His Dark Materials Showrunner Talks Lord Asriel’s Scrapped Episode

December 29, 2020

His Dark Materials recently wrapped up its second season as its seventh episode aired on HBO and HBO Max. According to the producers’ plans, the season would originally have consisted of one more episode. It should have focused on the adventures of James McAvoy’s Lord Asriel as he crossed the bridge to the stars and arrived in Cittàgazze. However, the COVID-19 outbreak forced HBO to go ahead without the standalone episode to keep the season release on schedule. While talking with EW, His Dark Materials showrunner Jane Tranter detailed the producers’ plans for that episode.

“What we wanted to do was actually explain the story of Cittàgazze, how the town was deserted and Asriel’s role in that, and what happened to Asriel and where he goes and why,” she said. “That missing episode [took place] three days before the start of season 2. So you flash back three days and then you catch up with where season 2 started.”

RELATED: His Dark Materials Season 3 Officially Announced by HBO and BBC

In the same interview, Tranter didn’t rule out fans possibly seeing that standalone episode eventually.

“If we were to ever look at that episode again, it would be a complete one-off special,” she added. “I don’t know if, by the time we’ve done The Amber Spyglass, what the appetite would be for that the further away you move from The Subtle Knife. It’s very intwined [sic] with all the mythology of that world. It felt like a subtle way of answering all the questions the audience had about Cittàgazze, about spectres, about some of the mythology. So, I don’t know.”

While the elimination of that episode implied that McAvoy wouldn’t appear in His Dark Materials Season 2 at all, the producers managed to save some of the material from it. In the final moments of Season 2, Asriel recruits a bunch of angels to wage war on the Authority, who is none other than God himself.

Do you think that we will ever see that Lord Asriel standalone episode? Let us know in the comments section below.

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