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Watch the first full trailer for HBO’s adaptation of His Dark Materials

Watch the first full trailer for HBO’s adaptation of His Dark Materials

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HBO and BBC’s take on Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass

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HBO’s Game of Thrones is coming to an end this weekend, and once it’s over, the network will have to figure out what its next big hit will be. One possibility is its forthcoming adaptation of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. You can get a glimpse of that today: HBO just released the first real trailer for the upcoming fantasy series.

Pullman’s fantasy trilogy (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass as well as his ongoing sequel trilogy, which started with The Book of Dust in 2017) is certainly epic in scale. Set in an alternate world where one’s soul manifests as a shape-shifting animal called a Daemon, it follows a young girl named Lyra Belacqua (played in the series by Logan star Dafne Keen) who travels to the Arctic to find her friend Roger. He (and other children in her version of Oxford) has been kidnapped by The Church, which is experimenting on them as it studies the nature of an elemental particle called Dust. That particle appears to be the stuff that imbues people with consciousness, and that’s something that the Church has deemed heresy. Lyra’s journey brings her on a considerable adventure across worlds and lands her in the midst of a massive war being waged across existence.

The new trailer builds on what we’ve seen of the show so far. The ambiance looks to be quite a bit more creepy than the 2007 feature film, and it shows off the Daemons and other sentient polar bears in Lyra’s world, which we didn’t really see in the teaser the BBC released earlier this year. As is to be expected, the trailer looks as though this first season of the series will largely adapt the first installment of Pullman’s trilogy, The Golden Compass.

The series originated with the BBC four years ago as an eight-part miniseries from the same company that produced Doctor Who. Last fall, the BBC announced that it had renewed the series for a second season and that it was bringing on HBO as a co-producer. That makes a bit of sense: HBO has a solid history of creating fantasy shows, and it’s looking to fill the void that Game of Thrones will leave behind after this weekend.

Unfortunately, the teaser doesn’t say when the series will debut, only that it’s “coming soon.”