His Dark Materials starts work on third and final season, The Amber Spyglass

The coronavirus has shut down TV productions around the world, but there are still some shows that are mostly done filming that will be coming out this year. Take the second season of HBO’s His Dark Materials, an adaptation of Philip Pullman’s classic fantasy novels. In the first season, we got to know Lyra Belacqua (Dafne Keen), a rambunctious young girl who gets pulled into a conspiracy to pierce the veil between her world, a steampunk-era world full of talking polar bears and animal familiars called dæmons, and ours. At the end of the first season, she and Will (Amir Wilson), a boy from our world, both walked through tears in the fabric of reality. Where will they end up? Stay tuned.

HBO shot the first and second seasons of His Dark Materials pretty much back to back, in large part because producers didn’t want the young stars to age out of their characters. That’s why we should still see season 2 — which will adapt The Subtle Knife, the second book in Pullman’s trilogy — later this year, coronavirus or no coronavirus.

But what about season 3, which will the final book in the series, The Amber Spyglass? Well, according to executive producer Jane Tranter, the team is starting to develop scripts, but not much more:

Unfortunately, that probably means we’re not gonna see seasons 1, 2 and 3 all in a row one year after the other. Season 2 should arrive this year, but there will probably be a gap between that and season 3, which we likely won’t see until 2022. Gaps like that are becoming increasingly common on TV, particularly when dealing with high-end, glossy-looking shows like His Dark Materials.

You’ve also gotta wonder how that plays into producers’ worries about the stars going through puberty. Keen and Wilson are 15 and 16 respectively, and can only play tweenagers for so long. Frankly, in season 1, Keen already looked a bit older than the other child actors she was paired with. But we’ll see.

In the meantime, you can enjoy an unreleased track from His Dark Materials season 1, a theme for Lyra written by Graham McCusker, who wrote vocal music for the first season. This particular theme didn’t make it into the final mix. “I wrote a small piano demo of a song I wanted them to use for Lyra’s character, as a theme for a time when Lyra is alone or in deep thought,” McCusker told BroadwayWorld. “When she has moments of feeling sad, unsure or scared of what the future holds. For instance, in reference to the book, it could have been used when Lyra falls asleep in the balloon, just after she speaks with Serafina Pekkala and they are flying across miles of sky to Svalbard and she wraps herself up in a pile of furs as they float away in the night sky. It could possibly have been seen as ‘the calm before the storm’.”

McCusker released the track to raise money for the Christie NHS Foundation Trust, a charitable organization. You can buy it on his BandCamp page to contribute.

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h/t IBTimes, ComicBook.com