His Dark Materials - Episode 7: The Fight to the Death + Episode 8: Betrayal
His Dark Materials ends its puzzling first season with a lacklustre cliffhanger. The co-produced HBO and BBC fantasy series has shown promise from the start but has grown increasingly apparent that it is not as fulfilling as it is at first glance.
The world-building of the entire season has been a frustrating mess. Never once does the show feel believable, at the very least, as many of the ideas and mechanics of its fictional universes are never comprehensibly explored. A notable example is the kingdom of the Panserbjørne (armoured bears), which is shockingly reduced to oversimplicity, set aside in favour of artificial contrivances and rushed solutions to sub-conflicts in order to keep the story going.
Scattered around each episode, awkwardly vague moments of exposition halt plot progression and repeat themselves on and on, adding nothing but frustration to why such things are included if nothing is being added for the viewers’ understanding. The mystery of the world’s mystical material, Dust, is always kept hidden by the adult characters, only to reveal that they do not know what it even is. Frustratingly, this happens a lot and it is not amusing in the slightest. It is the type of pointless narrative foolishness that will make some viewers might drop out, never to see the second season again.
The show alternates between dragging and rushing. Its pacing is terrible, with the building blocks of the narrative failing to mould successfully but the characters never get the time to be fleshed out. More or less, a majority of them serve to be either of the three: the protagonist’s minor inconvenience, the protagonist’s convenient solution, or a one-dimensional ominous being whose motive is barely touched.
The early inclusion of the secondary protagonist, Will Parry (Amir Wilson), stays a perplexing creative decision, as it does nothing to the overall arc of the season but only pad the runtime. Some will question why this plot cannot just wait until the second season and throwing it in here feels plastic and never advantageous.
In the end, little of His Dark Materials is understood and appreciated. A more-or-less forgettable, lifeless adaptation that — despite its talented cast, gorgeous visual effects and thought-provoking concepts — is bogged down by questionable writing choices from Jack Thorne and filmmaking constraints that prevent the entire season from becoming one cohesive whole.
