With the Knife in their possession, Will and Lyra set out on a quest to retrieve the Alethiometer. Boreal attempts to woo Mrs Coulter but isn’t prepared for how unimpressed she will be. The new Cardinal struggles to maintain his authority over the Magisterium. Doctor Malone finds new purpose.

Whereas it sounds, on the surface, as if this is a packed episode of His Dark Materials, the truth of the matter is that not a huge amount actually happens for much of the run time, and of what does, a fair amount feels almost thrown in as an afterthought.

A lot of the episode focuses on Boreal and Mrs Coulter, the former clearly hoping to bowl over the latter with his amassed wealth and achievements in the ‘other world’. The problem is, Mrs Coulter has no time or use for his affections, and she’s also not that easily impressed. There’s a hint here that perhaps Boreal isn’t as much of a pioneer as he might think, and that maybe even Mrs Coulter herself had made the crossing between worlds a long time before he ever did.

Mrs Coulter also goes to visit Doctor Malone, and that is an interesting interaction on two levels – on the one hand it’s fascinating to see how wrong-footed the usually unflappable Mrs Coulter is by the very notion of a female academic ‘allowed’ to progress and publish her own doctorate (which itself tells us a lot about Lyra’s world). On another level, it’s instructive to see how she responds to this revelation afterward – with cold, absolute fury. Also, she’s shown to be able to leave her Daemon behind for quite some time – is this something that’s ever going to be addressed? Could she, in fact, be part witch?

Will and Lyra, now possessing a knife that allows them to travel between worlds, are determined to retrieve the Alethiometer. It’s slightly disappointing, given how much padding is done elsewhere, that the episode basically rushes Will from not having much clue to being an absolute master of the Subtle Knife but I guess an extended training montage would have been a difficult sell. Regardless, they hit on a plan and then that plan is slightly wrongfooted by the unexpected presence of Mrs Coulter in Boreal’s basement. This allows us to see a quite different side of Lyra, that perhaps isn’t as far removed from her mother (and her father for that matter) as she might like to think.

Thrown in around the edges we have the rest. Cardinal MacPhail is struggling to keep his authority, and starting to lash out in ways that one can only expect will come back to bite him later. Doctor Malone finds herself set on a whole new path by a combination of her brief meeting with Coulter and another conversation with the ‘Angel’ in The Cave. And Will is confronted with the aftermath of his fight with the boy who had stolen the knife, in a scene which feels like it’s there perhaps because it appeared in the books but which adds very little.

Verdict: Overall, it’s feeling a lot more friendly towards beginners than the first season, and a lot less coy about some of Pullman’s central anti-religious themes as well. It still struggles though, because it’s starting to feel like it’s padding out the parts that don’t need it while rushing others. 6/10

Greg D. Smith