Review: His Dark Materials, "No Way Out" & "The Abyss" | Season 3, Episodes 5 & 6
Review: His Dark Materials, "No Way Out" & "The Abyss" | Season 3, Episodes 5 & 6
The dust remains very unsettled as HBO and BBC's adaptation approaches its finale
“Time does as it pleases down here”
“No Way Out” begins by throwing a bone—or, in this case, a seed pod—to book readers: after initially revealing the mulefa as walking “talking elephants” at the season’s midpoint, we return to Mulefa World as Mary indeed witnesses Atal putting her walking legs into some seed pods to glide down the roads on her way to their village. The compromise—make them mostly walk so that they don’t have to constantly animate them rolling around—is not something I support, but it’s something.
But I was struck during the scene by how this was the first time Mary’s story has actually been something. After being launched forward in the second season with the angels’ message that she was to play the serpent, Mary then spent the end of last season and the first half of this one just roaming around, without any clear sense of purpose. But once she’s with the mulefa, all that purpose rushes in: we get a flashback to the message from the angels, plus a full abrid…