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This article contains major spoilers for The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance. It also contains discussions and descriptions of death and suicide.

For a family-friendly Netflix show, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, the 2019 prequel show to the 1982 movie, has a lot to say about death. With ten episodes that all clock in at just under an hour, it spends a lot of time expanding on lore that wasn’t particularly present or crucial to the movie.

This includes the cultures around death, beliefs and rituals that shape that most unavoidable of things. When writers bother to build culture into their world that isn’t a caricature, and write deaths that are meaningful in the script and not designed for shock value or to subvert expectations, it grounds it. Death feels real in this world of wild and beautiful magic. Subsequently, grief feels real too.

The first death we see is that of Mira, a Gelfling. The Gelfling are the series protagonists: diminutive, elf-like humanoids that are considered to be closest of all creatures to Thra. Captured, she is strung up and drained for her essence. Essence is some kind of distillation of the spirit into a drinkable form. It gives life and sustenance to the Skeksis, so they draw it from Gelflings, killing them in the process. It’s painful, and horrific to watch, with her eyes turning pale and body becoming drawn before Mira disintegrates altogether.

Her murder is horrifying, scary, and objectively wrong. It’s easy to share the grief of her lover Rian who is forced to witness it. Rian is one of our protagonists, and seeing Mira’s death is the catalyst for many of the events in the series. He also later witnesses the death of his father, dragged underground by carnivorous plants during a battle.

It’s only later that we see cultural depth given to these deaths, though. Sadly but appropriately, Rian has no time to grieve these losses. They happen at pace, when he is on the run and trying to find solutions to problems far larger than himself. When the All-Maudra – the matriarchal leader of all the Gelfling clans – is murdered by one of the Skeksis, we begin to see culture take place. 

There are rituals to be followed, burial rites, but the All-Maudra’s daughter and successor Seladon was furious with the choices that her mother made. In her anger, she declares they will not honor her mother with the burial rites that would return her to the earth. “She’ll be made an example,” she says, “We will burn her.”

The reaction is immediate and horrified. Another Gelfling cries shame. In a single conversation, Age of Resistance establishes several things. Cremation is non-traditional, and even goes against tradition, being frowned upon. It’s a taboo, and we can learn crucial cultural information from this. The Gelflings consider burial the proper way to return a body and spirit to Thra, and that to have no remains denies the fulfillment of that right.

The All-Maudra had more than one daughter, and a stark contrast to Seladon’s fury is Brea’s open grief. She’s not present at the burning. She doesn’t even know it’s happening, and panics at the thought of not being there to bury her mother. Returning the essence of a Gelfling to Thra seems to be as much about the living as it is about the dead, much as funerals are in real life. The opportunity to grieve and remember is crucial to the healing process.

The added context impresses on the viewer how terrible the losses Rian suffered are. Denied a body, denied a burial, denied seeing the spirit’s return to Thra, Rian is denied essential parts of his culture.

So Brea and Rian, with the help of their friends, hold a ceremony in the desert for the ones that they’ve lost but cannot hold and cannot physically honor. They express their beliefs: “Life and death are a circle, not a line. There is no end, no beginning.” The cyclical nature of it doesn’t lessen the pain. They speak for the dead, for their grief, and unite in a song of remembrance. The group is made up of creatures from different cultures and clans, but mourning unites them. 

Although it’s an imperfect ceremony, it lessens their pain. Their singing is even carried across the winds to the reclusive Dousans, a Gelfling clan that is alleged to revere death. That’s not entirely the case however, the Dousan (it seems) are simply in tune with it. They are not unafraid of it, and are respectful of loss, but death is a return to Thra regardless of the body. You cannot desecrate or destroy a body that is already part of the world.

In a handful of deaths and simple scenes, they show the variety of cultural beliefs both similar and different between the clans of Gelfling. Regardless of differences, death is present and resonant. That it is part of the cycle doesn’t make it insignificant.

By contrast, the Skeksis themselves have a completely different approach to death. The towering bird-like entities with clacking, growling voices have malice to spare, and are responsible for many murders across the show. In the final episode one of them, skekMal the Hunter, seems poised to kill Rian. He comes up to skekMal’s knee when standing, and so is easily physically overpowered in his grasp. The way he holds Rian is like watching somebody scruff a kitten, and skekMal snarls, “I have conquered death! I return more powerful than ever! More powerful than Thra itself!”

skekMal had good reason to think he’s conquered death. After being grievously wounded, he had lapsed into unconsciousness before being taken for dead by the rest of the Skeksis. It was a surprise for everyone (skekMal included) to learn that he was not in fact dead. It’s fairly obvious that this brush with death had made skekMal more arrogant than ever, too.

Hubris typifies the Skeksis, who value power above all else and strive constantly to maintain an illusion of immortality. They feared what would happen if they died, and importantly, what would happen if the nations of peoples under their thumb knew that the Skeksis could die. It would undermine them entirely if they were not infallible, faultless, deathless. 

The Skeksis loathe death, and reject death so much that they have no rituals to deal with it. It’s a significant piece of lore in itself, the absence of a ritual exposing cultural beliefs and fears. They are horrified when skekMal, bloodied and wounded, comes to them and collapses. He is the picture of their worst fear, and they have no idea how to handle it. skekSo the Emperor reacted with a complete denial of death, first. He would give every last drop of essence they had to skekMal. 

When that was not enough, they would kill more Gelflings for more essence. At this moment, Mother Aughra – the living embodiment of the world, Thra – stepped in, offering herself in place of the Gelflings. She had great power, and could be drained to great effect to heal skekMal. That the Skeksis would prefer to kill the world than to be killed themselves is not a subtle symbol of their greed and evil, but it’s a powerful one. Where they fear for their own demise, they don’t extend that feeling to Aughra or to any other they kill.

When skekMal is on the precipice of death, the Skeksis speculate on how they might honor him. When it appears that the transfusion of essence from Aughra has failed and skekMal seems to be dead, they decide to string his body up in the throne room so that skekMal might be with them always. We watch them invent a funerary rite on the spot, preserving him like a marionette, dusting him with paint and adorning him with a new mask. It’s something indistinctly reminiscent of saints and martyrs, bodies put on display to honor them, rather than burial or commemoration.

As a species and a culture, the Skeksis are singularly self-centered. They are forgetful in their arrogance, too. Too readily they overlook their quieter counterparts; for the Skeksis are one half of a greater whole. Each Skeksis has a tether with one of the urRu, more commonly known as the Mystics. They are counterparts to each other, spirits that were once one entity known as the UrSkeks before their experiments on the titular Crystal resulted in them being cleaved in two. When an urRu feels pain, its counterpart Skeksis does, too. When a Skeksis dies, so will the matching urRu. 

Where the Skeksis are shriveled and bony, the urRu are softer looking, with long maned necks and soft faces that are deeply lined. They are slow, quiet, wise and reclusive, where the Skeksis are loud, bombastic, and unafraid to make shows of power. The Skeksis are disinterested in unifying, considering it detrimental, whereas the urRu generally consider that becoming whole is the only move.

Where the Skeksis fear death, the urRu seem to not contemplate it all that much. They are not impulsive or particularly active, and so death for them is unlikely to come by their own hand or by that of their enemies. They are not afraid of the unknown, although it seems that they too don’t have funeral rites. Why would they? They live as long as the Skeksis do. These things add up to being perfectly, easily underestimated.

skekMal’s almost deadly wounds were gifted to him by urVa the Archer, his counterpart. As his moniker suggests, he is skilled with a bow, as skekMal is skilled in the hunt. The light and dark in them is obvious: skekMal kills for sport, and urVa kills for survival. When skekMal was wounded, it was by urVa firing arrows into him, and each and every one wounded urVa, too. They fell into unconsciousness at the same time, into assumed death. They woke at the same time.

When skekMal is proclaiming his power over death, urVa is walking slowly outside, into the setting sun. “The hunt must end,” urVa says, voice a low and soft contrast to skekMal’s snarl. He holds his arms out to feel the breeze that reaches him at the top of the cliff, eyes closing. Before skekMal can crush Rian’s skull in his hands, urVa says, “Now we shall see what lies at the dream’s end.”

UrVa tumbles himself, almost gracefully, off the edge of that same cliff. Death comes for him, accepted peacefully, and it comes for skekMal too, although he descends into panic as he sees the approaching ground through urVa’s eyes.

Heroic sacrifices are commonplace on television. What sets this apart is that urVa has no hesitation, no question, no fear or sadness as he approaches his end. The urRu don’t know death closely, but haven’t allowed that unknowing to warp into fear. Like the Gelfling, they understand that death is an intrinsic part of life. Unlike the Gelfling, there is no mourning. There is almost a curiosity about what lies beyond. Death’s secrets after all, are only accessible to the dead.

The Skeksis, though, see death as a machination to be avoided. They do not seem to grieve each other on an individual basis, but see death as a damaging loss to the whole. By the end of the series, two more Skeksis have died, and it has become unavoidable. We are actively watching a culture come to terms with death when they have never had to before, and it’s fascinating to see them panic their way through mortality.

By the time of the movie, the Skeksis funeral rites have evolved. They cremate their remains, completely denying that their bodies will ever be part of Thra.

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