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His Dark Materials season three review: A final journey between worlds

admin — Sat, 17 Dec 2022 02:45:03 +0000

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.

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“I hope we got it right” – Inside His Dark Materials’ final series

admin — Fri, 16 Dec 2022 18:30:38 +0000

The dark nights are drawing in, fairy lights adorn our streets and families are coming together around the TV. That can only mean one thing: Time for a war against Heaven and a trip to the Land of the Dead! Or, in other words, time for the return of His Dark Materials for its third and final series.

When we left them back in December 2020, Lyra (Dafne Keen) had been captured by her mother Mrs Coulter (Ruth Wilson), Will (Amir Wilson) was searching desperately for her, and Lyra’s father Lord Asriel (James McAvoy) was recruiting angels for his war on the Kingdom of Heaven.

Time has passed both within the show and in real life since we last met our heroes and anti-heroes. In fact, so much time has passed that when we met cast and crew in a screening room in London, Amir Wilson was sporting a beard (he asked if Will could have a beard in series three, and was quickly shot down).

For once, that filming hiatus wasn’t due to Covid, but was planned from the start. “Season three was always meant to be when Dafne and Amir were a bit older and we felt comfortable to explore the slightly more adult themes that are in the third book,” explains producer Dan McCulloch.

Wilson adds that “we wanted to bring a new Will, a more grown-up Will, a Will who has more of a sense of himself and a stronger character, he’s a stronger person.”

“We wanted to bring a new Will (Amir Wilson), a more grown-up Will…”

When work started on Series Three, producer Jane Tranter tells us that she received an apology from book author Philip Pullman for leaving her with ‘a pile of problems’. “I was like ‘oof, yeah, Mulefa, Gallivespians, angels’ and he said ‘no, I mean Asriel’.

“Asriel is this huge character in the book who is known about through reputation and people speaking about him, but he doesn’t actually appear until much later on. So we came up with the idea of seeing Asriel earlier than you see him in the book, in order to be able to see him build the Republic, so when you get to catching up to where he is in the book and what’s happening, you understand what his mission is, and what it’s all about, rather than having other people talk about it.”

“We came up with the idea of seeing Asriel earlier than you see him in the book, in order to be able to see him build the Republic…”

Which isn’t to say that the Mulefa and the angels didn’t pose a pile of problems too – although it was the angels who took the creative team most by surprise. Tranter tells us that the biggest challenge was taking these epic characters who talk about “the war in the Kingdom of Heaven and being thrown out and dark angels and the celestial nature of things,” but keeping them “within the [grounded] grammar of the show”.

The problems posed by the Mulefa were more financial, and therefore something Tranter and her team were very used to dealing with given their “radically smaller” budget compared to other big fantasy shows. The challenge since day one has been to make the show look a lot more expensive than it is, and much of that has been down to using clever sets and production design.

“People often assume that we spend most of our days in front of a green screen just because it’s a fantasy show and there are a lot of visual effects,” Wilson says, explaining that that’s not the case. Even the Land of the Dead was a huge set. “[I]t went up to 20 foot high walls and black sand as far as you could see. Once they got the smoke in and dimmed the lights it really felt like you were in the Land of the Dead.”

Anyone who has read the books will know that the real challenge of the final series is landing the ending. “I think that everything we have done across three seasons now has been to deliver us that ending in that way that Philip Pullman did,” Tranter says. “I hope we got it right. I hope we got the totality of it right, both in terms of the pain, and in terms of the reward of love and what that means.”

His Dark Materials returns for its third and final series this December.

That theme of love is what Tranter thinks makes His Dark Materials perfect – if unlikely – Christmas viewing. The series, she says, is “all about love, different forms of love, and it’s about what you’re prepared to do for that love, and the sacrifices you might make. It’s also about what you’re prepared to do to protect freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of truth, freedom of creativity, freedom not to be taken over by an oppressive aggressor.

“Yeah, it’s tough stuff, but ultimately it’s a message of hope and of some form of renewal… So that for me feels like a good Christmas message.”

His Dark Materials Season Three will be released on 18 December. Read our review of the first two episodes here.

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His Dark Materials Season 2 Review: Face your dæmons

admin — Mon, 21 Dec 2020 17:22:28 +0000

The first season of His Dark Materials was something of a miracle – a well-realised adaptation of the beloved, but challenging, book by Philip Pullman. It had its flaws, but was undoubtedly a triumph. Season Two not only builds on that start but improves on it, plunging Lyra (Dafne Keen) and Will (Amir Wilson) into a new world, with old enemies and allies on their trail.

Season Two may lack the spectacle of Season One’s frozen north and armoured bears, but it deepens the worlds and characters of His Dark Materials. Keen and Wilson have excellent chemistry as two youngsters trying to be brave for one another, and Wilson in particular brings new layers to his portrayal as the vulnerable, grown-up-too-soon Will.

This time around, the weight of the show doesn’t just rest on Lyra’s shoulders, and in fact most of the story is driven by the adults, especially Ariyon Bakare’s slippery Boreal, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s loveable Lee Scoresby and new arrival Simone Kirby, who is excellent as Mary Malone, a dark matter physicist from our world who gets drawn into Lyra’s quest for Dust.

But the most powerful force in Season Two is Ruth Wilson’s Mrs Coulter, shoving her way through worlds in her single-minded pursuit of Lyra. While still a nasty piece of work, capable of literally switching off her humanity at will, we learn more about Coulter this season, from her difficult childhood to the patriarchal forces that have been holding her back. Her edges haven’t been blunted, but we can appreciate them more now, and you may even find yourself cheering at some of her murderous activities. No-one’s doing it like Ruth Wilson right now.

The show is as beautiful as ever, with everything from the stone streets of Cittagàzze to aerial witch battles brought vividly to life, and while there are fewer big action set-pieces this time around, you’ll find yourself unable to breathe during Lyra and Will’s daring heist, or Lee’s showdown with the Magisterium.

Best of all, the series shows no sign yet of shying away from any of the book’s more controversial, adult elements. Bring on Season Three.

His Dark Materials Season One and Two are available on BBC iPlayer.

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