We are watching a cold open of a new television fantasy. These first minutes are devoted to its eeriest motif, that the past and the future coexist within it. Five seconds of birdsong and a peaceful rural village seen from across a lake are overlaid by the caption “A Village in England / — July, 2089 AD —”, in a modern sans-serif font.

But clattering hooves bring on a horse-drawn cart, with farmers in their best clothes. Cut to a cottage, where the light fittings are all oil lamps, and our first close-up is of Will’s mother, getting ready and glancing over at — the camera follows her eye — an audibly ticking clock which, like the old tin of Slade’s Caramel Toffy on the shelf below it, belongs perhaps to the 1930s. But no time to think about that — it’s three minutes to twelve, when something will happen. She calls out — our first dialogue — “John! John!” — and the camera follows tight, domestic spaces inside the cottage which is, we find, the village watermill. A solid man grinds wheat into flour as the huge interlocking wheels turn in a dark wooden cavity of a room: our first of many glimpses of different lines of work in Wherton.

As we cut to the exterior, a millpond with swans, the naturalistic soundscape is punctured by two fat synthesised bass notes. This is the first calling card of a highly distinctive soundtrack which will provide so much of the show’s texture that it is almost a narrator. By turns spooky, tragic and melodic, it uses the oboe and cello sounds of a 70s prog-rock album rather than the drum-machine and sequencer of 80s pop, but still sounds modern today. Because it overlies historical landscapes and interiors, our eyes and ears continually reprise the past/future juxtaposition. What our eyes are seeing now are the cousins Will and Henry, in the clean chemises of children tidied up for an occasion. They are not speaking. They have had enough of being children. The faces of the Parker family have thus been shown to us, all four in succession, and the whole epic which spins out from here is always rooted in this point of origin.

John, no-nonsense in his best black coat, gathers his sulky teenagers as the music builds to a processional. The villagers stream out of their houses. There’s a deal of lively business — note the little girl unused to wearing her fancy patchwork-quilt dress — and incidental talk thrown away, as multiple shots expand a narrow physical space to make the walk seem longer. In a tricky four-shot, the Parkers join Jack, the centre of attention (“this is your day”), but even as they praise him the music becomes a little more doubting. The spry Squire is helped down from a carriage, as suddenly a banshee-like howl is heard by everybody at once. A bell begins tolling. In a well-paced double-cut back to the now empty kitchen, the ticking clock reaches noon: whatever is going to happen, is going to happen right now.

Jack walks out alone on a jetty into the lake, as exposed as a man walking the plank. There are overawed expressions on a dozen faces. We are just 2:10 into the episode when the cold open ends with an absolutely gigantic metal leg splashing into the water and our first sight of the silver Tripod: its three articulated legs, its underside, its lofty body. Note the post- Star Wars materiality of the model work, distressed by smoke-damage and scuffing, but note also the clean, crisp design, and the big-engineering chunkiness of the hinge joints. Hatches open; we see triangles and circles; this is full-on science fiction now, and that most alien of colours, a chlorinated green, swirls inside, as the camera rises and twists. The music swells and its pitch rises, too, proportionate to the sheer height of what we’re seeing, as an audacious long shot reveals just how tall the Tripod is. It is perhaps fifteen times the scale of the villagers or of poor Jack, who is being hoisted into the maw of the machine. A fat bass chord closes the cold open on a note of irrevocability. Whatever was going to happen, has now happened.

And appropriately, since we shall soon learn that Jack is having some sort of device attached to his skull — he is being Capped — the animated title sequence opens on a triangular Cap design like a printed-circuit-board stencil. A short animation, the titles pick up on the key green hue of the barely-glimpsed Tripod interior, but serve mainly as a stage for the title music. This melds the syncopated rhythm of Holst’s Mars to the bigged-up tragedy of a Beethoven funeral march, but once again the instruments are synthesized, and — like the animation — tell us that this story is from the future, not the past. In a sign that the programme considers itself prestigious, the opening titles credit not only the script-writer and author of the original novels, as was usual for the time, but also the director. The producer — in today’s parlance, show-runner — then occupies the bumper position on the final frame of the closing credits, which was more usually the director’s prerogative.

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As we rejoin the action the Tripod remains fixed in place, in a disquieting counterpoint to the sudden relaxation among the people below. Something the novel slightly obscures, but which any visual adaptation immediately makes plain, is that this is a fantasy of a world ruled by giant spiders. The Tripods unnerve not only by their hugeness but by remaining absolutely still for hours at a time. As for the Cap, that somehow serves both as the venom injected by the spider and as its web. Yet everyone is happy, and a pastoral, cakes-and-ale jollity is on full show. Throughout episode 1, micro-scenes of a few seconds are played out by the many, many extras. A ragamuffin weaves among villagers laying out the feast. The schoolmaster holds forth. Young couples stroll together. Travelling musicians arrive — upright piano, accordion and side-drum — on a none-too-steady cart pulled by a dappled horse.

Of course, these scenes are no help to us, because what we want are explanations. It’s here that the central character of Will first becomes the viewer’s representative, asking faintly rebellious questions of his mother back in the kitchen. She is placidly reassuring. He’ll understand when he’s older, but also, Capping is his exit from childhood, and he wants that, doesn’t he? A shot from the pantry: hung pheasant, flour, pickled onions, eggs, a hard cheese, bread, home-made jams sealed with muslin tied with string.

The two cousins are sent to take food to the “Vagrants” who, in England, are given a frugal welfare, but who are still at the opposite social pole to the well-to-do Parkers. There’s a lush shot of the boys carrying bread and milk-churns up a slight hill, the Tripod framed behind and above them, seen through tall trees. This scene is Henry’s début, as he talks mockingly about Will’s doubts, though he evidently shares them. The Vagrants are the damaged survivors of failed Cappings. This is a taboo subject which the boys can talk about only with each other and only at the very edges of Wherton, which is where we are going. All four Vagrants stand at the boundary, staring in disturbingly: two men, two women; two young, two old. But even as one mystery has been half-explained, another presents itself, because one Vagrant is not like the rest. Will clangs a swinging iron hoop with a ploughshare at the boundary marker of the village, and the heaviness of the sound gives this quite some menace. “You’re not allowed past the stone.” But we also hear the spooky musical motifs which throughout the series will signal Otherness, and the boys are far from comfortable here. “My name is Ozymandias,” calls out the one who is an Other even among Others, striding keen-eyed toward them. He tries to provoke a reaction, then laughs as the boys scurry back to the safety of their own world. The other Vagrants are already eating, oblivious, but Ozymandias has seen a spark of something and is for some reason satisfied.

With the festival in full swing, and tables laid with trifles, salad, bread and cold cuts, the Tripod comes suddenly to life – Henry and Will, still brooding, see it first — lowering Jack on its tentacle to return him to the ground far below, but now with a Cap bonded to his skull. All applaud. The Squire calls the musicians to play. Cheery, acoustic folk-instruments reclaim the soundscape from all those moody synthesised chords, the nineteenth century reclaiming the story from the twenty-first as if to reassure us that all is well. Four of the wives carve a roast suckling-pig, which had been turning on a spit. Unable to make contact with Jack, Will can only see the falseness of it all. The music is audible right out to where the Vagrants eat, too, emphasising the simultaneity of what’s happening, and Ozymandias, with a purposeful air, finishes an apple, transgresses the boundary line and strides powerfully up the wooded hill. For the first time we see his binoculars, and the camera pans from his POV across the feasters. Henry has been mollified by the food, Will has not. Again this pleases Ozymandias, and again we have no idea why.

And, blend to the lake by moonlight, the table-lanterns still burning. (Glowing like yellow blossoms, as the book has it.) The villagers have gone home, leaving the Tripod still impassively rooted in place. 5 July 2089, Capping Day, is over, but much has been learned in the 9:32 of screen time it consumed.

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A complex scene next afternoon intercuts village life with the schoolroom, though it’s the viewer who is really being educated. Economical shots show how the blacksmith makes a horseshoe: the camera loves the glowing embers, the microphone loves the hammering of iron. The wives shop with woven baskets in what could easily be a scene out of a Jane Austen adaptation. You can buy unplucked geese, and brown jugs of ale. This is what the women do while the men are at work. But the soundtrack, running ahead of a visual cut, gives us what the children do: they chant their times tables in a one-room school. Not infants, because they are aged perhaps ten to sixteen, but they are all in together. The teenagers are sat at the back — Will and Henry, and their likely future wives, “the two girls from the Willow Farm”, all due to be Capped next year. But already they’re too old for this. The school is another communicative set design, in a high-ceilinged, white-painted hall. The objects we see are carefully selected, from the desks and writing slates to the children’s paintings on the wall, all drawn from the natural world but one: a child’s-eye view of a Tripod. There’s a cane on the wall, too, but the schoolmaster comes across as firm rather than cruel. It emphasises how little ever changes here that he is played by an old-looking actor — an actor born in 1926, so that he was 58 in 1984, but who also had a face from a Victorian photograph. The blackboard has “6th July 2089” written on it (a Wednesday, incidentally): we can easily imagine that each day’s lessons begin by writing the date. All at once the chant is interrupted by the ululation of the Tripod outside. Everyone looks round: the camera cuts to a new shot showing the village inn, together with an ongoing sheep-drove, and there’s a side view of the Tripod as it turns its dome and begins to depart. A superb vision-mix shows the faces of the schoolmaster, approving, and the two girls from the Willow Farm, anxious, as the three of them look out of the schoolroom window, and the Tripod stalks away in shadow-play against the outside of the glass. This leads naturally into a monologue of indoctrination. Note the eleven-shot, if there’s such a word, where the faces of all eleven children are visible without blocking each other. Are they convinced of the benevolence of the Tripods? The scene ends with them happily escaping, like kids anywhere, out of the white door and down the steps, at the end of another school day. An informative moment occurs now: Henry, who is a lonely child — he is not the son of Mr and Mrs Parker, and was always excluded from the bond Will had with Jack — reaches out but is rebuffed. He turns away and consoles himself by casting a wooden yo-yo. Episode 1 has only seconds of screen time here and there in which to tell us about the subtly different childhoods of Will and Henry, but it does use those seconds.

Will has now heard three incomplete stories about Capping — from his mother, from Henry, from the schoolmaster — and goes in search of the only person who can tell him the real deal: Jack. The wordless scene which results is another tableau vivant of rural life — three woodcutters, their tools and jigs, a black kettle suspended over a lighted fire — and has a POV treatment, the camera jogging with Will as he spies through the trees. In this way we share Will’s moment of realisation that Jack, like a victim in a zombie movie, is one of Them now. This moment is the centre of the whole episode, as Will breaks under the pressure and runs blindly towards any kind of freedom. The racing music suggests the wildness of Will’s thoughts but, in an excellent bit of physical acting, this kinetic scene runs smack into a capture. We have been told already that Vagrants sometimes trap and kill children, and now Ozymandias, a physically powerful man, has pinioned Will. On the other hand… he no longer seems mad. Together they go to “the Tomb”, an overgrown mausoleum deeper in the woods, a place the Capped shy away from but which draws the imagination of children.

A lengthy scene follows, the only long conversation in episode 1. Will — in return for breaking many rules — finally learns the truth. Ozymandias, not of course his real name, is only shamming as a Vagrant, and pulls his Cap from his hair. The difficulty with which it comes free is what makes this shot work so well. “The Cap’s quite genuine,” he says, “it came from a dead man.” The sinister mention of death adds a little edge here, as does the shadowy, dark interior, which Ozymandias lights with candles, the camera following his hand as he rather elegantly snuffs the match from a box he was pleased to find. This is the first of many refuge-like interiors throughout the series, where our heroes will be safe, for just a moment, from an enemy world outside. Ozymandias is seductive, showing Will his binoculars — “Men made these, Will Parker” — and they talk a little of imagination, and of Capping as the end of creativity. There’s a neat callback to the paintings on the schoolroom wall: in Wherton, the only art is by the children.

Structurally, of course, this is a scene often found in children’s fiction. It’s the one where the heroes learn they are special in some way, and must go on an adventure into strange lands. Compare, say, The Eagle of the Ninth, 1954,[1] or The Hobbit, 1937,[2] or Treasure Island, 1883.[3] But playing against this stereotype is the unsentimentality of the pitch. If Will gets there at all it’ll mostly be luck, and the only reward will be a harder life. He’s only one of dozens of recruits, and has no super-powers or significance. He’s told not that he’s special, but that he’s ordinary. In the best line of the episode, Ozymandias looks him over and says: “Obstinacy! Good. I’ve always thought courage over-rated.” He opens his heavy gold pocket-watch, another miraculous object, and gives it to Will as a gesture of trust. (A chiming leitmotif is heard in the music whenever this watch appears, so it’s perhaps fortunate that it rarely does.) Ozymandias tells Will to meet him at “Five Ways, on the south road”. This sort of incidental detail in the dialogue, like mention of “the Willow Farm”, or of neighbouring “Whilmstone”, or villagers like Mrs Downes or Mr Hopkins, has a cumulative effect. Not one of these proper nouns appears in the book: the screen-writer is using even apparently casual lines in the dialogue to give a convincing substance to the world of Wherton.

There’s another interscene at the millpond, with night falling, which shows Will brooding alone: Mr and Mrs Parker look tolerantly on from the doorway, like the parents of any moody teenager. Spare a thought for their misery to come: they’re not bad people. Cut to the small hours of the night. The boys share a bedroom, but Will is bolt awake in his nightclothes. He steals food from the pantry, set to make his break… when Henry catches him. Evidently Will could have confided in Henry, but chose not to. Henry, the stubborner of the two, pushes his way into joining the quest. They talk in the mill room, giving our second and final look at the cool machinery. And so the final moments of episode 1 show the boys, cloth sacks over shoulders, walking in the pre-dawn out of Wherton for the very last time, crossing the line which must not be crossed. Pointing this up, the camera shoots them through the same iron hoop which Will had clanged the day before to emphasise where the boundary was. In a conventional adaptation of the novel this is where the credits would roll, but we have one final shot, and one last anxious chord. Unseen by the boys, the Tripod rises over the trees behind them, its ring of lights firing up as it watches them. For the first time we hear the high cueing-note which announces the imminent arrival of the closing titles… and slide into a clean, modern graphic which is once again an animation overpowered by its brooding music, and which traverses, left to right, in the manner of a journey.

So ends a densely packed overture, in which locations, set design, costume, model-making, video compositing, a throng of actors and a script refined from a classic book combine to powerful effect. Dramatising just two consecutive days, and set in a single village, the episode nevertheless tells a larger story about a century of history in a whole post-conquest world. Into that world it places two of our three protagonists, and introduces three of the four social factions — the Free Men, the Capped, the Vagrants and the Black Guard — which are their possible futures. The episode meditates just a little on imagination and freedom, and also injects danger into this apparently contented world, no sooner creating than unsettling it. That is a very great deal for 24 minutes of screen time to take on, and no episode of the show is more tightly edited.

Works cited:

  1. The Eagle of the Ninth (1954), by Rosemary Sutcliff. Wikipedia
  2. The Hobbit (1937), by J. R. R. Tolkien. Wikipedia
  3. Treasure Island (serialised 1881-82, novelised 1883), by Robert Louis Stevenson. Wikipedia

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