The Final Season of His Dark Materials Plays It Slow and Safe

We’re living in an unprecedented era of fantasy television. From Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Powe and The Wheel of Time to Netflix’s The Sandman and HBO’s Game of Thrones, there’s never been a better time to be a fan of this genre, as both streamers and prestige cable networks turn to some of fantasy’s most famous and popular titles in search of their next big hit. Stories once deemed unadaptable are finally making their way to our screens, and generally looking great doing it.

On paper, a show like HBO’s His Dark Materials should have been a slam dunk. Based on Phillip Pullman’s bestselling trilogy of the same name, its mix of magic, adorable talking animals, and philosophical debate about the nature of sin and humanity as well as the purpose of religious belief is precisely the sort of thing that makes this genre so fascinating. Its dense, multiverse-crossing narrative is virtually made to inspire in-depth fan explainers and theories and its richly drawn characters inhabit every shade of gray. So why is the HBO adaptation of this story just…okay?

Admittedly, Pullman’s story is incredibly complex and complicated, and maybe a three-season series—meaning that a max of eight episodes each was dedicated to the events of novels The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass—was never going to be able to fully unpack all the intricacies of this world of daemons and Dust. But as the series wraps up with a third season that arrives a bit like a cast-off Christmas gift, its final episodes often feel like the show is going through the motions of finishing a story without really having something to say.

While Season 2 of His Dark Materials represented a clear step forward from its first, its third and final outing fizzles rather than builds to something truly meaningful or even especially interesting to watch. To be fair, The Amber Spyglass is definitely the strangest of Pullman’s novels, with an even more overt religious allegory that recontextualizes the idea of the Fall of Man as a natural and perhaps even good event. (On the show, this includes everything from the late-in-the-game introduction of the Authority, its angels, and a literal realm called Heaven to the idea that Lyra represents a prophetical rebirth of Eve.) The story delves into the sort of complex philosophical issues that may lead to great debate, but that don’t necessarily translate quite as well to a visual medium, if only because it means so many episodes hinge on little more than extended exposition dumps, montages involving various forms of reading, and people repeatedly explaining things to one another.

Season 3 initially picks up where the second left off: Everyone’s searching for a missing Lyra (Dafne Keen), who’s basically being drugged and held prisoner by her mother, Mrs. Coulter (Ruth Wilson) in the name of “protecting” her. Lord Asriel (James McAvoy) is gathering literal soldiers—including the tiny Gallivespians who ride around on insects— for his campaign to bring down the Authority and free the multiverse from oppression. Passing through world after world on the hunt for his friend, Will (Amir Wilson) meets some angels (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith and Simon Harrison) who encourage him to join Asriel’s fight. And astrophysicist Mary Malone (Simone Kirby) finds herself in the mysterious city of Citagazze, using yarrow sticks and I Ching divination to determine her next move and trying to communicate with the strange band of children who live there.