There’s been a two-year hiatus since His Dark Materials last graced the Christmas TV schedules, and now it’s back for its third and final series, adapting Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass.
From the opening credits alone you can tell that this series is going bigger in every sense, from new creatures and new worlds to bigger and darker themes. Lord Asriel (James McAvoy) is preparing for war on the false king of Heaven, while the Magisterium – the all-powerful Church from Lyra’s world – is trying to capture Lyra (Dafne Keen), the prophesied ‘new Eve’.
When we rejoin Lyra, she’s being held in a drugged sleep by her mother, Mrs Coulter (Ruth Wilson) while Will (Amir Wilson) searches desperately for her, with the help of a couple of angels who want to recruit him – and his dimension-cutting knife – to Asriel’s war. Meanwhile, in Lyra’s deep sleep, she can hear her old friend Roger calling to her from the Land of the Dead.
As in previous seasons, Wilson’s Mrs Coulter looms large, as complex and contradictory as always, a villain who you root for, and whose actions you can never truly predict. We see more of Asriel this season than we ever have before, as he travels worlds looking for fighters to join his cause. His goal is clearly just, but this is still the man who murdered an innocent child, and he makes Mrs Coulter seem warm and cuddly in comparison.
The show’s new creatures – angels and tiny flying Gallivespians – are beautifully realised, and the locations and sets give it an expensive and expansive richness. The show doesn’t seem to be shying away from the more controversial aspects of the book – it goes harder than ever before on the corrupt Magisterium and the war on Heaven, although a prologue in episode one does stress the ‘false god’ angle. Everything is building up nicely for an emotionally devastating finale.
His Dark Materials Season Three will be released on 18 December. Read our interview with producers Dan McCulloch & Jane Tranter here.