His Dark Material: The Enchanted Sleeper (3x01)

We're back, and it's the final season! This episode picked up right where we left off, without missing a beat. My thoughts and feelings are remarkably similar to how I think I was feeling a couple years ago when season two was on the air. Let's dive in.

Cons:

The church stuff is such an important piece of the puzzle especially here in the third season/book, but I still find myself the most bored whenever we flip back to dealing with Fra Pavel, and that whole world. It's not that it's bad, necessarily, it's just sort of... dour, and slow, in a way that I don't feel gripped by.

I also thought Will and Iorek's interaction was a bit oddly paced? I get that there's a lot of book to get through very quickly and we only have eight episodes to do it, but Will finds Iorek, immediately challenges him to a duel and then uses the knife to cut through a bit of his armor, showing that he has a weapon too powerful to beat. This is straight from the book, and yet it felt very contrived and way too easy that Will would think of this idea right away and it would work so neatly. Maybe a small thing, but just thought I'd point it out.

An eternal complaint I have about this show is that the daemons are not front-and-center enough on the screen, which makes it easy to forget about them sometimes. Which is a problem, when so many key story elements are contingent on whether or not a person has a daemon with them or not. More visible daemons, please!

Asriel's stuff I mostly liked, but his whole army-gathering plan just gives him such a strange energy, like, he's the one guy who's got it all figured out and so he gets to be the one to say "fuck you, God"? I get that it's more complicated than that, it's just that Asriel's almost too much of a bad-ass here and I'm not sure I entirely like it.

Pros:

I loved all the stuff with Lyra in the cave with Mrs. Coulter. The spooky dreams where she sees Roger in an unfamiliar place, all the moments when Pan is awake and trying to rouse Lyra before Mrs. Coulter can put her to sleep again... the little Deaf child who is bringing supplies to Mrs. Coulter, believing she's helping a woman to awaken her daughter from an enchanted sleep. I loved the atmosphere, the inherent creepiness, and the fact that Mrs. Coulter really is, in her own twisted way, trying to protect Lyra. That's been true from the start, no matter how evil she might be in other ways. She knows why the church is after Lyra, and if she has to imprison her daughter to keep her away from dangerous folk, she'll damn well do it.

I also liked our introduction to Baruch and Balthamos, Asriel's new angel allies. They're tasked with bringing Will (and the knife) to Asriel to join in his growing army against God himself, but Will is determined to find Lyra first. Knowing how this story is going to play out, it's so satisfying to see Will stick to his convictions and go after his friend first. I'm continually just so impressed by everyone's performances; there was such a depth of emotion to Will's determination to find Lyra. Also loving that they didn't chicken out on the gay angels thing. That's from the book too.

Mostly, the Asriel stuff was pretty cool. You gotta love this dude rolling up with his magic flying machine powered by his thoughts, his bad-ass white tiger at his side, rescuing political prisoners and recruiting cool and interesting allies to his bizarre cause. Dude wants to kill death itself, I'm sure that'll be fun to see. McAvoy is doing great things with this part, is all I'll say.

This is a brief review, because there's another episode that's also out and I want to get to that one as well. By and large, pretty happy with all the setup we're getting here. This book is absolutely bonkers with all the stuff that has to happen in it, so I'm anxious and excited to see how well they pull it off!

8/10