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13 Feb

Chinese TV Drama Apologizes For Plagiarizing His Dark Materials

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Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery… but not in the world of corporate copyright. New Chinese fantasy drama Douluo Continent came under fire after its premiere last week when viewers noticed that some shots in the drama’s magical opening credits, created by third party company Visual Impact Digital Production, looked quite similar to shots in the magical opening credits for the His Dark Materials TV show… You can watch the Douluo Continent credit sequence here: And here’s the opening credits for the first season of His Dark Materials, designed by Clarissa Donlevy at Elastic… As you may notice, the…
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22 Dec

His Dark Materials Season 3: What to Expect

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It’s the news fans have been waiting to hear: the BBC/HBO adaptation of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials is confirmed as returning for a third and final season to complete the original trilogy. Filming on a new eight-episode season adapting The Amber Spyglass will begin in 2021. The announcement was made after the second season had aired its last episode in the UK, but ahead of the US broadcast (which is a week later than on the BBC), meaning American fans will be able to rest easier watching the finale in the knowledge that Lyra and co. are definitely returning.…
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20 Dec

His Dark Materials Season 2 Ending: What Does the Post-Credits Scene Mean?

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Warning: contains spoilers for His Dark Materials season two and The Amber Spyglass That’s the lid closed on season two. Like Lyra, His Dark Materials is all packed away for the time being. The episode’s closing scene showed our hero kidnapped and drugged and stashed in a steamer trunk by her mother, who was promising to take her somewhere safe. Having learned that Lyra was destined to be the new Eve – the fate of every world resting on a choice she was foretold to make – Mrs Coulter vowed to stop her daughter from bringing about another Fall. She would protect Lyra and…
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20 Dec

His Dark Materials Season 2 Episode 7 Review: Æsahættr

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This His Dark Materials review contains spoilers and references to the plot of The Subtle Knife.  Did you stay until the end? All the way to the end, after the production names and notices about the support of the Welsh government and tax credits from the Hawaii Film Office? Then you saw him – a hint as to where this fantastic (in all senses of the word) tale is heading.  Lyra has spent season two tormented by guilt over Roger’s death and wishing she could have done more to help him. Now it looks like she’s going to get the chance.…
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14 Dec

His Dark Materials Season 2 Episode 6 Review: Malice

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This His Dark Materials review contains spoilers. The problem with prophecy narratives is all the time they spend in the future tense. Such-and-such will change everything. So-and-so is going to save the world. Before a story moves towards a climactic battle, there’s so much team-picking and bag-packing to be done. While avengers are assembled and characters line up to pledge their sword, bow or axe, all eyes are focused on the horizon rather than on the here and now. Momentum stalls. It can feel as though things are going in circles. Season two has suffered from a little of that, and nowhere more than…
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09 Dec

His Dark Materials’ Spectres: ‘I Tried to Find a Way To Not Make Dementors’

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When Philip Pullman magicked up Spectres on the pages of The Subtle Knife, he did it without giving a thought to the VFX artists of the future. If Pullman had considered the puzzle he was setting the people tasked with depicting creatures so diaphanous that “in some lights, they were hardly there at all,” he may have had a rethink. Instead, not knowing that his story would be turned first into a feature film and then a stunning TV adaptation, he described monsters that were “a rhythmic evanescence, like veils of transparency turning in a mirror.” Tricky. “In literary form, it’s…
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06 Dec

His Dark Materials Season 2 Episode 5 Review: The Scholar

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This His Dark Materials review contains spoilers. By now, this series has firmly established the rule that if you put Mrs Coulter in a scene, you’ve got yourself a scene. It almost doesn’t matter who she’s paired with. Lee Scoresby, a Magisterium toady, a mirror… So long as Ruth Wilson is there, fizzing with barely concealed rage and oozing manipulative seduction, it works.  She doesn’t even need to speak, as this episode’s opening showed. Let Mrs Coulter watch a woman from our world tapping away at a laptop while rocking her baby and it’s all we need to understand the character’s…
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01 Dec

His Dark Materials: Why Mrs Coulter Hurts Her Daemon

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The most gripping scene in the His Dark Materials episode ‘Theft’ is a two-hander between Ruth Wilson and Lin-Manuel Miranda as Mrs Coulter and Lee Scoresby. (As their daemons are a key part of things, the scene could more properly be described as a two-hands and eight-paws-er, but let’s not be cute about it.) Invented for the TV adaptation by writers Jack Thorne and Sarah Quintrell, and directed by Leanne Welham, the scene shows Mrs Coulter threatening an imprisoned Lee with violence for information on Lyra’s whereabouts. By now, we know that’s no idle threat on Mrs Coulter’s side; torture…
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30 Nov

His Dark Materials Season 2 Episode 4 Review: Tower of the Angels

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This His Dark Materials review contains spoilers. The sweet spot of any fantasy adaptation is the point it becomes as compulsive to watch as the books are to read, and season two just arrived there. The episode ended with the major players all set to convene on the same location, raising anticipation for next week’s Cittàgazzan Royal Rumble. If, after the credits rolled, it had only been a matter of turning the page, we’d all surely already be deep into the next chapter. ‘Tower of the Angels’ delivered so many moments long in the coming, it was handing out gifts with…
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22 Nov

His Dark Materials Season 2 Episode 3 Review: Theft

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This His Dark Materials review contains spoilers.  Only the Authority can know the mysteries of the world! One world! One world! You can’t control the weather!  With each pronouncement, the Magisterium’s relationship to the truth grows more and more distant. From our position in mid-November 2020, His Dark Materials’ vision of a dangerous yet increasingly impotent force flailing to keep a grip on power by denying reality couldn’t feel more timely if Cardinal Hughes had spent the episode ALL CAPS Tweeting.  The Magisterium may not be able to control the weather, but somebody can, and that somebody was pulling this episode’s…
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18 Nov

His Dark Materials Now Has One Very Obvious Thing in Common With Game of Thrones

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This article contains spoilers for the His Dark Materials Season 2 premiere. In this age of an increasingly fractured viewing audience, it’s unlikely that a TV show will reach the heights of Game of Thrones, but HBO does seem to be intentionally courting the same fantasy-loving audience with His Dark Materials. So far, it doesn’t seem to be working, and there are many, many differences between the two series that could explain U.S. viewers’ hesitance to tune into the Philip Pullman adaptation. That being said, with the His Dark Materials Season 2 premiere, the two HBO fantasy dramas do have…
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18 Nov

His Dark Materials: Secrets of Cittàgazze and the Meaning of Pan’s Different Forms

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The terrible problem of creating sets for film and television, says His Dark Materials production designer Joel Collins, is that the very best work is invisible. “When you build a world that isn’t real but looks real, everyone thinks you didn’t do anything! You must have just stayed at home or popped along to Oxford and dialled it in.” “Or you just went to Italy,” laughs Framestore VFX Supervisor Russell Dodgson, whose team are responsible for, among many other computer-generated elements, His Dark Materials’ daemons. To make Cittàgazze, one of season two’s big new locations, the team didn’t just go…
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15 Nov

His Dark Materials Season 2 Episode 2 Review: The Cave

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This His Dark Materials review contains spoilers. This is such a weird story. Beautifully so. It’s not surprising that the first attempt to put it on screen in 2007 struggled to capture its peculiar magic, nor that it would justify all the blood, sweat and tears involved in a second go. Witches and parallel worlds and quasi-fascist baddies we’ve seen before in fantasy, but quantum computing, dark matter and an ex-nun physicist alongside them? This is a singular tale that – as fans of Pullman’s books know – is only about to get stranger. An episode like ‘The Cave’ shows just how…
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10 Nov

Andrew Scott Reveals His Dark Materials’ Chilling Behind-the-Scenes Secret: Show Tunes

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His Dark Materials is the Dune of the TV world, which is to say: extremely selfish with its cast. As if His Dark Materials didn’t already have more than its fair share of charismatic talent in Season 1, they’ve gone ahead and added Andrew Scott to Season 2 of the epic fantasy series as Colonel John Parry. (Scott’s Fleabag boss and co-star Phoebe Waller-Bridge will be voicing his character’s daemon, which, again: let other shows have some talent, would you?) I jest, of course. It’s been one of 2020’s few joys to see the second season of this show come…
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09 Nov

His Dark Materials: What is the Prophecy About Lyra?

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Warning: contains spoilers for the His Dark Materials book trilogy. “Witches hear the immortal whispers of those who pass between worlds. They speak of a child who is destined to bring the end of destiny. If told what she must do, she will fail. But she won’t walk alone. There is a boy whose fate is bound with hers. Together, they will change everything.”  So speaks Kaisa, the daemon of witch Serafina Pekkala in episode five of the BBC/HBO His Dark Materials TV series, ‘The Lost Boy.’ The words are inspired by two speeches in Philip Pullman’s The Northern Lights (published as The Golden Compass in…
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09 Nov

His Dark Materials Season 2 Episode 1 Review: The City of Magpies

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This His Dark Materials review contains spoilers. Here’s our spoiler-free review. In our world, it’s been almost a year since Lyra and Pan stepped through the hole Lord Asriel tore in the sky. And what a year. If ever the prospect of turning your back on one reality and escaping to another were attractive, it’s now. In lieu of Asriel’s scientific equipment and what might be termed broad-minded attitude towards the moral taboo of child murder, this is our hole in the sky: courtesy of the BBC and HBO, a seven-episode trip out of here. In episode one, His Dark Materials…
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09 Nov

His Dark Materials: Spectres Explained

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Warning: major spoilers for A Subtle Knife, book two in the His Dark Materials trilogy In His Dark Materials season two opener ‘The City of Magpies’, Lyra and Will find themselves in a new land. Cittàgazze is deserted but for a group of children left to fend for themselves after their parents came under attack. Some adults fled the city but others were caught by the Spectres, who drained them of the spark of life and turned them into blank-faced automatons, like the man Lyra and sees numbly and absently refilling a water jug in a city square. Spectres are invisible to children…
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05 Nov

His Dark Materials: Details on James McAvoy’s Missing Season 2 Episode

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The global pandemic has taken much from us, the least of which may be our regularly scheduled programming. While most late 2020 content had to be pushed to 2021 as a result of the outbreak of COVID-19, His Dark Materials was one of the few TV shows that had almost wrapped production when the outbreak of COVID-19 forced workplaces around the world to close. Because of this, we will be getting Season 2 in November… well, most of it. As we first learned during this year’s virtual San Diego Comic-Con, His Dark Materials was forced to cut an episode from…
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03 Nov

How His Dark Materials Expanded Its Writing Staff For Season 2

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The His Dark Materials TV series is massive in scope—not only in terms of film production, but in the sheer ambition of the story it is trying to tell. Adapted from the trilogy of the same name from Philip Pullman, the children’s fantasy saga brings together different worlds and the very different kinds of people and creatures who live in them. It’s an enormous project for one storyteller to undertake. In Season 1, the ridiculously prolific Jack Thorne wrote all eight episodes of His Dark Materials by himself. In Season 2, he has help. Up-and-coming British writers Namsi Khan, Francesca…
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27 Oct

His Dark Materials Season One Recap: Dust, Daemons and Betrayal

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Warning: contains major plot spoilers for His Dark Materials season one. His Dark Materials had so much world-building to do in season one that it took a little while to get moving. Once off the ground though, the BBC/HBO fantasy soared. By the time the story had landed in the Far North, a place of armoured bears, cruel scientific research facilities and windows to other worlds, the adaptation had captured the scope and excitement of Philip Pullman’s books. Before then, the foundations were being carefully laid to explain the nature of a world “both like and unlike our own” and to…
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DVD Guide reviews current dvd releases of movies and TV shows. The reviews of these dvd releases are my thoughts and understandings of the movie, dvd releases or TV show and not be taken as fact.

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