When Lyra made the important coming-of-age choice to express her love for Will, she lost her the natural ability to read the alethiometer, which had been part of her childhood. To read it again, she has to rely on books and study. We learned through captions that both teenagers went on to live full lives. Lyra became a scholar who went on to have more great adventures, and Will, always good with a knife, became a surgeon.

Asriel and Marisa’s Redemption

Asriel’s conflict in Season Three was his refusal to accept that he wasn’t, as he’d always believed, the chosen one destined to save the worlds, but his daughter Lyra was. Lyra was special because, as Iorek told Asriel, she was everything Asriel was not (him being a Dr Frankenstein-esque tunnel vision madman driven only by ambition, not – as Lyra was in her quest to help Roger – by love). 

Asriel’s extreme rationalism and refusal to accept other ways of thinking was shown to be almost as destructive as the Magisterium’s dogma in Season Three. That’s why, when Asriel faced Metatron in the penultimate episode, the angel took Asriel’s form. He was a man who had never faced up to himself, or taken responsibility for his wrongdoings – murdering Roger, abandoning Lyra… Metatron was a seer who could read people, and so used Asriel’s inability to confront his own darkness against him by appearing in his form.

Unlike Asriel, Marisa was an expert at controlling her mind and emotions (which is how she learned to control the Spectres in Cittàgazze, by suppressing the soul that they would have fed on – believed to be a sad legacy of her abusive childhood). Marisa used that power to trick Metatron into thinking she would join his side and betray Asriel and Lyra. She led the angel to Asriel, so they could both join in the attack against him. They seized him and leapt into the abyss, sacrificing themselves to save Lyra, and the worlds she was destined to save in turn. At the moment they seized Metatron, Marisa’s daemon (who represents the best of her – her human emotions that she suppressed and tormented for years) felt it and triggered the capacitors Asriel’s soldiers had placed inside the abyss, using the energy coils to create a surge that tore apart the Clouded Mountain from which Metatron ruled.

Does that sacrifice (they knew they were consigning themselves to oblivion in that abyss) redeem Marisa for her wrongs at Bolvangar or Asriel for Roger’s cold-hearted murder? Perhaps not. Perhaps Marisa dissipating the soul-eating Spectres and saving the army from their cruel attacks weighs in her favour. What’s important is that Mrs Coulter’s and Asriel’s final act was motivated by love and not self-interest, which is a redemption of a kind.

Father President MacPhail, Father Gomez, the Abyss and the Bomb

By the end, Hugh MacPhail and Father Gomez’s zealotry had turned them into concentrated symbols of the Magisterium’s unhinged desire for control and power. Self-harming MacPhail in particular embodied the church’s misogyny when he turned on Marisa – the object of his ‘sinful’ lust – and called her a weak, emotional woman. He also bludgeoned Dr Cooper to death, fulfilling Marisa’s promise that the Magisterium turn on their own.

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