One full year has passed since the series finale of His Dark Materials aired to complete the TV adaptation of Philip Pullman's novel trilogy, deliver the heartbreaking endings for Will and Lyra, and undoubtedly leave plenty of fans in tears. I was certainly one of those fans, even though the final season didn't include all of the book moments I'd been hoping for. On the anniversary of the finale, I thought back to my interviews for the third and final season, and comments from James McAvoy just make me wish all over again that there was a way to get the missing Asriel episode.
The missing episode actually isn't one that was meant to be part of Season 3, but was cut from Season 2. It was intended to cover what Asriel had been doing between the end of Season 1 and where his story picks up in Season 3, since James McAvoy was absent for almost the entire second season. Unfortunately, the episode was intended to film in March 2020, and COVID production shutdowns meant that Asriel's adventure never made it to screen. Even now, facing the 2024 TV schedule, the plan sounds too epic to never see the light of day.
Asriel's one and only appearance in Season 2 after the standalone episode was scrapped came in the season finale, when he delivered a grand speech to recruit legions of angels to his war against the Authority. When I spoke with James McAvoy and Ruth Wilson, who respectively played Asriel and Mrs. Coulter, for Season 3 in 2022, I asked the Split actor if any elements of the missing episode had been incorporated in the final round of episodes. He shared:
No, actually! There was a couple of iterations of that episode that revolved around the recruiting for the army and for the revolutionary force. Then that got booted and it became about literally what happens the second he walked through the opening in the sky on that mountain at the end of Season 1. So you would pick up his episode [when] he's literally walked through into Cittàgaze. Then you'd follow him through seeing Cittàgaze, before the spectres truly descend, and then being part of and integral in the evacuation of Cittàgaze and getting all the adults out.
Honestly, just seeing Cittàgaze again would be a treat! It really sounds like fans missed out on what would have been one of the series' standout episodes when the project had to be scrapped. I can't help but wish that there was a way that it could still be produced. Since Lyra and Will wouldn't be in Cittàgaze at the same time, it wouldn't even matter that the young actors are visibly older! Asriel's speech in the Season 2 finale to the angels was epic, but we could have gotten so much more. McAvoy went on:
It was also going to form the beginning of his relationship with the angels, because he managed to enlist the angels to help the evacuation, and there was like a coming together of angels and spectres in a tunnel, and they all just like poured onto each other. It was so good. And then it never happened. [laughs]
How am I supposed to not want to see that?! The final season seemed to fly by, not least because two episodes aired per week once the show returned to HBO in 2022. A bonus episode with Asriel's unseen adventures would have been great if it delivered even part of what James McAvoy described, but alas.
Of course, His Dark Materials did find a way to fill in the blanks of what Asriel was attempting in the third season without having one full episode to set it up. As executive producer Jane Tranter explained to CinemaBlend in 2022, the solution was "having Ogunwe be able to ask Asriel questions like us as an audience member asking."
Viewers learned Asriel's plan just as Ogunwe – played by the excellent Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje – did early on in the third season, so I didn't get the sense while watching that anything in particular was missing. But it really would have been nice to get that planned Asriel episode.
While I'm not particularly optimistic that a standalone episode of a show that already ended more than a year ago will ever be produced, I do still appreciate that James McAvoy shed some light on what could have been. Plus, it's not hard to revisit every episode of the show that was filmed. All three seasons are streaming with a Max subscription now.
