If you had a daemon, what would it be? If your soul existed in animal form—as a butterfly, say, or an osprey or a lynx—and if you could talk to that creature and that creature could serve as a conscience, a confidant, an extension to your perception, or maybe even a weapon, what shape would it take?
Daemons, of course, are one of the central conceits of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. The vast, ambitious novels imagine a steampunkish version of our world, where the rooms are lit by naphtha lamps, blimplike airships cruise the skies, and armored bears prowl the north. Lyra Belacqua, an ostensible orphan being raised under the guardianship of Jordan College, Oxford, rips across the roofs and spires of the town with her friend Roger, generally causing mayhem. Something called Dust permeates the universe and its existence is either an unpleasant secret or something else … depending on whether you ask the Magisterium, which rules this world as a Catholic Church-ish decreer of heresies, or people like Lord Asriel who, to say the least, has other thoughts about what to do with Dust. Lyra’s daemon is an animal named Pantalaimon, and because Lyra is still a child, his shape is not yet settled. He can be a moth when she’s spying or a polecat when she’s fighting.
The bond between human and daemon is sacred, as the opening credits to the first season of the HBO/BBC One adaptation of the series will tell you, and we learn the rules of daemons in the early scenes of His Dark Materials: They are a representation of the human’s character in some way; they can’t get very far from their person, to hurt a daemon is to hurt the human. The opening scenes of the series articulate another concept too: the idea that colleges are protected by something called scholastic sanctuary. It’s a phrase that doesn’t appear in the books but it’s mentioned in one of the first lines spoken, and repeated often. His Dark Materials, in just these introductory moments, promises not just the intellectual chewiness of Pullman’s books, but also the character- and theme-building that extends the story beyond the page and into the realm of prestige TV.
The first question you'll have about the series, of course, is: Are the daemons any good? Yes, yes they are. Pan and his ilk are credibly rendered, somewhat on the left shoulder of the uncanny valley, just realistic enough to be expressive and emotive (wee Pan as an ermine has a surprising emotional range), but still unrealistic enough for you to give them the benefit of the visual doubt.
Charismatic, brave, brilliant Lyra (Dafne Keen) is drawn into a mysterious web of child snatchings, possibly underwritten by the Magisterium. James McAvoy is Lord Asriel, an explorer flying in the face of the organization’s schemes, while also remaining a total mystery. Good guy or bad guy? Well, his daemon is a snow leopard, which should tell you a lot. “Many people would like to have a lion as a daemon,” a character says at one point. If you don’t like the shape of your daemon, he responds, you are discontented. Lord Asriel is probably pretty comfortable with the shape of his soul.
Then there’s Mrs. Coulter. Oh, Mrs. Coulter, beautiful, belted, besatined Mrs. Coulter (Ruth Wilson), with your pedestrian name and estranged golden monkey daemon, who are you? We see drive and brilliance and rage and an overweening ambition that will commit atrocities in the name of discovery and maybe science, but we don’t exactly know what you want. Are you acting in the name of orthodoxy as an agent of the Magisterium? Or do you want to burn it all down? Unclear. But Mrs. Coulter is certainly willing to engage with the status quo. After saying she has never understood scholastic sanctuary—a term that seems to apply to babies as well as to the ability of intellectuals to pursue their studies outside the censorship of the Magisterium—she asks the Master of Jordan College (Clarke Peters) why scholarship needs protecting.
The Master: “You don’t believe original thinking should be protected?”
Mrs. Coulter (ripping pages out of books): “Well, if the thinking was clever enough, it would find a way to obscure itself from the Magisterium, wouldn’t it?”
Then she continues: “Scholastic sanctuary is just another way of protecting bloated privilege. Tired old men talking in a tired old way about tired old things.”
Ah. I was all about science being able to operate outside the clutches of the church, but when you put it that way, Mrs. Coulter, the situation becomes more complex.
And that’s the point: The series is clearly going to grapple with the moral and theological ambiguities that the 2007 film adaptation, The Golden Compass, infamously did not. Now is a decidedly good moment in history to discuss the dangers of a bunch of men in a room talking about science, after all. It's also a good moment to question orthodoxies and received wisdom, to ask ourselves if people are not, in fact, being governed by those who would obscure the truth from them, declaring certain things heretical, even as others seek to rip the world open in ways that terrify the high priests of politics and science. Doing that may require spinning some additional narrative yarn, but if the era of big-budget fantasy TV has been indicative of anything, it’s that sometimes you have to look beyond the known canon. (Hi Game of Thrones!)
Pullman himself helped expand and explain his universe. He serves as an executive producer on the show, and according to series writer Jack Thorne, he provided backstory that never made it into his novels. “We would go there armed with different things we had taken from different bits of the story and go, ‘So what is the thread that connects these things?’” he said in an interview with the Independent. “And [Pullman] would tell us little unheard stories that had occurred in gaps of the chapters.”
I am here for the unheard stories in the gaps, as well as for the bigger arcs Pullman’s work demands, like a willingness to engage with concepts such as, oh, the meaning of original sin and the literal shape of one’s soul. His Dark Materials makes room for that. Pretty please, let it make room for more Mrs. Coulter too.
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