His Dark Materials lets Mrs. Coulter shine in one of its strongest episodes yet (newbies)

And like clockwork, His Dark Materials improves when Mrs.
Coulter reappears. This episode was a real high water mark for the character,
because so many of the actions she’s taken suddenly have an additional degree
of nuance, from her bizarre relationship with her daemon to her stunted efforts
to connect with Lyra.

It’s also an interesting twist on the show that the
character who best makes clear what daemons represent to people is the one who
loathes them. How much was Mrs. Coulter traumatized by her youthful affair
with Lord Asriel? Irreparably, it turns out, such that she thinks passion and
sex are what ruin people. After all, those things ruined her life. That her
romance with Asriel is also what gave her Lyra does not seem to have fully
sunken in yet, but there’s so much that works really effectively in this
episode about her learning who her own daughter is, and how extraordinary
Lyra’s passion and empathy make her.

Lyra mainly spends the episode wreaking havoc and sowing
chaos, which she suggests is what she’s good at. But it’s not her chaos
abilities that are the point here—it’s her commitment to breaking the other
children out of the prison. She could make a run for it the first time she and
Roger manage to get away from the other kids, but she doesn’t. Not only does
she re-imprison herself on their behalf, but she takes the time to destroy the
machine that’s been severing daemons. The show is making a compelling argument for
the way one single person taking a conscientious stand is life-changing for a
whole series of other people, but its demonstration of this concept doesn’t work equally well each time. For instance, it sounds silly when Lee suggests
he loves Lyra after knowing her a few days, but with only a few shots of
Mrs. Coulter’s face, there’s such a sense of torment over who her daughter is
communicated. It’s a very literal demonstration of why showing can work so much
better than telling.

The rest of the Bolvangar sequence is the oddest mix of
truly horrifying villainy and overwrought dialogue. Did we really need someone
to say “I was just obeying orders”? The bad guys on this show are doing
something at a pretty far extreme of villainy. It’s so vile that it’s
almost…too evil? And yet, inevitably, there’s the guy who feels kind of bad but
is doing it anyway. It’s so extreme that it’s hard to imagine how the dialogue
could have been written in a way that was less pointed and over the top. It’s
like the show has to fall back on tropes to get through it, so we end up with
the true believer leader, the ambivalent nice guy, and of course, the utterly
faceless violent guys who are defending the camp. We’re told they’re tartars,
but we never see what any of them looks like, nor do we understand what they’re
doing in this particular conflict.

The eventual fight scene mostly proves that turning the
tartars into more specific bad guys would have made it even cooler. The action
sequences are on their way to being suspenseful and exciting, given the narrow
hallways and near-misses, but it’s all over surprisingly quickly for a battle
we’ve been told the gyptians have no chance of winning. They’re actually doing
pretty well, with the very brief exception of one scene, and then Serafina
Pekkala, this show’s deus ex machina, zips in for a hot 30 seconds to kill
everyone. Was she unavailable earlier? How is she a hero if she’s only inspired
to help those kids when Lyra is in danger? Awfully Mrs. Coulter-y of her. Why aren’t
the witches in charge of everything if they’re this powerful? That was just one
of them!

We’re just going to have to hope she stuck around a bit
longer, since Lee lasts just a few hours as a surrogate father before
accidentally dropping Lyra out of his aircraft. Some balloon driver he is.

Stray observations

• I don’t think I’ve ever seen a show so driven by one single
  performance, and one that isn’t even the lead. It’s partially Ruth Wilson’s
  choices, but also the writing is just better for her. She’s given so much more
  complexity to play than anyone else. Everyone else is kind of trapped in very
  traditional hero or villain paths.
• But speaking of her, having her come back into the girls’
  room just to pointlessly say “well done” and freak everyone out was one of the
  episode’s hammier moments. What did Mrs. Coulter think she was doing in that
  moment?
• I honestly almost forgot that we spent any time at all with
  Will this episode. Can something happen with him already to justify taking time
  away from Mrs. Coulter learning about motherhood?
• Only Ruth Wilson could make “Billy Costa is dead.” “Well.
  That is unfortunate” work.
• Not to put too fine a point on it, but did Dafne Keen grow
  about six inches between when she filmed the first episode with Lewin Lloyd
  (Roger) and now?
• I appreciate the show taking the time to show us that the
  gyptians went back and rescued the daemons. I got worried when Lyra only
  told Roger to rescue the kids.
• And on the subject of daemons, why doesn’t Pantalaimon run
  when Lyra does? Every other time she’s made a run for it, he has, too.
• Back to Mrs. C—I ended up not working it into my review,
  because it was already going on and on about her, but the ways the word
  “mother” was used/said in this episode were so fascinating. Lyra screams it for
  the first time only when she’s near death (and it seems likely that was to
  provoke Mrs. Coulter into reacting), and Mrs. Coulter could barely make herself
  say it out loud when the two of them were talking later.
• Those fight scenes were VERY stingy with the Iorek fighting
  moments. We’ll hope for better for the future.