HBO has released a new trailer for its upcoming second season of His Dark Materials, teasing a dark set of adventures for Lyra and her friends. With the trailer, HBO revealed that season will debut in November.
Based on the fantasy series by Philip Pullman, the series features Dafne Keen as Lyra Belacqua, a young girl from an alternate reality in which a person’s soul manifests itself as a shapeshifting animal called a dæmon. In the first season (based on the novel The Golden Compass), she’s drawn into a conspiracy when her friend Roger Parslow (Lewin Lloyd) is kidnapped by mysterious agents working on behalf of the Magisterium, her world’s dominant religious order.
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Roger, along with numerous other children, are subjected to some horrifying experiments by the Magisterium, which is looking to ascertain the nature of an elemental particle known as “Dust”, which it believes is responsible for sin. Lyra sets off to try and find him, aided by a truth-telling device known as an alethiometer, and discovers a conflict spanning universes.
The BBC commissioned the first eight episode season back in 2015, and in 2018, HBO came aboard and helped greenlight the show for a second season, which will be based on the second novel in the trilogy, The Subtle Knife. The network debuted a first look at the second season at Comic-Con at Home earlier this summer, and this new trailer shows off a season that’ll be much darker.
We see the Magisterium concerned about the potential threat that multiple worlds poses to its rule, and Lyra’s mother Mrs. Coulter torturing a witch. Those witches—who showed up in Season 1—will play a much greater role this time around, and we see them preparing to fight a much larger conflict.
But most excitedly, we see Lyra and Will Parry (a boy from our reality, played by Amir Wilson) meet. Will possesses a special knife that allows its wielder to cut through worlds, and we see that there are greater things in store for Lyra in the coming war.
Frustratingly, HBO doesn’t give an exact date for when the series will debut—just November.
