I can't say I see people writing much about it, and obviously this thread went nowhere.

Personally, I think it's safe to say at this point the ways they've blurred the lines between The Golden Compass and A Subtle Knife haven't helped the story at all. If anything it's forced the show to scramble past some of the more interesting character moments in the first book because they have to get back to Will Parry, but until they actually get to The Thing he's not a very engaging character other than the shock of Subtle Knife's opening chapters. I'd have left all the Will stuff on the cutting room floor in favor of an episode more focused on the bears and bear culture; it's not just because armored fighting bears are a cool idea that fans of this series almost uniformly point to the time spent in Svalbard as the moment the series became a must-read. I wasn't surprised when the show's subreddit was flooded with "where is the armor?! / jaw drop scene" threads following that (admittedly very impressive in its own right) climactic throw down.


More broadly, this feels like a 10-episode show hamstrung by being a BBC-first production. The plot seems mostly there but I feel like if I hadn't read the books I'd feel pretty detached from this show, the direction is pretty stale and the show just feels over eager to hit its beats. If one of the major hurdles The Golden Compass (the movie) had was trying to fit a single book that mostly hides its true intentions from the reader until the final chapters by following its story's most sheltered yet curious character, one might expect a television series to be the perfect remedy, but this show still feels in a hurry to get where it's going in a way that makes it feel more like Thrones Season 7 than Thrones Season 1.

Lastly, she's a kid so it's hard to really go in, but...Dafne Keen is lowkey a drag on this show in a way I've been kind of shocked by. She shows flashes of good acting, let alone what makes Lyra a really fun character, and it's not always clear if the portrayal is her fault or the production as a whole. With what we get to see on screen, though, it's not surprising that Mrs. Coulter and Lord Boreal are eating up screen time because those are the performances you want to watch.

His Dark Materials doesn't have a lot of reveals the caliber of Ned or the Red/Purple Wedding, but it does have at least five incredibly emotional, shocking twists of the knife, and I wonder if people who haven't read the books would be aware we've already seen three of them.


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