Shannara Chronicles Season 2: Cast, Trailer, Release Date

Good news, fantasy lovers. MTV has renewed its TV adaptation of Terry Brook's The Shannara Chronicles series for a second, gorgeous season. The renewal isn't a total surprise. The high fantasy series broadcast to totally acceptable numbers on the network, but also looked pretty expensive to produce, filming all 10 episodes of its first season on location in New Zealand. (Think Lord of the Rings, but with more love triangles and pop music). The show's pilot was the most expensive pilot ever produced by the network.

For the unaffiliated,The Shannara Chronicles roughly follows the plot line outlined in Brooks' The Elfstones of Shannara. Set far in our future (note the downed Seattle Space Needle in the show's promo poster), the main characters live and fight in the fictional Four Lands. When an army of demons threatens to wipe out all of the creatures of the Four Lands — from elves to humans — three young heroes team up with the last druid to, you know, save the world.

Shannara Chronicles Season 2 Cast

MTV has stayed impressively tight-lipped about season 2 of their fantasy drama.

In the first season, The Shannara Chronicles starred Arrow's Manu Bennett, Pan's Labyrinth's Ivana Basquero, The Carrie Diaries' Austin Butler (also know as Thea Queen's DJ assassin boyfriend), and relative newcomer Poppy Drayton. Of course, the fate of Drayton's Amberle was very much in-the-air come the season one finale.

Speaking to SciFiNow about what season 2 might look like, particularly if the season will pick up where season 1 ends versus jumping ahead to the events of The Wishsong of Shannara, Terry Brooks said:

This is an interesting debate that’s ongoing. When I first saw this I thought, 'Well, we should just move on and do a whole new season that involves the next book and forget about this season.' But of course MTV said, 'Are you crazy? We’re building fan support for these actors, we can’t boot them out of there and bring all-new people in!' And I said, 'Well, they could be the same characters, just the children or whatever…' that didn’t work.

It became clear that they were going to build the story around the actors they have right now, and that was going to be the thrust of the story no matter what. But they are free to remove elements from other books, and I think they will do that. They’ve already been talking about Wishsong and using bits and pieces or large chunks of that storyline and building around the characters they already have, which isn’t too difficult to do. So that’s what they will do. What shows tend to do when adapting books is do the first season and then go off in different directions, so I forsee my duty as being to help them get there in the best way possible.

So it sounds like we'll be sticking with these characters we know and love from the first season. As for the fate of Amberle, Brooks teased:

Yeah, actually, although you might wonder how, and I won’t tell you, but we gave some serious thought to that, and there was a lot of talk about bringing her back out of the tree and so forth, but I said “No, she’s a tree [laughs], you can’t bring her back, that’s terrible storytelling, you have to find a different way.” So then I told them how they could do it, so we’ll see. But yeah, I think she’s signed on for another season or so, and she’ll back for that. I know that she probably wishes she’d gotten a different role, because she really liked the series, but her life was finite in that particular storyline.

It sounds like we haven't seen the last of Amberle...

Shannara Chronicles Season 2 Trailer

As of yet, we have seen no footage from The Shannara Chronicles season two, but we'll be sure to update this page when a teaser or trailer drops.

Shannara Chronicles Season 2 Release Date

Yeah, also no word yet on a potential release date for Shannara Chronicles season two. The first season debuted in January 2016, but we are obviously not going to get a January debut for season two. Perhaps MTV is holding it for a summer 2017 release?