'His Dark Materials' Season 2 Episode 1 shows viewers torture with tweezers and how to be a 'good' murderer
Befitting an "irreligious tale" meant for children, Episode 1 of Season 2 dives right into the grey morality of good and evil, rather than overly simplified definitions taught to children in religious institutions. This is brought into sharp relief when Lyra, angry at the alethiometer for causing the death of Roger, consults it for the first time after Pan has been after her to use it because "they need help".
The alethiometer has its own sense of judging the right things to reveal at the right time. Lyra says as much -- "It tells us the truth but not the whole truth", she tells Pan. She is a lot less trusting than she was in Season 1 and so her first question to the alethiometer is about Will Parry. He is someone she has just met and while her instincts say he can be trusted, she is also entering a deeper partnership with him to understand the origins of Dust or "dark matter" in Will's world. Since she will be traveling to Will's world with him, she needs to be sure. And sure enough, the alethiometer throws her a curveball. "He is a murderer," she says in shock when she reads it, before adding, "but a good one. Like Iorek."
In straight forward definitions, a murderer is a murderer -- irredeemably bad. But Lyra already knows that sometimes killing is necessary, that murder can be good. And in Will's case, he killed because Lord Boreal's men came over to hurt his mother and him to find Col. John Parry aka Doctor Stanislaus Grumman's papers.
After crossing over to a strange new world and roaming the city by the sea with Will, who also crossed over from his world, Lyra's sense of navigating between what adults say is "good" vs what might actually be good in the given situation is just as sharp as the alethiometer sometimes. Despite Dust being referred to as "bad" her entire life in her world, she knows that the Magesterium, (a thinly veiled reference to the Church in our world), the institution in charge of the 'Word of God" is filled with bad people. And if "bad people" think Dust is bad, "maybe it is good", she tells Will.
Will of course has no idea what she is talking about -- he would better understand it in terms of puberty and the start of sexual maturity and adulthood, or even in terms of the 'Orginal Sin' when you start differentiating between good and evil as an adult. Will is closer to this stage of 'becoming adult' as the feral children in the city of Cittàgazze tell them, but Lyra still has some time.
Lyra instinctively does not trust the child inhabitants of Cittàgazze who torture animals and have become like the 'Lord of the Flies' kids, without adult supervision. The sentient adults have all fled after the attack of the Spectres who drain adults of everything that makes them human aka their soul.
Will, as he is looking at the papers his father Col. John Parry left behind, gets a vision of the subtle knife and is strangely drawn to the highest tower in the city. Lyra, fresh from consulting the alethiometer, now knows there is something they need to do in Cittàgazze. But as the last shot shows, Will is in terrible danger, as the Spectres collect behind him, waiting for the moment when Will steps into adulthood.
While Will and Lyra grapple with good and evil in this new World, Mrs Coulter is in complete Lady Macbeth-mode. She is redefining good and evil as it benefits her. She manipulates the Cardinal to let her torture the witch they have captured to spill the beans on what she knows about Lyra, the child of prophecy and if witches travel between worlds. She enjoys torturing a bit too much, taking off her jewelry in the womanly equivalent of rolling up her sleeves. Then she uses a pair of dainty tweezers to pull out the cloud pines in the witch's body, one piece at a time.
The Magisterium's power is at its lowest since its lies have been exposed by Lord Asriel's hole in the sky. The witches are angry, especially Queen witch Ruta Skadi, for capturing her sister-witch. Skadi flies over and kills her sister witch who begs for death before she divulges anything to Mrs Coulter. In the lovely CGI sequence, Skadi breeches the airships defences, and dissolves into a whirling dust assassin, not only killing her sister-witch but also the ineffectual Cardinal as revenge. (Why not also the lovely Mrs Coulter who was doing all the torture, no one knows...) Mrs Coulter then gets the opportunity she's been looking for. She manipulates Father MacPhail, who dreams of being named Cardinal. She tells him she'll do his dirty work for him, by murdering the injured Cardinal while "tending to his wounds". "Let it be my sin and my first act of service", she says, dressing her sin as something good for the world that needs Father MacPhail's leadership. Not all murderers are good after all.
'His Dark Materials' Season 2 Episode 2 will air on HBO on November 23 at 9 pm.
