'His Dark Materials' Season 1, Episode 7 Recap: "The Fight To The Death"
Critics have complained that His Dark Materials has failed so far in its ability to emphasize the importance of the daemon-human bond in Lyra's world. Up until this week, I was inclined to argue with them. Though Lyra and Pan are not in constant contact in quite the way they are on the page, I assumed that was simply the result of creative license. The less than constant in-your-face of other people's daemons seemed an attempt to make them less of a distraction — and the excuse presented in Tony Costa's naming ceremony neatly suggested daemons are shy and tuck themselves away. Finally, the initial failure to make Billy Costa's missing daemon as visceral was made up for in Episode 6's "The Daemon Cages."
But this week, I have to admit that critics are right. There was a significant factor at Bolvangar that I completely missed last week, despite HBO's inclusion of the nurse characters in several of the promotional images. I did not notice their lack of daemons. When this episode began with Coulter's discovery that Sister Clara (Morfydd Clark) will not leave, because this is the last place she was attached to her daemon, it was a combination of horror and disbelief. How did I miss this? Daemon-less people should stick out like sore thumbs in this world. Sister Clara did not, which suggests the lack of emphasis on the creatures has seriously downplayed their importance in the show.
The horror of Sister Clara was not the only spot in this week's episode where the weird inability to emphasize daemons came to the fore. Once it became noticeable, I started seeing it everywhere. Lyra is captured by the panserbjørne, the armored bears, and tossed in prison, where she meets an unwell gentleman by the name of Jotham Santella (Asheq Akhtar). His main business is to explain that King Iofur wants a daemon of his own, and he suggests Asriel might have promised the bear one in exchange for getting out of the cell. But Jotham seems to have no daemon either — Pan explores the man by sniffing his hands.
