His Dark Materials review, episode 4: This enthralling universe is almost fully formed

The fourth episode of His Dark Materials, the BBC’s sumptuous Sunday night family fantasy, introduces two entertaining new characters, Lee Scoresby (Lin-Manuel Miranda) and Iorek Byrnison (Joe Tandberg). It takes its time with both, underlining the greater freedom afforded by an eight-hour series (with sequels already in the works) compared to a one-off film.

“Cold open” is unusually apt. The episode opens on Scoresby – an “aeronaut”, singing in his hot air balloon – making his way to Trollesund, the port town that serves as the gateway to the Arctic. Trollesund looks like a cold and barren place where the main leisure activities are drinking and fighting. Magisterium policemen prowl the streets.

Miranda is best known for writing and starring in Hamilton, the most popular hip-hop musical about an 18th-century finance minister currently showing in the West End, and you can see the broad gestures of musical theatre in his performance. His Scoresby is an unthreatening rogue-with-a-heart, who wears a leather waistcoat and sets his hat at a rakish angle. “I can fight and I can fly,” he says, and you half-expect him to wink at the camera or break into dance.

Beneath his balloon, he sees the ship conveying the Gyptians and Lyra (Dafne Keen), steaming north on their quest to rescue the abducted Gyptian children. When they arrive, the second-in-command Farder Coram (James Cosmo) takes Lyra to meet Doctor Lanselius (Omid Djalili), who tests her abilities with the Alethiometer. She passes with flying colours. Coram wants to enlist the help of the witches, especially Serafina Pekkala, who happens to be his ex.

Where Scoresby is spry and cunning, Iorek Byrnison is gruff and proud. He may even have a tendency to be too honourable. He is also an enormous bear – an armoured bear, to be precise. The magisterium have tricked him out of his armour on trumped up charges, having got him drunk on spirits, and he is working off his debt. Lyra can see the value of having an enormous angry polar bear on their team, and sets about getting his armour back.

Compared to the shonky CGI in The War of the Worlds, BBC1’s other Sunday night drama, you can see the money that has been spent on Iorek. His paws thud into the ground, and when he puts his enormous nose in Lyra’s face, you can practically smell his beary breath. Tandberg’s voice work gives Jorek just the right level of menace. Armoured bears are better friends than enemies.

Back down south, meanwhile, Mrs Coulter (Ruth Wilson) is summoned before the Magisterium to explain her raid on the college, which violated scholastic sanctuary. She turns the situation around by promising them Lord Asriel, whom she says she has imprisoned in the Arctic.

Once again, Coulter’s personal style puts the other characters to shame. The white winter chic for her ride in the airship is particularly enjoyable. She might have a wicked and guileful heart, and tremendous intelligence, but sometimes she looks like a missing Roger Moore-era Bond girl, and the programme is all the better for it.

As the episode closes, the Gyptian gang, with Lyra and her new friends, begin the long trudge north. After four episodes, with His Dark Materials’s enthralling universe almost fully formed, it is a cold-hearted viewer who doesn’t want to see where these characters end up.