His Dark Materials season 3 draws on horror of Trump, Boris Johnson

Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy is often seen as an atheist’s take on C.S. Lewis’ Christian allegory via fantasy adventure series, The Chronicles of Narnia. The comparison is less than one-to-one, but it’s undeniable that the series’ most present villains, the priests of the Magisterium, are a direct and horrifying allegory for institutionalized Christianity.

Primary among the Magisterium’s goals is to eliminate sin from humanity by any means possible, including, as adapted in the first season of HBO Max’s His Dark MaterialsThis is what separates children from their hearts. By its nature, the TV series spends more time with the adult characters of Pullman’s world than the books do, and the altered focus brings the books’ themes of adults controlling children to the foreground.

Getting the audience inside the heads of those villains without making them too sympathetic — whether it’s a mother who rages that her child’s identity is not merely an extension of her own or a global state that wants to remove the free will of its citizens before they come of age — was the biggest challenge of creating the show, according to series writer Jack Thorne.

“We deliberately introduced [Father Hugh MacPhail, who rises to become the leader of the Magisterium] much earlier than the books did,” said Thorne, “because we wanted to understand his journey. We wanted to understand how someone does this to themselves and does this to their country.”

Thorne, Polygon and Zoom sat down for a chat about the release of season three. His Dark MaterialsThe new season was produced in partnership with HBO and BBC One. Season 2 adapts to the events of Amber SpyglassHe introduces new societies from all over the multiverse where monolithic religion sought to restrict free will, and chose to start with children.

Photo by Simon Ridgway/HBO

He was asked whether he believed there were parallels between the two. Dark Materials’ fantasy horrors and current trends of book bans and legislative claims of child corruption, Thorne agreed that the connection was not lost on him.

“I’m very scared of where we are, as a world right now. We are all a little scared about where the world is at this moment. The way that we’ve put ourselves in our binary boxes and gone, If you’re not on my team, then you’re on the other team. And those who have emerged from that. Trump is a prominent figure. Boris Johnson was a member of my country. You also think about Trump. This is what it lives very strongly in. [His Dark Materials].”

Pullman’s Amber SpyglassThe final volume of his trilogy, “The Magisterium”, contains these themes as well as many more. It introduces a villain behind the Magisterium and shows a version purgatory, angels, or even the creator the universe. But it’s also the book that completes the series’ transformation from a classic fantasy setup — children finding hidden doors to other worlds — to something from the classics of science fiction: a multiverse of alternate worlds full of a wild diversity of civilizations both like and unlike our own.

Photo: Peter Baldwin/HBO

It’s a move that puts His Dark MaterialsThe same genre of mainstream, modern multiverse drama is also included Everything at Once, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s headlong jog toward Secret Wars: Avengers.

Thorne also credits the multiverse of multipleverses for our current moment.

“Why are we drawn to the multiverse? Is there something about this time that makes us want to see the other side? You know what? I think there are many reasons we could. Our time is so — it feels like we’re living through something quite profound. I don’t think we’ll realize quite what a revolution it’s been until we’re at the other side of it. This revolution is young people-driven. It’s about identity. And when we work it out, at the end of it, that stuff — the His Dark Material books, and the Avengers films, and everything — will seem like they exist in a new context.”

With the new season kicking off this week and production on it done and dusted, Polygon asked Thorne if he felt he had a different perspective on Pullman’s books now than when he began the show.

“We used to say, right at the beginning of the process, ‘We’re doing a Ph.D. in Philip Pullman,’” he recalled. “And I feel like I’ll never quite finish that Ph.D. And with The Book of DustHe is challenging me to believe things, which I did not think were possible. We went through the whole process with him, and he was very supportive. But at the same time, his universe is so multifaceted that we’re constantly playing a game of catch-up with his ridiculous intellect.”