The second season of the BBC’s dream adaptation His Dark Materials (aired on HBO in the US) ended on major cliffhangers for everyone its cherished main characters, and together with the explosive conclusion to the show on the horizon, everyone’s wondering if we’ll find out more of Lyra, her shapeshifting daemon Pan, along with their dimension-hopping friend Will Parry again. The fantastic news is another season of this show is on the way-the bad news is it may be a longer wait than we ever needed to survive to the initial 2.
The journey continues. #HisDarkMaterials will return for a third season. pic.twitter.com/nK1r4bkNjN
— His Dark Materials (@daemonsanddust) December 22, 2020
Has His Dark Materials Been Renewed For A Third Season?
Yep! The official His Dark Materials twitter account verified in December 2020 that Lyra, Pan, and Will are back for one more round.
When Will Season 3 Come Out?
No one’s stated exactly what the production schedule for the next season will probably look like, and watching as it is adapting the wildest release of the trilogy, it is likely that the BBC will want to wait to be sure they’re not hoping to film a show at the height of a pandemic.
The BBC has said that production will start in Cardiff sometime in 2021, but has not said when, or if the new season will be all set for a November or December 2021 air date (as Season 1 and Season 2 were in 2019 and 2020). Screenwriter Jack Thorne told The Guardian that he was “currently rewriting it” and, “We’re pushing ahead with the scripts since we need to be prepared to picture next summer,” so it is unlikely that we will see more of this series this year.
What Will It Be About?
The next season of the series will follow the third book in Pullman’s show, The Amber Spyglass, that not only introduces a whole lot of characters, animals, and important places, but provides Lyra, Will, and Mary Malone their most metaphysical test. Season two left off with Will, the bearer of the Subtle Knife, literally taking up his shaman father’s mantle and falling out of the crossroads world of Cittagazze to some unknown place (where, even if you read the books, he’ll soon meet a pair of angels that assist him on his quest). Lyra and Pan are secure, for now, in the clutches of the obsessive Mrs. Coulter, yet Lyra has strange dreams about Roger, the boy Asriel murdered to start his tear in the world, dropped in some dark land. Meanwhile, Mary has entered a new world altogether, in which she will soon meet the elephantine mulefa (probably the series’s most complex special effects), and Lord Asriel has succeeded in achieving the assistance of the angels in his cosmic warfare against the Authority.
Who Will Be In The Cast?
Everyone who survived the bloodbath at the end of Season 2 (so, not Jopari/John Parry, Lord Boreal, or Lee Scoresby) will probably return for Season 3. Including Lyra (Dafne Keen), Will (Amir Wilson), Mrs. Coulter (Ruth Wilson), Dr. Mary Malone (Simone Kirby), Serafina Pekkala (Ruta Gedmintas), Ruta Skadi (Jade Anouka), along with Lord Asriel (James McAvoy).
It’s also likely that we’ll see armored bear chief Iorek Byrnison (voiced by Joe Tandberg) again, as he had been noticeably absent for the majority of Season 2. New characters that have already been cast include the angels Balthamos (Ikay Agu) and Baruch (Oliver Monaghan) and their chief Xaphania (voiced by Sophie Okonedo).
