Hanna showrunner David Farr reveals plans for 'third act' of series after season 2
"So… what now?"
Hanna season 2 just completely blew up everything Hanna thought she knew about the shadowy government organization Utrax. By the end of the season finale, Hanna (Esme Creed-Miles) and her now-ally Marissa Wiegler (Mireille Enos) took down John Carmichael (Dermot Mulroney) by getting the blackmail they needed to control him moving forward. With this leverage, Marissa and Hanna plan to infiltrate Utrax as double agents and dismantle it from the inside, identifying the mysterious Pioneers and exposing them one by one.
If Amazon renews the spy thriller for a third season, Hanna and Marissa will find themselves back at the very place they've been working so hard to escape and destroy, completely flipping the dynamic we've watched for two seasons. Meanwhile, Utrax trainee Clara (Yasmin Monet Prince) found and escaped with her birth mother, finally getting the family and freedom she always wanted, while Sandy (Áine Rose Daly) became a full-blown Utrax assassin, having completed her first kill mission.
Christopher Raphael/Amazon Studios
So, to borrow from the final line of season 2 finale, what now? While creator and showrunner David Farr is keeping mum on the details, he does reveal that he already has the plan for a third season. "All I can say for now is that from the end of this season, you can see that I have a plan in my imagination for where this goes," he tells EW. "I'd love the opportunity to tell that story. I always imagined it having that third act. More than that I just can't say for now."
Farr adds that he's "had conversations" about the future of the series, "but like any TV show, we have to wait and see." He also admits that because of the coronavirus pandemic, "at the moment things are particularly uncertain, so we wait."
While season 1 featured an expanded re-imagining of the 2011 Hanna film, season 2 charted new territory, featuring a new location, new characters, and higher stakes as the Utrax trainees blossomed into full-fledged assassins. And Farr says he's "always had it in mind" where the third season would go. "It will be wonderful to see if we can explore that," he says. "When you make a TV show, you do have to have an architecture in your head vaguely what it is and how long it might be, and that can change slightly. But in my head I always had that three-pronged idea of which the first act was the movie and this is a very exciting second act."
Christopher Raphael
What Farr is most excited about exploring in a third season is "watching this young woman go from knowing nothing about the world to being able to truly take her place in it."
"That strikes me as a very personally challenging and beautiful story for a young woman, and also quite a political story as well," he adds. "That's what I love about the character of Hanna, is that she is deeply individual and personal and very intimate and odd, and yet somehow she does have a kind of political quality, particularly with what's going on in the world right now with the younger generation really feeling the sense that there are forces out there who are trying to control them and trying not to let them have a voice. And that's coming in all sorts of different ways. And one way it's coming out is definitely in gender politics."
It's something that Farr has enjoyed touching upon in the first two seasons as well. "For me to be able to tell a story in which a young woman, a very particular young woman, a very unusual young woman, goes on that journey," he says, "that is what Hanna fundamentally, deep down, is about."
Hanna season 2 is out now on Amazon Prime Video.
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