Season 1 of His Dark Materials was not perfect. The HBO drama — which follows a girl named Lyra (Dafne Keen) who must free herself from the magic-hating Magisterium — dragged at times due to stiff dialogue and an uneven story. But despite the show’s flaws, it still managed to entrance its audience with fantastical visuals and convincing performances. This left it with a unique opportunity moving forward.
His Dark Materials already had all the building blocks it needed to churn out a swift second season. With a determined protagonist, a well-developed magical story world, and a cliff-hanger finale marking the end of the first season, its potential was massive. The series just had to find a way to speed up its pace and add in some excitement. Unfortunately, while Season 2 remains somewhat entertaining, it makes few attempts to expand upon the greatest features of the first season. To understand what I mean by this, we have to journey back to the beginning.
The second season is similar in tone to the first. It’s fanciful, it’s weighty, and there’s a sense of impending doom simmering in the background.
By the end of Season 1, Lyra had discovered that Lord Asriel (James McAvoy) and Marisa Coulter (Ruth Wilson) were her parents. She tricked Mrs. Coulter to get away from her, only to be duped by Asriel, who separated Lyra’s friend Roger (Lewin Lloyd) from his daemon. This created a bridge to a new world but murdered Roger in the process. Asriel jumped through the portal, and Lyra followed Asriel in hopes of redeeming Roger. This is where Season 2 begins.
In the new, strange land that Lyra is transported to, she meets a boy named Will (Amir Wilson), and the two discover their fates are tied together. While Lyra spends much of the early episodes acclimating to her new surroundings, she also continues to search for more information on Dust. This leads her to physicist Dr. Mary Malone (Simone Kirby), who is doing research on the conscious dark matter herself, and might be able to guide Lyra forward in her quest for answers. Meanwhile, aeronaut Lee Scoresby (Lin-Manuel Miranda) searches for someone who might be able to help him protect Lyra, and Mrs. Coulter hunts down her daughter.
Tonally, the second season is similar to the first. It’s fanciful, it’s weighty, and there’s a sense of impending doom simmering in the background. Only this time, Lyra stays planted in the same few locations during the first five episodes (the number provided to critics).
Cittagàzze, the city where Lyra stays, is pretty to look at, boasting warm colors and a Mediterranean feel. Additionally, the Oxford in Will’s universe —which is separate from the one Lyra lived at in Season 1 – is aesthetically polished and striking. However, because Lyra isn’t consciously on the run from Mrs. Coulter like in the first season, she’s not exploring new places episode-to-episode, so there’s a sense of sameness.
Lee Scoresby (Lin-Manuel Miranda) on his sky-high side quest
Image: BBC / Bad Wolf
We get glimpses of a few more visually impressive locations due to Lee Scoresby’s, Mrs. Coulter’s, and even the witches’ ongoing side plots happening in different dimensions. While it’s nice to have additional sights to admire and adventures to savor, these characters’ quests are physically separated from Lyra, which leads to fewer meaningful character interactions.
Season 1 was at its best when Lyra confronted her parents head-on. There’s a particular type of wickedness to Lord Asriel’s and Mrs. Coulter’s betrayals that makes it easy to cheer for Lyra when she’s in their presence. These moments also made Lyra’s friendships sweeter. We wanted Roger to survive, not just because he was an adorable kid, but also because his unwavering devotion to Lyra starkly contrasted with the false relationships her parents manufactured. And while Lyra spends more time connecting with characters like Will, who acts as an ally; Mary, who becomes a mentor figure; and even Lord Boreal (Ariyon Bakare), who takes on a more prominent villain role in Season 2, these new relationships fail to carry the same weight as those in the first season — the ones viewers were already invested in. They’re not bad additions to the series — I was particularly a fan of Lyra and Will’s chemistry — but the characters newly brought to the forefront can’t make up for the ones pushed to the side.
I wish there were more direct conflicts between familiar characters, because they were the ones that best pushed the story along.
The most stress-inducing scene in the first bunch of episodes comes when Lyra and her mother have a short-lived but tense stand-off. This moment is closely followed in anxiety levels by one in which Mrs. Coulter and Lee have a similarly heart-pounding run-in after Lee ends up in prison and Coulter uses the opportunity to rile him with questions. I wish there were more direct conflicts between these familiar characters, because they were the ones that best pushed the story along.
While Mrs. Coulter is separated from Lyra for most of the narrative, Lord Asriel is even more absent, as in, he’s not in Season 2 at all. Asriel is also missing in Philip Pullman’s The Subtle Knife, the book upon which Season 2 is based, but during a virtual Comic-Con panel in July, executive producer Jane Tranter revealed that he was supposed to receive a stand-alone episode. Those plans changed, however, after COVID-19 shut down production. Filming of the other seven episodes had wrapped in 2019, so Season 2 continued without Lord Asriel, and the existing footage was modified to create a narrative without him.
“We were all absolutely gutted about this,” said writer and executive producer Jack Thorne in a tweet. “We had the read through, got to set… Covid. Had some incredible actors raring to go and some new story to explore. But the brilliance of many departments on our show went into override to make up for the loss.”
I’m sure they did work hard to overcome the hole created by the absence of the Asriel episode, but I can’t help but wonder if Season 2 would have made better sense and been more compelling had the lost story been woven through the other episodes as planned.
Season 2 isn’t bad, but it misses opportunities. Maybe this is the result of a flawed original script or maybe it’s COVID-affected production. I assume it’s a little bit of both. That being said, as much as I wish Season 2 found a way to narratively pull through, it’s still as dark, mystical, and philosophically intriguing as Season 1 — so if you’re a returning viewer, you’ll probably like it. You just won’t be wowed by it.
I have yet to watch the last two episodes of Season 2, so His Dark Materials could pick up the pace. But if it doesn’t, Season 3 still has the elements it needs to go out with a bang, including an absorbing cast and an imaginative, high-concept setting. I just hope that this time, it takes full advantage of them.
His Dark Materials Season 2 premieres Sunday, Oct. 12 at 9 p.m. ET on HBO.