Series Thoughts: His Dark Materials (Season 1)

• Released: 4 November 2019
• Total amount of seasons: 1
• Seasons watched: 1
• Rating: 5/5

Synopsis

In a world where one's soul lives beside them in the form of an animal, a girl named Lyra finds allies and goes to rescue a bunch of kidnapped children in the north.

My Thoughts

This is one series I wanted to watch when it first came out, but then didn't until last year. However, I pretty much instantly became hooked.

If you've seen my review of The Golden Compass movie, you know I very much love it despite its flaws. However, like I said, that movie was flawed and never got to live out its full potential due to pressure of the catholic church and also the fact that it never got any sequels. Spoiler alert: His Dark Materials (the books and the series) is a very anti-catholic series. I used to have a problem with this back when I was religious, but now that I'm either agnostic or an atheist (I really don't care anymore tbh) I can't give less of a fuck. 

This series does have some things that initially put me off when I first checked it out last year. I of course couldn't help but compare it to its movie counterpart at first, and there definitely are some things I liked better in The Golden Compass. 

First of all, the colorfulness. I get it, it's a dark story, but the movie still had the Lyra's world be full of color. It felt very vibrant and magical. In His Dark Materials, the world feels a lot less gray and dour, and also more modern, making it feel a lot closer to "our" world. Which kind of put me off since the movie made it very clear that this was a very different world with different architecture, vehicles, colors, etc. Now it just kind of feels like a slightly alternate version of ours.

Another thing that I can't fully count against the series but was very noticeable: the lack of daemons. It's not that there are none, but in comparison to the movie, where pretty much every background extra has a visible daemon, in this world it's mostly limited to our major characters and a few background characters. I'm 99% sure that the reason for this is the budget. I mean, of course it's ridiculously expensive to make a ton of different animal models and also have them interact with the live-action environments perfectly. So their solution seemed to be to either have daemons be "hidden" (such as Boreal's snake) or just have the daemons for major characters.

There's also almost no shape-shifting of the children's daemons, they'll mostly just shift off screen, also probably for budget reasons. This might also just be a nitpick, but in my opinion there were too many bird daemons. It's canon that all witches have bird daemons, but a lot of non-witch characters have birds (usually raptors) as well, including pretty much all Gyptians sans Farder Coram. I guess maybe birds are easier to paste into the background since they can perch on objects/fly? Who knows, just something I noticed.

However, despite these initial things slightly putting me off, I still think this is an amazing series, and actually worthy of being called a good adaptation of the book (unlike the movie, for as much as I love it). It goes all-out with, including with the religious themes and darker elements. Characters (including children) can and will die. The Magisterium is explicitly shown as a religious organization and the actual whole "Dust = sin", "the Magisterium is evil" stuff is addressed and not just danced around at all. 

The acting was also great, and I loved seeing this interpretation of Lyra's world after my initial hiccups. Yes, it's more modern and dour, but it's definitely still interesting, and also kind of more fitting to the tone of the story. I also like the new actors they got to portray these characters. They all do a good job and there isn't one character where I'm really like "god, I want their Golden Compass counterpart back."

The pacing is also a whole lot better. The movie had so much story to cram into its shorter runtime and also messed up with some of the pacing story-wise (having the rescuing of the children be the climax rather than Roger's death or even the polar bear fight), but the series adaptation had ample time to properly establish itself and tell the entire story.

Heck, we don't just get the story of book one, but also some of book two intermixed, with us getting the setup to Will's story that in the book didn't start until book two. Which I honestly think was a really good decision; it gave us much more time to already get attached to Will. In season 2 things might've felt rushed or it might've been too late for the audience to form a connection with him, but this honestly felt perfect.

So, yeah, it's not as colorful and lacks the childlike-wonder of the movie, but for a more mature take on the story that isn't afraid to dance around the darker subjects, it does an incredible job. Even the lack of daemons isn't really all that noticeable after a while, you just kinda get used to it. My only gripe, I guess, is the bear fight largely taking place off-screen. I don't know why they did this, since even the child-targeted movie didn't shy away from this, but maybe it was budget reasons as well. Still, it's an amazing show that deserves to be checked out.