For the most part you can leave the church out of the show too, they barely figure into the story until Asriel reveals what it’s all about. But the show has gone out of its way to show all the villainous fathers and cardinals, while trying to keep them as secular as possible. It’s ridiculous.

It’s a great moment in studio-cowardice. You have to feel sorry for Chris Weitz who took on so much, compromised to get to make the movie, and then was taken off the project a couple of months before its release because New Line got even more nervous.
You also have to love the creatively bankrupt way the executives…

Yeah, if the show has an overriding feeling it’s that this is a job for the people in charge, and not exactly a passion project. There’s an element of ‘well this is good enough’ that comes through the direction, the visuals, music, everything.
There was an article on Slate the other week about the difficulties of…

The thing is that the book is so solid that you can’t really go wrong with a straightforward adaptation. You can skip a few detours like mrs Coulter taking Lyra away after Bolvangar before she gets on Lee’s balloon, but there’s nothing a writer needs to ‘fix’.
Pretty much every change the show has made from the books…

The thing is that there is a terrific character drama in there too, this story of a girl looking for a home and a family, but Thorne isn’t really doing much with that either!
The way he’s restructured it just throws off how Pullman built up the drama. I can see why they might have wanted to draw in Will’s side of…

I haven’t read the books in a few years, but I remember Serafina having a warmer presence. I’m not quite sure what that scene with her was, but it felt tonally out of place. James Cosmo is absolutely great as Coram, but I’m not convinced of the show’s take on Serafina yet.
Also Kaisa should be goose.

So basically they don’t know how to stage and frame a scene. 

I mean, the show’s versions of daemons is basically the Bolvanger daemons already.

It’s a remarkable failure of screenwriting to not use the daemons for exposition and anything else you want to have your characters talk about. But then I don’t think Thorne is really interested in them, whatever does interest him in telling this story isn’t clear to me though. I thought that when we got our first…

Ruth Wilson is great, but she’s basically playing mrs Coulter with all the relish of Anthony Hopkins hamming it up as Hannibal Lecter. 

Yeah, and that failure of understanding on Thorne and the directors’ part colours in the whole adaptation. Their whole focus seems to be off the mark, more interested in setting up the dimension hopping and the spectacle of the later books than what those things mean.
Lyra and Pan are the main characters of the books,…

A thing this reminds me of is that not long after the books came out Pullman was asked about this question of faith in god, vs religious authority, and he sort of admitted that having every religious character be a ‘baddie’ was lacking in nuance. So this doesn’t bother me so much.
I do wish that the show was more…

If I remember correctly it was something that happened during the duel.

The thing I always wonder about is how much our understanding of these sexual identities even matters that much in such pre-Kinsey days. Would someone like Will even think of himself in those terms?
Reading any specific sexual identity onto Will, beyond having a some sense of his queerness, seems like projection on our…

Yeah, it was obvious Morgan wasn’t that interested in the political goings on in the Wilson and Heath years. And I mean fine, the show is called The Crown, but those were turbulent times one could easily televise.

One wonders how much the portrayal of Heath was influenced by the abuse allegations that have come out about him in the past few years, though on the other hand it’s not as if Mountbatten didn’t get a more kindly treatment than he deserved.

I absolutely loathe that main title theme. Lorne Balfe is a hack.
In some ways the movie was much better than the show so far.

If that’s so it explains why this adaptation feels so off. Mainly I don’t understand why they’ve let her become so undone so early, because the impact of her vulnerability with Lyra at Bolvangar sort of depends on her being a lot more stiff upperlip at this stage in the story.
And Lyra learning her parentage this early…

They weren’t portrayed as rubes, the show actually did a rather clever thing in setting them up as men like Philip, only to have it be Elizabeth who could best understand their particular situation. The issue in that scene was that they couldn’t fill the emotional void Philip felt.

but it’s also really weird to me that the Queen Mother now behaves like an entirely different person than she did in the first two seasons.