His Dark Materials fans missed out on an episode all about Lord Asriel in season 2. But with a final season on the way, there may be hope.
HBO’s His Dark Materials is one of the few television series fortunate enough to have, for the most part, avoided the impact of the COVID-19 crisis and the production shutdowns that accompanied it. When the full impact of COVID restrictions hit the film and television industries back in March, the show was mostly done shooting its second season — though it didn’t escape totally unaffected.
Due to shutdowns, His Dark Materials was forced to cut a standalone episode from the series’ second season, one that would have followed the character of Lord Asriel (James McAvoy). Although Asriel is completely absent from Philip Pullman’s The Subtle Knife, the book on which the second season is based, the producers got the author’s blessing to give fans some idea of what Lyra’s father was up to during this period.
And according to executive producer Jane Tranter, the episode would have done even more than that. Speaking with Deadline, Tranter revealed that the installment would have shed light on some of the biggest new elements introduced this season. “That missing episode was going to really flesh out the story of the Knife, the story of the Guild, the story of the Specters and the creation of the Specters,” she explained.
To make up for the all that lost world-building, the team had to get creative. “We built up a sequence, a visual effects sequence at the start of episode four that essentially told through image and a voiceover about the history of the Knife in order to put it into as much context as possible, and we lent into the witches and we lent into other characters really helping us.”
Of course, not receiving all of the backstory behind the Specters did leave some storylines shrouded in a bit of mystery. Fortunately, fans may still get those answers. Not only does The Amber Spyglass, the third and final book in Pullman’s series, dive into those topics further, but Tranter hinted that the standalone episode may find its way into the third and final season of the show. “We definitely want to include it in the third season because the third season is an adaptation of the end of Spyglass and that’s a whopper,” she said.
If it means getting to see more of James McAvoy’s character, we’ll take it.
There’s no word on when viewers can expect the last season of His Dark Materials, but it sounds like we’ll be jumping straight into Asriel’s war on the Authority. Hopefully we’ll see everyone back in action in 2021.
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