When I first learned that HBO was making an adaptation of His Dark Materials, one of my all-time favorite book series, I couldn’t have been more excited. As fans know, the first screen adaptation of HDM was noteworthy only for being the most forgettable movie ever to star Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman. But if ever there were a series tailor-made for the HBO prestige treatment, it’s His Dark Materials, a series that rose to SF/F superstardom by grappling with themes of religion, authoritarianism, true love, and simply growing up, via the premise of an incredibly elegantly executed fantasy multiverse. There was no possible way this could be bad, I thought.

For those not familiar with His Dark Materials, here’s some quick background. The three books in the trilogy are titled The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass. The first book is the best, although parts of the third are among the best SF/F ever written. HDM is widely known as Philip Pullman’s argument for atheism, but The Golden Compass is somewhat less about religion and more about the mystery of adulthood, vis-a-vis the idea that something special happens when humans become adults. The aim of the series, and of TGC in particular, is to explore that change through the lens of fantasy.

Mostly, the new HDM pilot succeeds at this goal. It has signature HBO production values and acting — most notably Ruth Wilson as Mrs. Coulter, Lucian Msamati as a pitch-perfect John Faa, and Dafne Keen, who imbues Lyra with the essential verve and vigor her movie counterpart lacked. Still, their combined efforts can only carry the second half of the pilot. The rest of the episode is bogged down by bad characterization and a complete inability to show rather than tell.

Ruth Wilson as Mrs. Coulter.

One reason TGC resonates so much with readers is that the book is also structured in a way that mirrors the process of growing up. When the reader is first introduced to Lyra and Pantalaimon, there is no preface explaining daemons or that the books take place in an alternate universe. Instead, we are thrown into the world and left to figure it out on our own, just as children are born into a world they don’t understand and must orient themselves by the cues they receive. At each step in the plot, we don’t just experience the story, we learn more about what adulthood means in this alternate universe, and therefore more about what it means for us.

So I was disappointed by writer Jack Thorne’s decision to emulate the movie in showing a beginning text that explains daemons and that Lyra’s Jordan is in a different world than our own Oxford. This tell-don’t-show philosophy completely screws up the first half of the episode. Since the placard has already told us Lyra is special, we don’t get a filmed version of the book’s introduction to her character, a sequence which introduced the gyptians and helped us better understand daemons while establishing the cheery tone needed to contrast the book’s ending. Thorne even extrapolates this lack of character into Lyra being a loner with only one friend, cutting against the basic plot of the books, in which Lyra achieves much through her ability to socialize and influence others. In the parlance of Wicked, Lyra is fundamentally Glinda, not Elphaba. The story doesn’t make sense without that.

The opening placard also screws up the episode’s worldbuilding. At multiple points, daemons are simply not given enough visual emphasis. We don’t see Pan getting in the cupboard with Lyra, nor do we see Asriel explicitly check for him when he pulls Lyra out. We don’t see the servants’ or most of the Scholars’ daemons on the sidelines, or even the Master’s daemon once he leaves his study. We don’t see Ma Costa’s daemon at any time, even during her son’s daemon-settling ceremony. Even Farder Coram’s cat daemon, described as supernaturally beautiful in the book, is inconsistently on screen. I’m sure there were budgetary constraints, but these should have prompted innovations. For example: do daemons poop? If so, how would that inspire the redesign of spaces we take for granted? This is the kind of thing I loved imagining when I first read The Golden Compass, and I’m beyond disappointed that neither Thorne nor director Tom Hooper considered it in their adaptation.

Lucian Msamati as John Faa and Anne-Marie Duff as Ma Costa.

Even worse, their attempts to fill these gaps are clumsy at best. Take the filler scenes with Lord Asriel photographing the city in the Northern Lights, and later throwing Lyra off the airship when she leaves. Although these scenes are meant to broaden the story, they add so little in terms of new plot information, and detract so much from the tone, that they paradoxically make it smaller: a story about a guy who’s just too busy to take care of a kid, rather than a story about a girl discovering herself and the world as she grows up. They try to backfill this characterization by having Lyra engage in some cringe-inducingly expository dialogue with Pantalaimon and Roger, but that doesn’t work either. The characters sound like bad cosplayers at Comic-Con, with none of the lyricism Pullman used to evoke his 1920s-esque Oxford.

A rare example of a good scene in the first half of the episode was with Lyra and the Librarian, where he reads from the Bible of their world, “And your eyes shall be open, and your daemons shall settle, and you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” This scene accomplished multiple aims in the way prestige television is supposed to: it underlined the importance of both religion and daemons settling to this world, while showing rather than telling that the Librarian likes and cares for Lyra, even as she’s bored by formal lessons but knows just how to manipulate the people around her. It’s like a peek into yet another alternate universe, where this episode was transcendentally good.

One early scene that I’m still torn on is the gyptians’ daemon-settling ceremony. It’s by far the most watchable scene in the episode, and yet, I’m not sure that it makes sense in the world of HDM. It was always my impression that most people don’t notice exactly when their daemon settles , but that it changes less and less as you get older, and eventually both you and it realize that it doesn’t really feel like changing anymore. (I’ve also always thought it was unrealistic for daemons to settle in adolescence — mid-20s to early 30’s seems far more plausible.) After all, this idea that you know for sure when you’re really an adult is in fact a childish one, and the point of HDM is to introduce adult ideas through a young adult lens. Still, it was a beautifully imagined ceremony that fit well with the gyptians’ communal culture. I particularly liked that each family donated a bit of silver to make Tony’s ring.

Dafne Keen as Lyra and Ruth Wilson as Mrs. Coulter.

Then there’s my least favorite part of the pilot, James McAvoy’s portrayal of Lord Asriel. McAvoy leans hard into Asriel’s humanity, playing him as someone torn between many kinds of important work. Although I understand the choice, it doesn’t seem at all true to the plot demands of Asriel’s character. On the one hand, Lord Asriel is indeed a marginally better person than most HDM authority figures: he visits Lyra occasionally, advocates for the gyptians in political struggles, and later puts himself on the side of “good.” But he is never motivated by love or kindness. Instead, it’s always clear that he does these things because he finds conventional routes to power too stifling. Lord Asriel isn’t a man beset by moral qualms trying to fix a bad situation, but one whose ambitions are so large that he can’t bear to apply himself to anything less than upending the entire multiverse. This purely egotistical motivation is the only way to resolve the most important action he takes in TGC, and Thorne’s and McAvoy’s inability to tap into that is largely responsible for the pilot’s rough feel. Even to someone unfamiliar with the source material, it’s obvious that Asriel doesn’t quite seem to inhabit the same world as everyone around him.

To be clear, I’m not only upset about these things because they’re different from the book. They change the tone of the series in a way that fundamentally contradicts its anti-authoritarian message, by shifting focus from Lyra to her domineering older relative. Hopefully this will turn out well, and the series will overall feel very similar to the book but with somewhat more emphasis on the male characters. The worst case, of course, is that it might somehow turn into another Game of Thrones, which had similar red flags at the beginning of its run.

Still, there are plenty of things to enjoy in this pilot. As I mentioned earlier, Dafne Keen, Ruth Wilson, and Lucian Msamati hit their characters out of the park. Wilson brings every bit of Mrs. Coulter’s glamour and magnetism to the screen, Keen ably embodies Lyra’s passion and fighting spirit, and Msamati basically becomes John Faa. The show also mostly looks beautiful, from the night scene in the gyptians’ camp to the interiors of airships. If nothing else, it seems likely to be a truly interesting visual spectacle.

So I’ll still be tuning in next week. But I hope this rote feeling, that the series was written by the numbers, fades away. The Golden Compass is a classic for a reason, and it deserves more thought than this adaptation has put in so far.

The good parts: