His Dark Materials – No Way Out Review

“No Way Out” puts its own spin on Lyra and Will’s journey to the Land of the Dead as the pair continue their darkest mission.

Lyra and Will arrive in the Land of the Dead and discover it is a barren wasteland made up of rust and decay. The inhabitants are listless spirits, with some of them being there for millennia. As well as searching for Roger, Lyra concludes the pair need to find a way to save the residents of the Land of the Dead. At the Magisterium’s headquarter Mrs. Coulter is held prisoner and Father MacPhail plans to sever his former ally from her dæmon to ignite a weapon to kill Lyra. In another world Mary meets a community of strange creatures that have the ability to move around with giant seedpods.

His Dark Materials can be a great and frustrating show. It’s a show that has made considerable changes from its source materials. Sometimes the changes were for the better, like John Parry’s death and Will needing to help reforge the knife, some were baffling like the characterisation of Lee Scoresby, and others were done for budgetary reasons. “No Way Out” characterised all these advantages and disadvantages.

One of my issues with The Amber Spyglass was Lyra and Will’s journey to the Land of the Dead and searching for Roger felt a bit too easy. In a novel, events that could take a long time could pass with a few sentences. The TV series was able to show the search for Roger being a lot more difficult. It was like searching for a needle in a haystack since they were in a world inhabited by countless spirits.

The Land of the Dead was shown to be a maze of cliffs. This was different from the description in the book because it was a vast, barren landscape filled with countless ghosts. The only light source was the glow from the spirits. Making The Land of the Dead a maze made the task of finding Roger more difficult since Lyra and Will had to go to various locations. The narrow pathways meant the showrunners could save on actors, extras, and special effects.

The episode showed that the longer spirits were in the Land of the Dead they became catatonic, like the Apathetics in the sci-fi film Zardoz. Lyra gave the spirits hope and they were awakened by her promise to get them out of the Land of the Dead. It was a bit like Warm Bodies where love brought the zombies back to life. When Lyra said she thought about what was important when the Harpies tried to guilt Will and Lyra, and when talking about events in the first episode to Roger, it felt like Will had to focus when the knife was repaired.

There were some major changes to this storyline which reduced the emotional impact. The worst of these was when Lyra hugged Roger. In the novel Lyra and Roger were unable to embrace because he was a spirit, he no longer had a physical body. Another important change involving Lyra and Will was when they first encountered The Harpies. In the novel, Lyra tried to lie her way past The Harpies and they attacked her, leading to Will threatening them with the knife. A small moment from the novel that I liked that didn’t make it into the episode was when Lyra and Will spoke with a young child who had been in The Land of the Dead so long that she had forgotten her name.

The final change involving this storyline was when The Harpies promised to make The Land of the Dead into hell and Lyra and her allies needed to make a deal that would benefit the creatures. This deal-making wasn’t in the episode but in the series, The Harpies were listening to Lyra as she told her stories to the spirits. So, the deal with The Harpies will probably come about later in the series.

Mrs. Coulter was in a dire situation. She was held captive, and she was about to be severed from her dæmon like the children she tortured in Bolvanger. However, she’s never to be underestimated because she sees a weak link, Dr. Cooper. In the previous two episodes Dr. Cooper was pressed into service to make the bomb and Mrs. Coulter can read people well. Mrs. Coulter uses his powers of manipulation for good instead of evil.

The laboratory at the Magisterium did have a 1930s aesthetic look to it. It was bare concrete, and the devices were knobs and levers. This was fitting because the bomb in the episode looked like a nuclear bomb. And it landed like a nuke in The Land of the Dead. This part of story saw another major departure from the novel because at the end of the episode the angels set off the bomb and a booming voice announces, “you think Dust makes you Gods, let’s see how you fair without it.” It was different but I liked it and it made the forces of the Authority more involved in Lyra’s story.

There was a big shift in the relationship between Father MacPhail and Father Gomez since the first episode of Season Three. Father MacPhail has been shown to be a conflicted man who did sinful acts, so had to flagellate himself as a penance. In “The Enchanted Sleeper” he has a moral dilemma because he questioned whether it was right to kill a child to protect his God. Gomez convinced MacPhail that sinful actions were sometimes required for the greater good. In “No Way Out” MacPhail asserts his authority over Gomez when the young priest questioned MacPhail’s action. There was a great little moment when Gomez was in the chapel and looked at a mural of Eve and the Serpent and decides on what to do.

The final plotline involved Mary and her meeting with Mulufa. She becomes a part of this community of strange creatures and befriended Atal. Mary acted like a scientist as she observed and took notes. She was an explorer in our world who went to places like Africa and Australia. When Mary stated that there were more dead seedpods, it felt like Moana and Strange World where there was a decay, and the characters needed to figure out why. However, Mary’s storyline felt rushed because she learned the Mulufa’s language and made her observations within an episode.

The series’ budgetary limitations were shown with their portrayal of the Mulufas’ World. Their world was the most alien in the novels since it had giant trees, covered in natural roads, and the Mulufa had formed a symbiotic relationship with the trees. The series made this world look like the Savannah and the Mulufas barely used the seedpods to move.

“No Way Out” was a dark and atmospheric episode, especially Lyra and Will’s storyline. It showed what the TV series was capable of and worked as its own version of the story.