‘I saw a big brown bear and a smaller, darker,
Romping like big rubber toys’
– Ted Hughes, ‘The 59th Bear’
My first reaction to ‘The Fight To The Death’ was that, sadly, it’s another case of all the adaptational flaws coming together into one fault-line. Involving as it does a fight to the death, it once again comes up against the immovable object of pre-watershed censorship of violence – dealt with as clumsily as usual, in one case with a jarring cut, but in another, some truly awful blocking places the offending content in the background, where the viewer is unable to have their sensibilities nudged, or to really tell what’s going on.
So as flaws go, that’s the frontrunner. (Side-note: this really throws into sharp relief how much more you can get away with on the page than onscreen.) The latter example, the worst offender present, is the titular fight to the death, that’s the one the whole episode is – should have been – built around and leading up to, and it’s not even immediately clear who’s won.
It’s a shame, because most of the leadup is done fairly well. Svalbard, like Bolvangar, is another excellently designed set that looks straightforwardly evil. Lyra’s first contact there is with Asheq Akhtar’s overacted exposition-dump, who, having gone a bit loopy in prison, is reminiscent of nobody quite so much as the sadly departed Rik Mayall as Mad Gerald in the first season of Blackadder, only without the funny faces.
(“How are you today, Mad Gerald?…I’m completely mad, thank you!”)
That was, of course, a comedy, but even so Mayall had set an incredibly high bar for unhinged prisoners. However, Nina Sosanya’s also set an incredibly high bar, within this show, for playing people with mental health problems. Since we’re reminded of this within ‘The Fight To The Death’ – and God, don’t you just want to wrap her up in a blanket – Akhtar can’t help put come across like a pale shadow of her performance.
This, luckily, is quickly shunted aside in favour of Joi Johannson’s glorious, ham-tier Iofur Raknison, who comes floating in like some great barrage balloon, utterly self-assured and utterly credulous at the same time. When he showed up previously I described him as having something Disneyish about him, which could so easily have been a sling and/or arrow, but it’s meant in the best of ways, and this still applies here. You wouldn’t be surprised to see him suddenly burst into song and deliver a musical number about how much he loves killing and eating walruses.
Dafne Keen’s Lyra is the perfect foil for this kind of huge Toblerone of a villain, since it emphasises her vulnerability in a way even the whole child-catcher arc didn’t. Even though one’s a flesh-and-blood child and one’s a creation of elaborate CGI, it’s a joy to see them bouncing off each other. Wherein lies the problem: there’s simply not enough of it.
If I had to sum up ‘The Fight To The Death’ in a word, it’d be ‘rushed’. The actual Svalbard section, which should clearly be the centrepiece here, is crammed into – at most – half the runtime. When the actual fight to the death comes, it’s barely halfway through the episode, and hasn’t received nearly the setup required to make for a suitable climax. We’ve only just been told what’s going to happen and why before the show’s already jumping headlong into it and barrelling through onto the next plot point on the list – by this, I mainly mean the fight itself, and I’ve already touched on how that was mishandled. There’s no real matchup, no consideration of either party’s strengths and weaknesses, advantages and disadvantages, instead it’s just two great big white blobs of CGI playing Twister for a minute or two before the show moves promptly along.
What would likely have alleviated this apparent time pressure would have been the episode not feeling the need to check in with all the other running plotlines. Will, at least, gets a bit to do, but the rest are little more than distractions, especially the Magisterium, which has always been a non-starter. The books left the Magisterium itself largely in the background, and now that this adaptation’s brought them to the fore, it’s easy to see why. So while this isn’t strictly speaking all the flaws coming together – although that depends largely on your point of view – it is still the adaptational decisions running into each other and in so doing producing a bit of a snarl.
Despite having all these balls in the air, ‘The Fight To The Death’ finds time for some of the seemingly obligatory long shots of its child stars travelling through an Arctic landscape. Now, we’ve already covered how the episode’s trying to deal with a lot and its pacing has suffered as a result, but I’m not going to criticise these bits in and of themselves. If anything, there could stand to be more little interludes like this – not necessarily travelling sequences, just pauses in the action long enough to let the show establish a sense of wonder.
The armoured bears are fantastical enough as it is, and it’s via them that here we get a reference to blood-moss, one of a number of minor similar-but-different elements of the Materiverse that makes it clear that this is a different world to ours (chocolatl, anyone?). It’s this kind of world-building that makes fantasy fantasy, and also shows the problem with the show having brought ‘our’ world into proceedings only five minutes in.
(Though to be fair, the aurora borealis is very much a thing of our world, but having scenes lit up by its softly changing light is plenty fantastical.)
Of course, what really makes the armoured bears fantastical is being armoured bears. Iorek’s introduction of losing his armour because he was brought low by being pissed-up on booze was quintessential tragedy, and when he got his armour back, we knew he meant business. So above all else, I cannot fathom why the fight to the death, in an episode called ‘The Fight To The Death’, would have two armoured bears not wearing their armour. This is like Clint Eastwood’s man with no name foregoing his revolver to bludgeon a man to death with a rubber chicken.
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