This post first appeared on Ren’s Patreon page.

Look, you try coming up with titles for these posts.

This photograph was taken on Bonfire Night 2016, just eight months after the release of Season One, and I expect Kate was already fed up of people asking her when the next season was coming. (For those of you outside the UK, Bonfire Night, a.k.a. Guy Fawkes Night, the 5th of November, is when British people celebrate a man failing to blow up the king, by mostly failing to give themselves horrible injuries from pyrotechnics.) Two years before that I can remember several of the senior crew running around the Lyngarth village set with sparklers before toasting marshmallows over a well-used barbecue.

Bonfire Night 2023 has been somewhat quieter. I’ve tweaked a few visual effects shots and had a chat with Kate about what improvements in the production process can be made for next season.

All four episodes of Season Two are now picture-locked. A few weeks ago Ori and Alex came up to Cambridgeshire to dub some of their dialogue, some because of intrusive background noise, some to add extra plot details. Marked Ones at the Tavern Dweller level and above can watch my video blog from the day here. We finished the day with a cast and crew reunion meal. As I sat there chatting to the two Ashes about the upcoming first writers’ room session for Season Three, it certainly felt we had turned a corner. Although there is still grading, VFX and sound work to do on Season Two, the job of telling the story feels done, and it’s time to write the next chapter.

I actually wrote Season Three at the end of 2020, immediately after scripting my version of Season Two. I’ve tweaked it a bit since then, but I knew it was far from perfect and it seemed only right to reassemble the team who toiled away in 2019 to develop Season Two to now get Season Three licked into shape. If you’ve seen the YouTube video about us writing Season Two you’ll know that it was an… er… challenging process. Our latest meeting was no different and concluded after nine hours with us having found far more problems than we’d solved. But I came away with plenty of food for thought, and although the road will be rocky (and not in a good, chocolate-marshmallow-and-biscuit kind of way) ultimately the script will be much better for it. Certainly Russell T. Davies’ “Doctor Who: The Writers’ Tale”, which I’m currently reading, gives me confidence; he finds the process just as frustrating.

Talking of frustrations, am I – like Kate might have been in 2016 – fed up of people asking me when Season Two will be out? No, not yet. I hope to be able to answer that question soon.