After two years away, HBO’s adaptation of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series returns for its third and final season. This one will adapt the third and final book in the trilogy, The Amber Spyglass, which is also the biggest and strangest. “Season 3 is wild. It’s 100 percent the weirdest thing I’ve ever shot in my entire life,” star Dafne Keen (Lyra) told Entertainment Weekly. “We’ve done so many weird locations and just surreal scenes where you’re talking about angels and God and the most random things ever. It was wild to film it and all the set dressing and everything was insane. If the other two [seasons] were already very fantastic, this one was a whole other level of that.”
Season 3 will catch up with Lord Asriel (James McAvoy) as he gathers an inter-dimensional army to fight the Authority, who is basically God. Asriel thinks the Authority and his religion have subjugated humanity, and he’s out to put a stop to it, even if that means ignoring or even hurting his daughter Lyra. “He’s such a dick and he’s such a bad father,” McAvoy said. “He’s doing it for the right reasons, but he’s doing it all the wrong way. The destination is more important than the journey for him. The ends totally justify the means for him. He’s a leader and a world-changer and a thinker and a doer before he is a father.”
Meanwhile, Lyra will reunite with her talking polar bear friend Iorek Byrnison, travel to the Land of the Dead with Will (Amir Wilson), and meet up with some angels who are rebelling against the kingdom of heaven. Meanwhile, Dr. Mary Malone (Simone Kirby), whom we met in season 2, will travel to an alternate dimension and encounter Mulefa, alien beings with diamond-shaped skeletons who get around using giant seed pods as wheels.
It’s gonna get crazy. Watch the trailer below:
Lin-Manuel Miranda returns for His Dark Materials season 3
You might notice that Lin-Manuel Miranda, who played the Texan aeronaut Lee Scoresby in the first two seasons of the show, shows up in the trailer. How could that happen, you might ask, when Lee definitely died at the end of season 2?
Well, Lee does actually show up in The Amber Spyglass for a cameo. Lyra runs into him in the Land of the Dead, which is where the dead hang out. So they’re playing fair.
“This one ends in a pretty heart-wrenching, emotional, but also an incredibly profound way,” said executive producer Dan McCulloch, appearing at New York Comic Con. “These books, I read them when I was a teenager, still watching the end of the show now, I think they still move me as they did then.”
His Dark Materials season 3 premieres on HBO and HBO Max on December 5.
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