His Dark Materials (TV Series) The Clouded Mountain (2022) User Reviews

It's all rip roaring, crazy, non-nonsensical fun, so best not to overthink it.

[SJEinTexas · 7/10 · 18 January 2023]

I agree with an earlier reviewer that new plot devices just seem to pop out of nowhere in this episode. Although, since that seems to happen with regularity in most of the episodes, one almost comes to expect it by this episode.

BTW, season 2 episode 6 establishes that Mrs. Coulter can somehow control Specters. However, how she now has gained the ability to eviscerate them as well is one of the many new non-nonsensical plot devices.

And, what the heck, why wouldn't the seemingly god-like, all powerful, all controlling, ultimate evil antagonist, Metatron, also known as the Authority (who can also manipulate the flow of dust), lure Mrs. Coulter and her ex-lover Astriel into his sky fortress, where he takes human form (which was his original form?) and is wrestled into the dust rift and destroyed?

And, yes, why not use Steampunk weaponry and tactics from a physical realm to fight off all manner of creatures from a spiritual realm? It's been established in all the previous episodes that it makes perfectly good sense, so why not double down on it in this episode?

It makes one wonder about what kinds of chemicals were being ingested by the authors when this series was written.

Anyway, why am I giving this episode seven stars?

Well, in the end, it was all rip roaring, crazy fun after all, wasn't it, so it's best not to overthink it. :-)

The Ultimate Sacrifice

[claudio_carvalho · 6/10 · 26 April 2023]

The war between Asriel and Metatron's armies begins. Mrs. Coulter protects the population and army from the Spectrums, and then she lures Metatron, proposing an alliance. When Asriel sees Marisa going to meet Metatron, her heads his vehicle to Heaven to meet them. Meanwhile, Lyra and Will seek out their demons and are protected by a troop.

"The Clouded Mountain" is the penultimate episode of "His Dark Materials". Like most of the episodes of the Third Season, a deceptive episode. The ultimate sacrifice from Lord Asriel and Mrs. Marisa Coulter to win the war is noble. My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): "The Clouded Mountain"

I'm sorry, did I fall asleep

[felix-bergman · 5/10 · 27 September 2023]

Not surprisingly the series makes wanted to amp up this fight to take more center stage than it did in the book, where it mostly plays out in the periphery while Will and Lyra look for their daemons. But it never got interesting. A bunch of red and blue dots colliding in mid air. The pansarbjörnar who does show up in the book was apparently too expensive to animate, the specters has a very short lived cameo role with no real satisfactory explanation as to how Marisa could just obliterate them all, when in the book this is when both Lyra and Will can see them for the first time.

They tried to add some backstory to King Ogunwe in the series, but I'm not invested at all in what happens to him or his people. Despite his lack of development in the book he was a much more interesting character there in my opinion.

In the book it was a big point that Metatron had once been human and still longed for human flesh, particularly women, which is Marisas whole plan going there, seducing him and tricking him into leaving the clouded mountain and go to Asriel. The show looked like it could have gone there, but ended up just being boring talk and some punches to the face instead. And I'm sorry, I know it's stated in the books that Marisa seems to be getting unusually far from hear daemon for not being severed, but this is getting ridiculous what we see in this episode.

And Will and Lyra looks like they are out on a Sunday Stroll rather than trying to find their daemons in the middle of a full scale war. What made this scene so tense in the book despite most of the battle being in the background is the urgency of finding the daemons before the bad guys do, eventually leading to them grabbing each others daemons by mistake. But here they act like there is no urgency at all and it's basically already over by the time they find them, so it just feels forced that they are sending them to yet another world.

And unless I missed something (I DID fall asleep but I think I rewound everything I slept through) they never explained the chariot with the authority. In the book, Metatron is the regent, but the actual Authority, the incredibly old angel who was claimed to be The God in many religions throughout all universes, was still around, to frail to do anything, but still needed to be kept alive by Metatron. So as the battle starts The Authority is transported away from the battle in a sort of casket, but his guard is attacked by cliff ghasts and Will and Lyra find him and think he looks so old and sad they let him out, at which he dies. We see this death in the series, but unless I missed something, someone who hasn't read the book will have absolutely 0 idea what that was all about. They just find a random glowing cube on the battlefield after the battle is all done and decide to cut it open and for like two seconds we see some old dude laying there before disappearing and we have no idea what just happened.

She can do magic now?

[Rob-O-Cop · 7/10 · 7 January 2023]

I liked that this show didn't fall over backward to explain the different worlds to us, but it lost its way when it just dropped plot armor in out of nowhere.

Where exactly did Mrs Coulter show any magic ability before she went on to the balcony raised her hands in the air and evaporated all the attacking angels? Cos everyone was getting their arses handed to them by the incredibly more powerful angel forces against the ww2 rifles, with the exception of Asriel's awesome aircraft fitted with state of the art rail guns, which he only built one of in the whole of the world, with nothing coming anywhere near it, he's a real Rick Sanchez it would seem, Then there's Metatron, a name that didn't age well, but no one even talks to him, finds out what his aim is, why is he evil exactly? It's a big fight but there are so many vague elements to it. And apparently the witches had a full handle on it all along but just failed to tell anyone as they do a good 5 mins of exposition in the next episode laying it all out. They could have saved everyone a lot of time and energy if they'd laid this down at the beginning.

It all lead to this but when we got there it didn't really make logical sense and let the previous 2 and a half series down.

The Clouded Mountain

[Prismark10 · 6/10 · 30 March 2023]

The ending suggests that this would be the final episode but it really is the penultimate episode.

This is the one that has the big fight between Lord Asriel's army and Metatron's army of Angels and Spectres.

The Metatron went to a floating city called the Cloud, which was above Asriel's base.

Mrs Coulter sides with the Metatron that looks like a reversal from her recent behaviour. However it is all a ruse to buy Asriel more time.

Not having read the book. I thought the episode was nothing too much out of the ordinary for the third series. The climax was a much needed jolt though.

Both Lord Asriel and Mrs Coulter sacrifice their lives to take down Metatron. Their daemons fade away signifying the finality of their deaths.

Both of Lyra's parents were complex characters. Now it is up to Lyra and Will to carry the story.