THERE’S A WAR BREWING IN HEAVEN. On the one side is God – or at least the being that has assumed His holy mantle. On the other, an arrogant, occasionally murderous, mortal man who plans to assassinate the supreme being and reforge reality. Which side would you choose?
For Lyra Belacqua, the young hero of Philip Pullman’s iconoclastic fantasy trilogy – and the BBC’s lavish TV adaptation, about to air its third and final season – the answer is somewhat complicated. The man, you see, is her father, Lord Asriel (James McAvoy). He’s not been a great dad, having kept his fatherhood secret for most of her life, taken off on adventures for months at a time and, uh, killed her best friend Roger.
Then again, the Authority and its tyrannical agents, the Magisterium, are surely worse – and they’ve put a target on Lyra’s head, believing her to be a threat to their continued dominance. Talk about being caught between Hell and a hard place…
The Amber Spyglass – the last book of Pullman’s trilogy – is a big novel in both scope and ideas, and it makes up the entirety of these final eight episodes. Adapting it for TV was no mean feat, but then the fact that this series exists at all is something of a miracle, after all. Hollywood tried and failed to adapt His Dark Materials back in 2007 with The Golden Compass, a neutered, compromised version of Pullman’s Christian-bothering vision.
The film performed adequately at the box office buthowever, proved to be a learning curve for everyone involved.
