His Dark Materials

This week, we're talking about Chelsea's all time favorite trilogy: His Dark Materials. We discuss the original controvery, initial impressions of the new series, and tolerate a bit of nerdiness from Chelsea. This is our first episode that we discussed without watching the rest of the series.

His Dark Materials is thick with references to classic literature, art, and philosophy. After the episode, we learned that Lyra and her daemon were partially inspired by "The Lady with an Ermine" painting, which is currently in an art museum in Krakow. View it here. The trilogy has also been compared to Paradise Lost and shares many of its core themes. But the most obscure inspiration for this story is The Blazing World, in which a young woman is able to travel to another world through the North Pole and finds a planet with talking animals (including bears).

Special thanks to our brothers, Nick Pula and Ben Wilton, for making this episode possible.