‘Let’s throw everything at it’: Why Deadloch Season 2 may be its last
deadloch season 2 rolled into the tiny town of Batchelor on the outskirts of Litchfield National Park in September 2024 (ET), bringing cast and crew to transform the town into fictional Barra Creek for a limited shoot. The production has moved the detectives and supporting characters from Tasmania into the Top End to film a darker, hotter mystery that features dismembered body parts, warring croc-wrangling families and missing backpackers. Production designer Helen O’Loan and series stars have described intense conditions, on-the-fly rewrites and a sense that the show is pushing every element to the extreme.
Behind the scenes: Deadloch Season 2 in the Top End
The crew occupied Batchelor — a town historically known as Rum Jungle and sitting roughly 98km out of Darwin — for a concentrated period in late 2024 (ET), covering local signage and turning the general store into the Barra Creek Tavern with full set dressing, tourist billboards and props such as a metres-long rubber crocodile. Helen O’Loan, production designer on the series, said, “We own it for a couple of weeks, ” describing the town as a crew base that drew curiosity from local visitors and even a few “wild brumbies. ”
The second season relocates the two central detectives, Dulcie (Kate Box) and Eddie (Madeleine Sami), plus Dulcie’s partner Cath (Alicia Gardiner), to Barra Creek to investigate the death of Eddie’s one-time partner, Bushy. The new storyline layers grotesque elements and regional colour: dismembered body parts, two feuding croc families, errant crocodiles and missing backpackers populate the plot, while production designers and props teams built a Top End world complete with tour billboards advertising “Don Darrell’s Best Best Jumping Croc Tours” and the “Home of King, the largest croc in the NT. ”
On-set reactions from cast and crew
Alicia Gardiner, series star on the production, captured the physical toll of the shoot: “I couldn’t concentrate in a scene yesterday, the sweat was literally dripping down my back, ” she said, noting the contrast with the freezing conditions of the first season. Gardiner added, “This series feels so different. ”
Madeleine Sami, who plays Eddie, described the environment’s grit and heat: “I am a week into filming now, and I’m thinking I’m going to have to get some sort of scrubbing device, because that dust is so fine and it sticks to everything because we’re all lathered up in sunscreen. ” Kate McLennan and Kate McCartney, who write and showrun the series, were seen constantly rewriting on the run to respond to conditions and performance needs, intensifying the sense that the production is throwing everything at the material.
Fast context and what’s next
Season one was filmed in Tasmania; production moved north for the second season to capture the Top End’s heat and landscape. Batchelor, once Australia’s first uranium mining town, registered 507 residents in a 2016 census and was transformed into Barra Creek with extensive set work.
What comes next: crews will complete the scheduled weeks of location work in Batchelor before moving on to post-production, while writers continue to refine scripts on set as filming progresses. Expect further updates from cast and production as editing and final assembly begin following the location shoot in late 2024 (ET).
