1. Lost Again
Only four episodes in, the group already finds themselves separated, spread out across the world. After an encounter with some hill giants, Niko and Lyra end up hurled into a deep dark wood that projects their regrets in front of them. Mandok winds up in a nearby town where he’s trying to bargain for food while being hunted by those opposum things. And Flicker wraps himself in a cocoon to take on his newest form. The Niko and Lyra story makes up the main plot, which reveals how Nar Est was able to take power and the world fell, while also forcing Lyra to confront more of her mistakes. “This forest is filled with whole centuries of regret I don’t want to revisit,” she says at one point.
2. It’s a Thrill
As Niko and the Sword of Light makes more headway into its story, it’s also getting more confident in its delivery. Like last week’s episode, the action sequences here are becoming more effective and interesting instead of just some random action we watch happen. We start getting a bit of a jolt whenever Niko ignites his sword and shouts whatever move he’s going to use. The monster in “From the Phantom Woods to the Mountains of Misery” is a mushroom-shaped, one eyed conjurer, who takes the images the Shouldcoulda Wood creates and manifests them into something tangible. It dissipates into pollen spores and uses an elaborate system of winding, twisting branches to find a perspective on everything. The creators, this time under the direction of Geoffrey Thorne, are finding more methods of working around Flash’s limitations, relying on moody coloring, deliberate layering, and scale to get us more invested in these characters’ plight.
The show also continues to do well at developing Lyra. Here, she realizes she has to make peace with her past choices before she can move forward. The creators also make sure to go out of their way to show that Niko is processing all her failures and lessons, in his own way, and is making choices to fight for the light based off everything he’s witnessed from her. Right now, their main objective is to try to get to this pond which will hopefully age Niko up into being the great, fully grown warrior they hoped would have emerged from the crystal, but I don’t think these lessons, the observations, these decisions could have been made if Niko wasn’t still in the process of discovering the world himself.
3. Wrinkles and All
Of course, Niko and the Sword of Light still has some kinks to work out. I’m not entirely sold on Mandok and those opposum things that were the Lion King hyena hybrid are even more grating now they’ve been separated. Even this early in the series’ run, we’re still seeing a lot of repetitive narrative devices. For instance, each other these last episodes have ended with our heroes in some messy predicament — at the end of “From the Swamp of Sorrows to the Hills of Humiliation,” the ground suddenly erupts under our heroes’ feet as the mountains are coming alive. But the resolution isn’t as dramatic or intense as the show has you believe. This episode opens with the hill giants arguing about the rules of rockby in thick Scottish accents before they fling Niko and Lyra into parts unknown. It ends with them falling into the ocean, surrounded by a bunch of piranha-looking fools. This device is cute and makes us want to start the next episode, but the resolution is a fake out and feels cheap.
I also don’t think the show has figured out Nar Est entirely yet. He’s an interesting looking villain and features some of the most imaginative animation the show has offered so far; however, his overall motivations are fairly basic and bland. He corrupts the Great Jewel for power or something? I mean, I’m sure as the show continues we’ll learn more about him but as it stands now, Nar Est is sort of some out-of-focus obstacle these characters will eventually have to deal with rather than a direct and total threat.
4. Watching the World Fall
The biggest revelation in “From the Phantom Woods to the Mountains of Misery” is how Nar Est took power and oboy does it get dark. Through her regrets and memories, Niko watches the king of the old kingdom fall ill, poised by his trusted advisor, Nar Est. In a bid for total power, Nar Est corrupts the Great Jewel with dark magic. Lyra manages to save a shard and keep her kingdom in some frozen time trap. We watch the city fall, caught in the inevitable web Nar Est constructed.
Continued belowIt’s all fairly dramatic and well wrought but what interests me most is how early this information came up. We’re only four episodes into a 13-episode season, with another apparently on the way, it seems soon, structurally, for this information to be revealed. Consider, we didn’t learn anything about Voldemort until Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Which only tells me that we’re going to see the dismantling of Lyra’s memory or a sort of backwards fix of Nar Est’s destruction. Now that I write about it, I think it might be a bold decision, something hopefully the show explores.
5. Still Plenty to Head Out On
There are plenty of great lines tonight. One of the other things Niko and the Sword of Light is getting better at doing is giving out one-liners. “WITNESS MY REASONING SKILL!” Niko yells.
“Just a sliver of light chases away a lot of darkness,” Lyra says.
“You are the strangest sort of woodland creature. A creature made of woodlands.”
One last question though: Niko at a piece of breadfruit being projected at him. Thorne makes sure to show us what the imagined things really were. So what did Niko even eat?
All right, see you next week to see how our heroes get out of their latest trap.
