveals and delayed payoffs (without first reading the book) but few have confused and bored me quite as much as this one.
It isn’t even the subject matter, this is absolutely up my strasse, I’m a big fan of fantasy. It isn’t just me either, my wife and kids voiced the same sort of opinion unprompted.
Did you come to it without any knowledge of the books?