The BBC/HBO dramatization of Philip Pullman’s magnum opus His Dark Materials has been one of the televisual highlights of the year, if not the decade. The alternative reality of Lyra Belacqua’s Oxford, with its airships and daemons and gateways to other worlds, is so strange and yet somehow so familiar. The violent dogmatism of the Magisterium mirrors the rising tide of nationalism; the Gyptian children severed from their daemons might serve as a metaphor for the scars of a decade of austerity.