His Dark Materials: Malice Books Included

December 21, 2020 7:23 PM - Season 2, Episode 6

Lyra and Will find allies who can help them in their search for Will's father. The Magisterium learn something shocking, and Mrs Coulter meets a formidable foe.

Den of Geek - Are Lyra and Will safe and who can they trust? Those are the questions of season two's penultimate episode.

EW recap - As the Magisterium declares war on Lyra in the season's penultimate episode, nothing stands in Mrs. Coulter’s way after she learns how to control the Specters.

posted by oh yeah! (6 comments total)

Most of the episode titles come direct from chapter titles from the book, but this one’s non-obvious—someone in my watch party recalled a line from The Belle Sauvage, concerning Coulter’s daemon: “if that monkey had a name, it would be ‘Malice’.”
posted by liamcampbell at 9:18 PM on December 21, 2020 [2 favorites]

They seem to be going to great lengths to make us feel sorry for the monkey, though. You didn't see that in the books, though there was that dude in the sequel who mutilated his own daemon.

They definitely improved on the books in the "Why can she control Specters" question, but I still think it makes her inexplicably overpowered.

I was disappointed at lack of Mary Malone.

LMM just... can't act, and it's painful in scenes with people who can. I'm not sorry his final showdown is coming up.
posted by emjaybee at 7:01 PM on December 22, 2020 [5 favorites]

TV Line - His Dark Materials Renewed for Third and Final Season at HBO
posted by oh yeah! at 3:34 AM on December 23, 2020

Oh good, after episode 7 we’re still not really any closer to resolving anything? I mean I guess we’ve had a bunch of little resolutions, but it definitely feels like we’re still just kind of going through serial motions. Buy next month’s issue of Astounding Stories to read the thrilling conclusion!
posted by Kyol at 8:50 AM on December 23, 2020

One thing I think was improved was how they took out Boreal. I remember in the books Mrs Coulter was just kind of inexplicably in an affair with him and it never made sense? Here she never has to go to that, it’s all in promises and expectations.

That said, LMM can act (I’ve seen him in theaters!) but it’s stage acting, not movie acting. This was actually a known problem when people had to go en masse from the stage to the movie theater, it was an issue for a lot of people, toning it down to do the subtle stuff, which is I think where his problem lies.
posted by corb at 10:40 PM on December 23, 2020

Could Mrs. Coulter scare off the specters in the books? I don’t remember that at all.
posted by schmod at 6:53 PM on January 1, 2021