Welcome to Meta Station’s first recap of “His Dark Materials,” the perfect show for a podcast hosted by an atheist English professor and a Catholic playwright. Join us for a deep dive into the transformation of the books from page to screen, with side quests into climate change, Vatican II, “Paradise Lost,” gender fluidity, and Galileo. Plus, we lay out a careful plan about avoiding spoilers and then forget it immediately, of COURSE Erin knows the Milton quote Philip Pullman got the series title from, and Claire hops in the wayback machine to reminisce about being a youth minister when these books first blew up in the U.S.
Grab your alethiometer and your bottle of secret crypt wine, we’re going on an adventure!
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0:00 – Hello, New Listeners, and Welcome Back, Old Friends!
0:02 – Page to Screen Adaptation, Part I: Asriel, Lyra and Narrative Perspective
0:21 – We Stan a Relatable 11-Year-Old Who Is Sometimes a Butthead
0:27 – Page to Screen Adaptation, Part II: Dramatic Irony, Pacing Big Reveals for Television, and How Ruth Wilson Almost Convinced Us, Too
0:44 – The Gyptian Daemon Ceremony: Our Need for Ritual, the Magisterium’s Dehumanization of Religion, and the Return of Claire’s Catholicism Corner
1:10 – Pan-Daemonium
1:34 – Galileo, Climate Change, and Dust: The Politics of Scientific Knowledge
1:55 – The Magisterium, the Master, and the Moral Bankruptcy of Incentivizing Ignorance
2:02 – Erin Rambles On About Miltonian Cosmology, and All Is Right With Meta Station
