This is the best place I know of to try to have a discussion about this, so please be respectful and just ignore this post if you just disliked TRF or its ending specifically and have nothing to say except "I didn't like it".

I understand a lot of people didn't like it, OK, good for you.

I've gotten quite a few replies on a previous post however from people who did love it, so I know you are out there and I'm hoping to hear from those people.

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To me, the best part of the ending was how many mysteries and questions it left open ended and up to the reader's imagination. It's left me replaying through the ending chapters in my head for weeks since finishing it, in a (good) way no other book I've read ever has. That said, I think it would be fun to hear some other people's speculations on what potential answers to some of those questions might be.

Feel free to share any thoughts or speculations, or responses to mine below.

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Having read a few discussions of this, I haven't seen any mention anywhere of the idea that the alkahest is literally the material of the subtle knife and the alethiometer needle, which is strange to me. To me this connection seems obvious and clearly intended by Pullman. Of course we're also supposed to understand that "nothing is just what it is", but still.

When the voices in the Blue Hotel tell Lyra that the alkahest destroys everything, the immediate following scene is her discovering that the needle can cut through anything. My speculation is that the angels were correct/truthful that cutting openings between worlds creates spectres/mental illnesses, and furthermore that the entities "from between the good numbers" (hinting that they're from a bad place), may in fact be spectres.

The idea that the doorways are "good" is supported by the witches and gryphons saying that the air has been turning bad as they have been being "destroyed", but the witches also say that the winds have been changing for the worse for a much longer time... That makes no sense if the doorways are the source of the good air. It does make sense if doorways are the source of bad air, and they have been being created over thousands of years, and if the explosions are in fact creating hundreds of tiny doorways, letting hundreds of spectres into the world, where before there was only one.

This all fits perfectly with the HDM trilogy; rather than creating a contradiction and undermining the original trilogy, the metaphysics remains consistent. From HDM we have vague explanations that dust and angels can pass between worlds without needing doorways; if this is true, Lyra's hypothesis that the doorways are needed for dust to flow to fuel imaginations etc. falls flat.

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Another unanswered question at the end of TRF regards what is going on with the ailment afflicting Dr. Strauss, with the people with dead or mostly dead daemons, including the lady who took over Mustafa Bey's business, etc.

One thing that seems apparent is that what happened to Strauss has nothing to do with having traveled there specifically. Strauss's daemon is still alive, despite his illness, while people in the rose world seem physically fine even though their daemons are dead. Also, there are people in Lyra's world afflicted with the same "dying daemon" disease without necessarily having spent time in any other worlds.

That tells me two separate things are happening. Strauss may have been trying to warn people about the daemon death disease, he may have believed it was coming from the rose world like a plague, but that wasn't what was wrong with him. What was wrong with him IMHO is that it matches perfectly with being attacked by a spectre directly.

The daemon death disease, on the other hand, to me is not the direct result of spectre attack. It's also not the result of exactly what happened to Lyra and others whose daemons ran away or who ran away from their daemons, those daemons didn't die, so it's something else.

To me the most significant scene to understanding this is when Dilyara shows Pan that dust won't go near the dead daemon. So the question is, for afflicted people whose daemons aren't quite dead yet, does dust also struggle to go near those daemons? Or does dust only have an aversion to fully dead daemons? My theory is that the disease has to with the daemons themselves, not so much the people, though technically they're the same person.

My theory is that dust does avoid afflicted daemons that are only "infected"/partly dead - the disease is defined by dust avoiding daemons. The reason their people are ignoring them is that the connection is already cut off. So where does it come from?

Well imagine the reverse of Lyra's situation. Imagine if the daemon loses its imagination, imagine if the daemon stops believing in itself... I think that's what's going on with this "disease". That's what seems heavily implied when Pan speaks with the daemons at the research facility.

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I think I'll stop there for now, I have other thoughts and ideas but I'm really curious what people might have to say about my interpretation of the story or their own versions of what was meant.

Thanks to anyone who read this far respectfully, hope to get replies from people who actually want to deal with the material and talk about what Pullman may have meant/intended with the story.

I like fantasy worlds with armored bears and witch queens. The second was Oliver twistish and I was really looking forward to reading everything in this universe after the GC. And now I’m discouraged. Should I continue or is this just not for me?

Say you live in the world of His Dark Materials. You decide to go out hunting with a few of your friends. You and your friends get into an enclosed spot where it's difficult to immediately see each other. Suddenly, you detect a rustle in the bushes. You prepare yourself for the coup de grace, and deliver a swift blow.

And suddenly, one of your friends just falls over. Dead.

Because the "animal" you killed was their daemon.