We’re two episodes in, and the adventure is starting to kick off. But first, to London!
Lyra’s is introduced to Mrs. Coulter’s world in London: her fabulous and very comfy-looking apartment, her wealthy and important friends, her fancy clothes. And almost immediately, Lyra is forced to choose between being true to herself or putting up with abusive behavior in exchange for indulging in all the things Coulter’s London has to offer. I will say Mrs. Coulter’s apartment is very Blair Waldorf’s apartment in Gossip Girl. Maybe that’s just me.
We also get to see where the Gobblers are taking the children. Roger arrives and shouts, “Billy Costa!” when he sees his bud Billy Costa is there. I do love how everyone calls each other by their full names all the time in this series. It’s very cute somehow.
One quick note on the opening credits: they’re very Game of Thrones meets Westworld. I see you, HBO.
Mrs. Coulter wants to mold Lyra into a fine young lady, putting her in stuffy dresses and forcing her to read books and behave. Lyra’s all, “Can’t you mold me into someone who reads a little, but travels and adventures?” Girl, I wish someone would mold me into someone who travels a lot. Where is my mentor who will do that for me? I feel you.
Being a proper lady is boooooring.
Every time Lyra tries to push back on what Mrs. Coulter tells her, Mrs. Coulter tells her how extraordinary she could be if she just changed. Poor Lyra says, “No one’s ever said I could be extraordinary before.” She’s so eager to be accepted that this works on her pretty easily. It breaks my heart.
Something else is off in the seemingly-at-first-glance-idllyic world of Mrs. Coulter’s London home. Lyra and Pan hear sounds in the walls that they first try to shrug off as just clanky pipes, but it soon becomes clear that something else is afoot. When Lyra gets up to investigate, she finds Mrs. Coulter’s golden monkey in a room by himself, without Mrs. Coulter. Imagine how strange this must be for her. Humans and their daemons must be together at all times. I imagine it would be as weird as if we saw someone’s head wandering around without the rest of their body. Pan and Lyra find themselves wondering, “What is she?”
Cliffhanger. Let’s look at what’s going on in other parts of the His Dark Materials World. The Gyptians are looking for Billy Costa, and they find his sweater vest.
Sweet little baby Billy Costa and Roger are becoming friends. They’re both sweet little wide-eyed angel boys, and I’m sure they were cast to be this way. I would die for them. The Gobblers better not hurt them. Anyway, Roger tells Billy Costa that he knows Lyra will find them. Aw.
Poor captured babies.
Evil dude #1 Lord Boreal is also up to no good. He goes to Jordan College looking for Grummond’s head, but the Headmaster is like, “LOL NOPE.” So Lord Boreal just waits til everyone is sleeping and just walks right into the crypts. I mean, if Lyra and Roger were allowed to play in them last episode, how hard can they be to break into? Anyway, he somehow identifies the skull that’s meant to be Grummond and also knows immediately, after his snake daemon slithers menacingly through the skull to imitate the Death Eater’s dark mark, that this skull is not Grummond. Lord Asriel was lying.
Back at the Mrs. Coulter palace, The Magisterium has come to pay Mrs. Coulter a visit. Turns out all of this evil stuff Mrs. Coulter is doing on the down low? They’re not so keen about being attached to her doings. Lyra very openly tries to listen in to the conversation because the girl has no tact. Mrs. Coulter just says, “Go to your room. The grown ups are talking.” Grown ups are the worst.
At this point, Lyra realizes that maybe Mrs. Coulter is a bad person, and she decides it might be best for her to keep the alethiometer with her at all times. So she decides to put it in a really obvious handbag that she’ll carry around with her. Mrs. Coulter (shockingly) think this is a bit odd. “You look so sad to be carrying a shoulder bag in your own home,” she says.
Then this happens…
I don’t know why exactly, but I had an extreme emotional reaction to this scene. Part of it is, yes, emotions are high in this scene for both Mrs. Coulter and Lyra. And yes, I am just an emotional person by nature, so there’s that too. Even though this scene was teased in the season trailers, it really hit me.
Here’s something that hasn’t been discussed directly in the show, but perhaps if you haven’t read the books, you’ve been able to figure it out. It’s extremely taboo to touch another person’s daemon. No one does it. Touching a daemon is like touching the deepest part of a person, but worse. The daemon/daemon touching rules might be a little different, but knowing this, it’s still quite jarring to see two daemons battling and the toll it takes on poor Lyra. Also, straight up: this is child abuse. And that’s pretty messed up.
What follows after this physical confrontation is a verbal one. One in which it is revealed that Lord Asriel is actually Lyra’s father. But c’mon, we all knew this, right? As soon as Lyra responds to Mrs. Coulter’s reveal with, “My parent died in an airship accident,” she knows how dumb it sounds. Clearly Lord Asriel is her father. Even Mrs. Coulter calls it a ridiculous charade. Still, the reveal is emotional.
For some reason, after Lyra’s bad behavior, Mrs. Coulter still is perfectly cool with leaving Lyra alone in the house. Of course, as soon as Mrs. Coulter leaves, Lyra and Pan start investigating, and oooh she finds a lot of stuff. First of all, they discover secret passageways in the walls, which is what they’ve been hearing at night. That bad ole golden monkey has been sneaking through the walls to spy on them. Lyra uses the secret passageways to enter Mrs. Coulter’s private office and there she finds… well, a lot of damning materials: documents for an organization called the General Oblation Board, and blueprints for a machine that looks to be able to split a human from his or her daemon.
Lyra is trying to make sense of all of this, but it’s a lot to take in, understandably. She tells Pan, “I don’t think I understand any grown ups at all.” Me neither, TBH.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Coulter is visiting the stolen children. So, if you hadn’t realized it yet, here it is: Mrs. Coulter is THE QUEEN GOBBLER. This bitch has been running the whole operation. She tells the kids they’re going on a journey. Poor Billy Costa is like, look, I just wanna see my ma. Too bad, Billy Costa.
MEANWHILE, meanwhile, Lord Boreal is passing into another dimension in search of the real Grummond. Y’all. This is intense, and probably a whole article could be written just about this change from the book for the TV show. In the books, we don’t get any traveling to other dimensions until The Subtle Knife, which is the second book in the series. But because this show is told from multiple perspectives rather than simply Lyra’s perspective, it makes sense that we would get these side stories. And I’m loving it.
While Lord Boreal is meeting up with his contact in our dimension (you know, the one where everything is boring and we don’t have cool daemons living with us), his contact asks him where his daemon is, and he says, “We don’t always like having them on full display.” This seems like a cop out to explain why BBC didn’t spend their whole budget on CGI daemons. But whatever. I guess at least they’re trying to acknowledge it.
Still, I wonder, how does someone with a, say, snow leopard daemon hide it? What does someone like Lord Asriel do when wandering the streets of our dimension’s London? Like, does the snow leopard where a disguise? How is he getting around without getting arrested for having a dangerous animal on city streets? I need to know.
Anyway, it’s time for Mrs. Coulter’s super fun adult party where Lyra gets to play waitress and pass around champagne in a stuffy dress. So fun.
A journalist who WAS NOT INVITED TO THIS PARTY WTF quickly takes Lyra to one side and tells her the brutal truth about Mrs. Coulter: General Oblation Board = GOB = GOBBLERS. Dang, Lyra, you grew up in a college and yet clearly those smarts didn’t rub off on you.
Welp, after hearing that, Lyra grabs her alethiometer handbag and gets the heck out of there ASAP. Mrs. Coulter is NOT HAPPY that her pet has run off.
Lord Boreal is present at the party as well, because obviously baddies gotta stick together. So while Mrs. Coulter looks for Lyra, Boreal is handling the rogue reporter. And by handle, I mean he takes her into a car and crushes her daemon. This is not okay. If you’re not supposed to touch a daemon, you’re definitely not supposed to kill a daemon.
Lyra is running wild on the streets for all of about five minutes before she gets snatched up by a dang gobbler. Welp. I guess Mrs. Coulter tried to warn her that gobblers were all over London.
And this is where this episode leaves us. I will say this was a pretty solid second episode. I still have some questions about how everything is going to work out, but for now I trust the show runners and think they know what they’re doing. I’m just trying to sit back and enjoy the ride.
Until next week!