His Dark Materials writer is working on season 3, which introduces the mulefa

The third (and likely final) season of His Dark Materials has been slower in coming than the first two, but it has delightfully strange surprises in store.

The second season of His Dark Materials is just about to wrap up, and sooner if you live in the UK than the US. Like the first season, it’s gotten better as it’s gone along, as the journey of Lyra Belacqua (Dafne Keen) and Will Parry (Amir Wilson) has opened up to include adventures with witches, reality-cutting knives, Spectres and more.

The second season adapts The Subtle Knife, the second book in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series. There’s one more book left: The Amber Spyglass. The first two seasons of the show were filmed back to back, but the third has been slower in coming, in part because the pandemic has slowed everything down.

Nevertheless, writer and producer Jack Thorne tells Comics Beat that he’s working on the third season, and that his production designer is even coming up with designs for the mulefa, a sentient species featured in the third novel that have never shown up onscreen before:

"So I’ve been writing Series Three; I’ve written four episodes of Series Three. You know nothing is set in stone, but we’re writing on. And while I’ve been writing, Joel Collins, our production designer, has been drawing. So, I have seen pictures of things, and they’re exciting pictures. We’re in development for what will eventually be on screen. Nothing is decided yet, but I have seen pictures and it’s really interesting."

The mulefa are one of the most fascinating aspects of the third book. Without spoiling how they play into the plot, they’re long-snouted creatures with diamond-shaped skeletons, no spine, and four limbs they use to grasp seed pods produced on their world, which they then use as wheels. They’re unlike any creature I can think of, so a TV show will have a hell of a time rendering them onscreen.

"Cool concept for the Mulefa I found! from hisdarkmaterials"

But that’ll be then. In the meantime, there’s still another episode of His Dark Materials season 2 to go, with hopefully more bonding between Lyra and Will to come. “This is a show about trust,” Thorne said, “and neither of them want to trust each other, but at the same time, they’ve got a yearning to trust each other. And so you’ve got that sort of contradiction, always acting within them, that yearning and then that distrust. Just working out the different phases of that in each episode was a really exciting and really difficult part of the writing process.”

Lyra and Will are the heroes of this story, but Lyra’s conniving mother Mrs. Coulter (Ruth Wilson) has often stolen the show. In Pullman’s books, she’s pretty much a straightforward villain, but Thorne has tried to give her more dimension.

“I hope that we walked the line where you can see Mrs. Coulter in two ways,” Thorne said, “you can see someone that’s intent on pursuing power and you can see someone that’s intent on pursuing Lyra, and that there is a contradiction within her to what she truly wants, and she hasn’t resolved that question…[T]he great thing about Mrs. Coulter is that she behaves as if she’s got great certainty, but that doesn’t mean that she does have great certainty.”

I dunno, she seems certain enough to me; if you’re in the UK and you’ve already watched the latest episode you know what I’m talking about. If you’re in the U.S., you can see it on HBO Monday!

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