His Dark Materials had to cut a whole season 2 episode because of the pandemic

We’re getting one less episode than we thought in His Dark Materials season 2, but it may be a blessing in disguise.

This past weekend, at Comic-Con@Home, we finally learned when HBO would be dropping the second season of its adaptation of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, the ongoing fantasy story about Lyra Belacqua (Dafne Keen) exploding an interdimensional conspiracy.

The second season will adapt The Subtle Knife, the second book in Pullman’s trilogy and arguably the best. There’s a lot of great stuff in this book. Lyra joins forces with Will Parry (Amir Wilson), the mythology expands in exciting ways, and I already want merch of the titular subtle knife.

And the His Dark Materials team managed to shoot pretty much all of the second season before the coronavirus pandemic came along and basically shut down Hollywood, meaning we’ll get to see the whole thing as intended…mostly.

During a panel about the show, executive producer Jane Tranter did reveal that writer Jack Thorne had penned a whole episode all about Lord Asriel (James McAvoy), Lyra’s father, but that it had to be cut. “It was separate from the other seven episodes because it was a standalone episode which Jack had written with the blessing and input of Philip Pullman, which looked at what Lord Asriel had been doing between going through the anomaly at the end of season one and when we see Lord Asriel at the beginning of book three The Amber Spyglass,” Tranter said. “It meant that we could continue post-production on the seven episodes that make up The Subtle Knife and just put the Asriel standalone episode to one side and maybe in the future we can revisit it as a standalone. But essentially our adaptation of The Subtle Knife had been completed.”

McAvoy himself confirmed the existence of the “lost episode” on an episode of the Empire magazine podcast not long ago. “We were one day into shooting that and Boris [Johnson] called the lockdown, so it’s gone now, unfortunately, so I’m barely going to be in Season 2,” he said.

I know the instinct here is to bemoan the loss of an episode, but if we take a glass-half-full approach, this may end up working in the season’s favor. To be honest, I thought the first season of the show was a bit bloated, especially towards the beginning, and didn’t think much of Thorne’s decision to show us a bunch of stuff we didn’t see in the book. It was never as strong as the textual material. These are good books: you can adapt them as is and you’ll be fine.

Lord Asriel isn’t in The Subtle Knife much and that’s okay. It kind of sounds like the show dreamed up an episode just so James McAvoy could be a part of the season and not because the story demanded it. And if I’m wrong and his standalone episode is amazing, maybe we can still see it later.

Photo: Ruth Wilson in His Dark Materials.. Courtesy of Alex Bailey/HBO

One person we will be seeing more of in season 2 is Mrs. Coulter (Ruth Wilson), Lyra’s driven, nigh-sociopathic mother. The show has fleshed her out a bit more than the books did, and it sounds like that will continue. “You don’t ever get to know who she really is, or it’s a struggle to work out who she really is,” Wilson said during the panel. “She’s constantly challenging me and confusing me. Her intentions are always mixed up from moment to moment.”

"What was really joyful this season to play with, was to get into her circumstances more… What she’s had to deal with as a woman in a very male world, and the sacrifices she’s had to make and at what cost, which is the cost of losing her daughter really, or choosing something over her daughter."

Again, if I’m being honest, this kind of sounds like more of the dithering I didn’t like in the first season — there’s a reason we don’t get to know Mrs. Coulter or Lord Asriel very well in the books; this story is supposed to be told mainly from the kids’ perspective, but the show is going in another direction and I’m just going to have to make peace with it.

“It digs into that in the book, but we were allowed to go even further,” Wilson continued. “She does such horrific things, you need to balance that with reasons why. We know that by season 3, we see her as a completely different person, so you need to find the journey.”

His Dark Materials season 2 is coming this fall.

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