His Dark Materials S1 E1 – Lyra’s Jordan

Hello and welcome to the first review of the first episode of His Dark Materials! I’m going to try something new with this approach and I hope it’ll work out for me and my viewers.

So let’s not waste any time shall we?

Lyra has been living in Jordan College in Oxfurt with her uncle Asriel, but I could tell right away that she doesn’t have a close relationship with him since he’s always away on expeditions up North. I wanted to ask, why did the college’s master poison Asriel? I mean, in the movie version from 2007 it was a random dude from the Magisterium. To me, that made sense because the Magisterium doesn’t approve of Asriel’s desire to seek the truth about Dust and parallel worlds.

It’s clear that the Magisterium is this governing body wishing to remain in control and stop people from seeing the truth.

Lyra is no different from how I remember her, she enjoys sneaking around and letting her curiosity get the better of her, even if it means she gets in trouble. Her daemon Pan can be just as mischievous but I think he tries to warn her the consequences of her actions more often than going along with them. I also feel bad for her because she’s desperately trying to form a bond with her uncle and he just seems to push her away all the time as he leaves for another expedition.

One thing I also really liked was how the Gyptians have their own ceremonies when a child’s daemon settles (you could say the daemon settling means the child has just hit puberty). I didn’t know Billy had an older brother, but then again it looks like HBO is steering this towards the books, which I have yet to read.

Then enter Mrs. Coulter who hopes to make Lyra’s exploration dreams come true, she’s as charming as ever and I find she evolves more throughout this series so I’ll get to that in the next episode.

While the scene where Billy is abducted was pretty scary, my only complaint is we don’t see what happened to Roger until the very end, but I suppose that’s they were going for, the whole cliffhanger!

This episode gets an A.

And that’s it for now. I’ll try to do these on a weekly basis. Stay tuned for the next.

👽Emily