Real European geography, from Hampshire to the Alps, is very accurately laid out in the show. The placing of its fictional locations… not so much.

First, where is the City of the Tripods? If we consult the books, The White Mountains tells us only that no Cities exist in England. “The City of Gold and Lead” then establishes that there is just one in Europe, and seems to place it in the Netherlands, at perhaps Arnhem on the lower Rhine. On television, an episode in series 2 places it instead near Koblenz, in the central German Palatinate. But in episode 8 of series 1, we see it from a farmhouse window near Dijon, so it can’t possibly be further away than Strasbourg or Basel, and even that frankly seems a stretch. These are discrepancies of many hundreds of miles.

Series 1 and 2 were adapted by different screenwriters who made different choices in order to tell different stories. The conflicts between them are not so much continuity errors as the sort of rethinking between a movie and its sequel. (Consider, for example, the question of who Luke Skywalker’s father is in Star Wars, a movie not intended to have a sequel, vs. The Empire Strikes Back.) Whatever games we might like to play with maps in The Tripods, the needs of the story come first. In series 1 the story needs Will to tell the others where Eloise is, and to show not tell. It’s also good to make the Tripods more powerful, to increase their mystique, to trail future adventures. There’s repeated talk in episodes 9 to 12 about how close the City must be, which applies a slight point of pressure, much like the talk of winter closing in. Understandably, the script wants to make the journey tougher as it goes on, unlike in the book, where the last part is the anticlimactically easy. So one can see why series 1 made this choice. Equally, though, series 2 needs the City to be distant from the White Mountains and a real challenge just to reach.

Episode 10 of series 1 makes another surprise choice. The Free Men of the books live in “the Tunnel”. A real location, this is the long steep rack-railway tunnel from the base of the Eiger to the glacial saddle of the Jungfraujoch, in the Bernese Oberland of Switzerland. Its icebound summit complex, at 3454m, would make a magnificently romantic hideout, though the books clarify that the Free Men live mostly at the Tunnel’s base, and not the summit. But in series 1, this refuge is instead under Mont Blanc — the highest point in Europe, where France, Italy and Switzerland meet. Why change? In fact there are several plausible reasons. Perhaps it was to deal with the sheer vagueness of The White Mountains as a target, since (on television) the boys have lost their original map and have only a name to go on. Or perhaps it’s to avoid crossing into German-speaking lands. To be consistent with the handling of French, that would mean chunks of episodes 12 and 13 being in German. Or, maybe it’s to route the travellers safely west of the un-televisable Lake Geneva, and get them into the High Savoy without need of a boat. Or then again, perhaps it’s just that Mont Blanc is better known, and is the more Romantic choice.

So you can talk away these inconsistencies, for sure, and hardly any viewers will even have noticed them. And yet, and yet. It’s a little unsatisfactory that series two will, without any comment — because what comment could there even be? — shift the City back to the Rhine, shift the Free Men back to Switzerland, and drop the whole business of foreign-language dialogue entirely.

Next: Episode 11 ● Prev: Episode 10