S02.E05: The Scholar

[Cranberry]

Quote

Will and Lyra set out to retrieve what's been lost. Mary takes a leap of faith.

Originally aired: December 6, 2020 (on BBC One; Dec 14 on HBO)

[Quark]

So good! Nice to see Pan get a little bigger.

[Cranberry]

Ruth Wilson was on fire this episode. I love that the show is giving her so much to do. Coulter's disdain for Boreal, her grudging respect for (and envy of) Malone, her protectiveness of Lyra, her betrayal when Lyra attacked her... all so good. I liked the confirmation that she can move far away from her daemon like a witch does, too (although clearly not happily, as her daemon showed). Is it because she's not as close with him (i.e. in tune with her inner self) as most people are with their daemons? Is she just really good at self-control, as she claims? Did she undergo a similar ritual to the witches? The one thing we can rule out is intercision, as she clearly isn't bland and compliant (essentially lobotomized) like the nurses at Bolvangar. I doubt the show will explain it, but I've always wondered.

[Capricasix]

Oh man, that was great. I think the hair was standing up on my arms when Lyra attacked her mother, and I was fiddling with the cap of my USB stick and clenched it so hard that it left red marks in the palm of my hand!

Love Mary Malone. I can’t wait

Spoiler

to see the mulefa, but I have a feeling we’ll have to wait until next season for that.

 

[ElectricBoogaloo]

Seeing Mrs. Coulter's daemon buckled into the seatbelt while they were in the car just cracked me up.

I also loved the look of undisguised disdain when she picked up the jeans between her finger and thumb.

And ooh, that realization first when she learned that women in this other world could have doctorates and be in charge of academic departments. There may be some shitty things about Will's world, but at least women can publish research under their own names. I wish I could say I was surprised when she said that her only option to publish her research was to let a man take credit for it, but rampant misogyny is never a surprise anymore in any time, place, world, etc.

I was convinced that Will and Lyra were not going to be able to escape the house unharmed with both the knife and the alethiometer so I was pleasantly surprised when they managed to get away. The way Lyra had Pan viciously attack her mother's daemon was shocking. I think Lyra and Mrs. Coulter were both as surprised as I was. I don't blame Lyra for not believing a word that her mother says though. She's already lied to her and betrayed her, so she has absolutely no reason to trust her. Mrs. Coulter can say that she wants to protect Lyra and help her, but Lyra has no reason to believe her. She's done nothing to earn Lyra's trust after all the shit she pulled last season.

Edited December 9, 2020 by ElectricBoogaloo

[AnimeMania]

That was a long episode for so little story progress.

I am sure there is a reason why Ms. Coulter knows how to drive, knows the rules of the road, and her way around the city.

[meligator]

I was so nervous about how they were going to get out of the house.  Whew that was an episode.  

[WatchrTina]

On 12/6/2020 at 7:35 PM, Cranberry said:

I liked the confirmation that she can move far away from her daemon like a witch does, too (although clearly not happily, as her daemon showed). Is it because she's not as close with him (i.e. in tune with her inner self) as most people are with their daemons? Is she just really good at self-control, as she claims? Did she undergo a similar ritual to the witches?

Oooh, I had forgotten that Lyra had noticed last season that Mrs. Coulter had the freakish ability to be far away from her daemon.  I was all set to wave a pitchfork over that inconsistency (since I think it's quite clear that Mrs. C does NOT have a friendly relationship with witches and therefore is unlikely to have been taught the trick by them.)  So . . . her ability is unexplained BUT consistent with what we've seen before.

 

2 hours ago, AnimeMania said:

I am sure there is a reason why Ms. Coulter knows how to drive, knows the rules of the road, and her way around the city.

Uh, yeah.  That bugged me too.  Feels like a . . . not a plot hole so much as an inconsistency in world-building.

 

This episode was so INTENSE!  The suspense over whether Lyra & Will would manage to get the alithiometer back without getting trapped or losing the knife was hard to sit through.  But I have to say the smackdown between Pan and the golden monkey daemon was satisfying to watch.  It was a long-overdue payback for that unprovoked and shocking attack on Pan in season one.  I rather enjoyed the degree to which Mrs. Coulter was incapacitated by the attack BUT . . . if Marissa and her daemon have such a loose relationship that they can be physically separated by large distances then it doesn't really make sense that an attack on the monkey would incapacitate Marissa to such a degree.  I guess if I have to fan-wank it then perhaps Marissa's reaction to the attack was the shock at having the tables turned and receiving violence at the hands of her daughter.  She can dish it out, but she can't take it.  

Marissa's daemon can't talk, can it?  (Or if it can, we've never seen it.)  So that's another suggestion that there is something odd in their relationship -- though perhaps daemons of adults speak ONLY to their human.  I can't recall -- in the first few episodes, when Lyra was running around with her little friend, did HIS daemon ever speak and if so, did it speak to Lyra and/or Pan or did it speak exclusively to the boy?

Edited December 15, 2020 by WatchrTina

[aghst]

1 hour ago, AnimeMania said:

That was a long episode for so little story progress.

I am sure there is a reason why Ms. Coulter knows how to drive, knows the rules of the road, and her way around the city.

Yeah I wondered about that, she took his Tesla keys and just drove herself to see Mary Malone?

Boreal (Charles Latrom) disdains the world of consumerism, how there are twice as many shops as churches.  Yet he likes the "best coffee in Oxford," his Tesla, his little collection, his swanky pad, the top shelf liquor, the speakers he controls with his iPad.

Marisa seems to like her modern clothes and new hairdo, as she looked at herself in the mirror, her alter ego in this different world.  She sees the possiblities here, especially for women, which may be why she disdains how Boreal has enriched himself trading trinkets, being  tempted by nice things.

She rolls her eyes at Boreal's overtures about them being together in this new world, tells him to turn off the music.  Only later, when she needs his help to try to reach Lyra in Cittagazze, she lounges towards him seductively and pokes at his male ego, asking you're going to let an "adolescent" take your prized Knife from you like that.

That confrontation was thrilling.  Golden monkey wasn't as menacing this time.  If it attacked Will when he reached for the alethiometer, he could have sliced in in reaction with the Knife.  It was suspenseful the way Mrs. Coulter was hidden out of view when they peered through the window and only saw Boreal.

Will and then of course Lyra were surprised to see Marisa.  I guess there were many things Lyra could have said to her mother, since she learned about the things she'd done, starting with running that place in Solvanger where Marisa had them running experiments on the abducted children including Roger.

How did Pan best the golden monkey?  Had he grown since the last confrontation with it?  Pan's aggression reflects Lyra's stance towards her mother.  She wasn't going to have any of Marisa's conciliatory tone.

Was quite the thrilling escape back to Cittagazze, where Lyra makes them some coffee.  Which is better Oxford coffee or Cittagazze coffee?

Mary Malone got quite useful intelligence from Dust communicating through the Cave.  But come on a former nun and now an academic is pretty streetwise enough to con the guard?

So the Dust/Dark Matter leads her to Cittagazze and Lyra.  But will she be safe from the Spectres?  She must find Will and Lyra straight away!

 

[Cerulean]

I noticed Boreal referred to Mary as “Malone”, not “Dr Malone” (or even Ms Malone). He also called all women arrogant and treated her badly when he met her last week. 

I don’t know if this is meant to characterize him poorly, or to foreshadow him underestimating Mrs Coulter. 

[AnimeMania]

7 hours ago, aghst said:

So the Dust/Dark Matter leads her to Cittagazze and Lyra.  But will she be safe from the Spectres?  She must find Will and Lyra straight away!

I thought the Specters were Dust, shouldn't they be nice to Malone since they asked her to come there?

If I was Malone I don't know how quick I would be to want to do the bidding of something out for revenge. That doesn't sound like a noble or worthwhile purpose.

[Natalie25]

2 hours ago, AnimeMania said:

I thought the Specters were Dust, shouldn't they be nice to Malone since they asked her to come there?

If I was Malone I don't know how quick I would be to want to do the bidding of something out for revenge. That doesn't sound like a noble or worthwhile purpose.

The Spectres aren't Dust, but they must be attracted by Dust (which seems to settle on adults only per the experiments in Season 1). Children don't attract as much dust and are free from attack until they grow up. Mary was told to go Cittagazze by the Angels, which are different from Spectres.

[Tachi Rocinante]

• Enjoyed this one, for the most part
• Ruth Wilson's permanent RBF is finally starting to grate on me. It takes me out of some scenes because her acting isn't strong enough to overcome it, especially in this episode.
• Boreal is a wuss.
• Could Coulter be an 'excommunicated' witch? Or is she just so strong-willed that she conditioned herself to move three feet further away every day, or something regimented like that?
• The little "X" wound above Will's left eyebrow kept changing shape. 
• Fuck yeah, Pan!
• Only 2 more episodes? So we're only getting 7 this season?
• The Expanse comes back tomorrow! (Sorry, couldn't resist)

[iMonrey]

I call bullshit on that whole fight scene. Once they saw the aletheometer sitting out in the open (which, again, why?) there was no reason that Will couldn't have pinpointed its exact location, walked right up to it, and sliced a small window open, then reach in and grab it and yank it back into his own world. They even showed him counting the steps to where it was sitting. So when he actually stepped through, and was still several feet away, and closed the window behind him, I just groaned because it felt so very contrived.  It was obviously all set up for a big, tense, fight and escape situation. 

This would have worked better if there had been some reason for Will and Lyra to pull it off that way - like maybe in their world there was a wall or something where the alethiometer was sitting so they weren't able to get close enough to it. Anything to explain this cockamamie plan. 

Yes it was very suspenseful and exciting but it was completely unnecessary. This was perhaps the clumsiest writing/directing I've seen on this show.

[Lady S.]

On 12/9/2020 at 3:58 AM, ElectricBoogaloo said:

Seeing Mrs. Coulter's daemon buckled into the seatbelt while they were in the car just cracked me up.

Yeah, that image stayed with me for the rest of the ep so I didn't even wonder how she knew how to drive a car later. However I did wonder how Mary Malone knew the exact spelling of her name to google. It's not like Coulter had a business card to give out or anything, unless I missed that.

 

14 hours ago, WatchrTina said:

Oooh, I had forgotten that Lyra had noticed last season that Mrs. Coulter had the freakish ability to be far away from her daemon.  I was all set to wave a pitchfork over that inconsistency (since I think it's quite clear that Mrs. C does NOT have a friendly relationship with witches and therefore is unlikely to have been taught the trick by them.)  So . . . her ability is unexplained BUT consistent with what we've seen before.

I'm choosing to believe that the reveal that the witches' daemon-distance ability is not innate but achieved through trial was meant to imply that any non-witch could do the same if she somehow learned the ritual. Otherwise I don't see the point of that exposition being delivered that way as the witches' ambassador dude had no reason to tell the Magisterium about that secret completely unprompted. I do also like the idea that she just has that much inner-power and inhumanity, though.

I'm also connecting the vo from a couple eps back about the knife-makers just hoarding shit instead of using it for any higher purpose with Boreal's situation. It appears he's just used his years world hopping through unclosed windows to collect a bunch of treasures that only he knows he has, with no deeper agenda. I have to agree with Coulter about how lame that is. 

14 hours ago, WatchrTina said:

Marissa's daemon can't talk, can it?  (Or if it can, we've never seen it.)  So that's another suggestion that there is something odd in their relationship -- though perhaps daemons of adults speak ONLY to their human.  I can't recall -- in the first few episodes, when Lyra was running around with her little friend, did HIS daemon ever speak and if so, did it speak to Lyra and/or Pan or did it speak exclusively to the boy?

Roger's daemon definitely spoke but I don't remember if it ever spoke to Lyra. 

14 hours ago, aghst said:

How did Pan best the golden monkey?  Had he grown since the last confrontation with it?  Pan's aggression reflects Lyra's stance towards her mother.  She wasn't going to have any of Marisa's conciliatory tone.

 

Mary Malone got quite useful intelligence from Dust communicating through the Cave.  But come on a former nun and now an academic is pretty streetwise enough to con the guard.

 

As a child's daemon, Pan can still change forms and be as big as he wants. And I assume the attacking daemon would always have an extra advantage as their human would not be the one immediately incapacitated. 

It helped that the guard was pretty incompetent. Just knowing "Latrom's" first name meant she must be his lady friend and authorized to go through with no identification and no Boreal/Latrom at her side. That guy's probably gonna get fired.

[mjc570]

I had to laugh at Mrs. Coulter's reaction to the jeans.  I assume that was included to show how little Carlo understands her.  I admit I had to feel sorry for her - she's done terrible things (although I think she was forced into a lot of it), but there is no question she loves Lyra.  

Mary M. is still my favorite character.  I don't think she was streetwise or anything like that, but smart enough to pick up on the guard's mistake.

All in all, a pretty satisfying episode, except for the plot induced stupidity of Will.

[WatchrTina]

3 hours ago, mjc570 said:

 I had to feel sorry for her [Mrs. Coulter] - she's done terrible things (although I think she was forced into a lot of it), but there is no question she loves Lyra.  

I question it.  I don't understand her relationship with Lyra but I would certainly not call it love.  To my mind it's more along the lines of "I know I'm supposed to care about this girl -- I gave birth to her and she's the product of a forbidden passion that almost cost me everything -- but she's SO annoying and troublesome -- I think I'll torture her a bit by having my daemon beat up her daemon -- that'll show her who's boss!"  Yeah, that's not love.  It's more like a creepy love-hate obsession.

Edited December 16, 2020 by WatchrTina

[iMonrey]

Quote

I question it.  I don't understand her relationship with Lyra but I would certainly not call it love.  To my mind it's more along the lines of "I know I'm supposed to care about this girl -- I gave birth to her and she's the product of a forbidden passion that almost cost me everything -- but she's SO annoying and troublesome -- I think I'll torture her a bit by having my daemon beat up her daemon -- that'll show her who's boss!"  Yeah, that's not love.  It's more like a creepy love-hate obsession.

Agreed. Coulter is such a cypher I rarely understand what's going on in her brain. The most transparent she has been was in her conversation with Boreal about her resentment against the misogyny of her world where she can't have a doctorate like Mary or even publish a paper with her name on it. That was genuine emotion. What she feels for other people is a baffling mystery. 

[Llywela]

I think the show has made fairly clear that mostly what Mrs Coulter feels for other people is rage. And contempt. She keeps a very tight lid on it, because Mrs Coulter is all about control, but the rage seems to always be there, in all her interactions, simmering beneath the surface. She considers herself to be better than just about everyone she meets, yet has always been constrained by The System, so she looks around and she sees other people, lesser people, being given advantages she herself is denied, and she feels rage, which has been burning for so long she can no longer feel anything else. Whatever satisfaction she has ever achieved in her life has stemmed from her ability to manipulate and control those who have constrained her, in order to achieve her own ends in spite of everything that's been stacked against her all her life. Control (and power) seems to be her greatest desire in life, control over both herself and everything around her.

What she feels for Lyra is more complex. I don't think it is love. I don't think she is capable of love. She clearly feels some sense of responsibility for Lyra and it seems clear that she wants her to be safe, but primarily I'd say she wants to control Lyra, the way she seeks to control everyone else who crosses her path. But Lyra defies control in a way that both frightens and intrigues her, so that the more Lyra pushes her away, the more Mrs Coulter desires to keep her close, to achieve that control.

Edited December 16, 2020 by Llywela

[tennisgurl]

I don't know if what Mrs. Coulter feels for Lyra would really be what is considered love, its more like...responsibility? A sort of clinical interest in what a child she produced can do? She feels something for Lyra, possibly its as close to love as someone like her is capable of, but its sure as hell not anything healthy or anything that Lyra will want any part of. 

The relationship between Mrs. Coulter and her daemon has always seemed off, did she do the ritual that the Witches do to keep distance from their daemon? They showed last season that she could be away from her daemon in ways that no one else can, plus we never hear her daemon talk to her, which I guess could just be because of how internal she is, but it still feels weird considering most daemon's talk to their person pretty frequently. As terrible as she is, I did actually feel for her a bit as she was realizing how different her life could be in this world, where she could have so many more opportunities as a woman, its probably the most emotion we have seen from her beyond rage. Which probably says a lot about her, she can chat about the children she kidnapped and did horrible experiments on with a cold smile but she gets all emotional thinking about how much her societies injustices have adversely affected HER. 

Seeing characters jumping from world to world is interesting. Mrs. Coulter holding those jeans with a look of confusion and disdain was pretty great. 

[aghst]

Supposedly the relationship between people and their daemons are suppose to be really affectionate, intimate, like BFF.

Marisa doesn't seem to like anyone.  Would she still love Asriel if she wasn't forced to end the affair as she alludes to?

She does soften her approach when she's talking to Lyra rather than being dismissive when she's talking to most everyone else.  Almost like she's trying to win her over instead of making her heel.

Is that out of motherly love or maybe she's also aware of these other prophecies about Lyra, knows she's special?

I can't recall but was she surprised to learn that Lyra was reading the alethiometer naturally?

[Enigma X]

It seems to me that Mrs. Coulter can't like or love her daemon because she does not like or love herself.

Edited December 18, 2020 by Enigma X

[Speakeasy]

On 12/18/2020 at 5:55 PM, Enigma X said:

It seems to me that Mrs. Coulter can't like or love her daemon because she does not like or love herself.

The use of daemons in this season has been especially great in terms of using them to show the state of the characters. Coulter's abuse of hers always freaks me out because it shows she is basically beating herself into submission so she can do get her shit done.

It makes me think she's attempting to follow some kind of stoic ideal about subordinating her passions to reason, but in a massively toxic way that just ends up as intense self loathing and general rage powering a tremendous force of will.

The Wolverine Vs Monkey fight was intense, wow. Brilliantly similar to what the monkey did to Pan in season 1 and both... Vindicating to see Lyra able to stand up to Coulter but disturbing to see her acting so much like her.

Also great thing you can do with daemons is have a battle of wills be an actual battle.

[Black Knight]

On 12/18/2020 at 9:55 AM, Enigma X said:

It seems to me that Mrs. Coulter can't like or love her daemon because she does not like or love herself.

Agreed, with an additional complication: We learned in S1 she's compartmentalized daemons from humans. Instead of seeing daemons as an exterior manifestation of humans' souls, she believes daemons drive humans into sin, hence her big plan to have all children severed from their daemons, thus keeping children pure into adulthood and eliminating sin from the world. She blames her daemon for the sin of her affair with Asriel, which is actually correct in the sense that her daemon is her, but she doesn't accept that. Her belief is that daemons are a manifestation of original sin, rather than the manifestation of a human's soul. So she hates her daemon in two ways: The one she acknowledges, that daemons are basically exterior agents of Dust responsible for their humans sinning (in her opinion); and the one she doesn't acknowledge, where she hates her daemon because she hates herself and the daemon is herself.

Deep down, does she know she's full of shit and that she's the one responsible for her sins? Probably. But she's so good at compartmentalization and self-control that that knowledge is buried under so many layers of deluded rationalizations that I'm not sure it could ever actually come to the surface of her awareness.

[Frisson]

On 12/17/2020 at 11:55 AM, tennisgurl said:

I don't know if what Mrs. Coulter feels for Lyra would really be what is considered love, its more like...responsibility? A sort of clinical interest in what a child she produced can do? She feels something for Lyra, possibly its as close to love as someone like her is capable of, but its sure as hell not anything healthy or anything that Lyra will want any part of. 

The relationship between Mrs. Coulter and her daemon has always seemed off, did she do the ritual that the Witches do to keep distance from their daemon? They showed last season that she could be away from her daemon in ways that no one else can, plus we never hear her daemon talk to her, which I guess could just be because of how internal she is, but it still feels weird considering most daemon's talk to their person pretty frequently. 

Based on the scene with Lee in the episode where they talked about abuse, I wonder if maybe her parents did something to her daemon so that it wouldn’t talk to her and be able to distance itself? 

[angora]

Good discussion on Mrs. Coulter's ability to travel a long distance from her daemon/withstand Pan's attack on him. Watching her slowly steel herself and rise to her feet while the daemons were fighting, I was struck by Lee's conversation with her in episode 3: she can "take the pain." If it's painful/damaging for non-witches to be separated from their daemon, she taught herself to bear it because she saw how it could be advantageous. That's why the monkey freaks out when she leaves him behind to talk to Mary Malone, because *he* knows how hard it is to be apart, but Mrs. Coulter's goals matter more to her than the pain. And when Pan attacks the monkey, she *is* hurt; she's knocked to the ground and clearly going through it. But she fights through the pain to stand and stare Lyra down.