Series 1 finishes on a three-part Alpine serial. Though never less than watchable, this first episode is the most uneven of the three. Its secondary adventures — a river crossing and a Vagrant-haunted forest — work much better than the centrepiece, a mountain festival, and the sense of journeying over a long distance isn’t quite brought out. The episode would benefit from a montage of walking here, like the elegant one of horse-riding in episode 8.

We open on a wonderful shot, though, of the white water of a mountain river in spate. This is the cold, stony world of the Haute Savoie, and we hear as well as see the force of the current. As a sort of indicative scene to show the more challenging terrain, we get a five-minute mini-adventure of fording this torrent, which looks genuinely dangerous. The travellers are ragged from “walking and walking and walking”, as Henry puts it, and are all out of food. Let’s call it ten days since the vineyard, then, making this 28 October. The coil of rope, their most versatile equipment, solves yet another problem, and they manage the crossing with a sort of professionalism which tells us that these aren’t the clueless boys of July any more.

As they descend into a valley, Daniel on his donkey-like horse picks them up again. How he’s managed to stay in contact, who knows, but he still doesn’t seem much of a threat. A tactic of the television adaptation throughout has been to shift things that the Tripods do into things that the Black Guard do, and in that sense Daniel trailing the boys is a case in point. But these episodes would have gained from casting an older, more aggressive actor as Daniel, who was perhaps cast more for his persona in episode 9 as a prospective bridegroom than as a police inspector. We have no real sense of him here as an adversary, or even a hunter. He can’t question locals, or talk to other Black Guards, because such a scene would have to be in French. As it is, he does and says basically nothing. Within moments of this glimpse he disappears again, not to be seen for another whole episode.

Oblivious to Daniel, the boys pass through scrubby terrain with ruined houses, then avoid further descent by crossing the valley floor on a viaduct of the Ancients. This is all reminiscent of the post-apocalyptic vision of episode 4, but in their current state the boys have less zest to explore and that makes it less zestful for us to watch, too. We could easily miss that the trail junction where the travellers rest was once a road intersection and the ruin adjoining it a petrol station. The camera barely notices the wrecked car chassis, or the blue and red Elf logo partly obscured by the tree. Elf was the leading French oil company of the 1980s, so continental motorists might have spotted that clue in the original broadcast.

So, then, where episode 4 showed what happened to the railway, episode 11 shows what happened to the road network: it too is still in use, in a lower-tech way. The boys are picked up by a family riding a form of horse and trap known as a jarvey, or jaunting-cart, which became popular around 1800. Like the steam engine in episode 4, this is a lovingly restored vehicle, and the camera takes an admiring look. Also on show are clothes which are more Swiss than French, and this family, wrapped up warm, is our first glimpse of that. Further fair-goers are encountered, and soon we’re at the festival site itself, a ruined abbey. There are more jarveys, more locals (one woman wearing a very rum blue square hat), Black Guards with lean hunting dogs, and an ornamental display of fancy bread. Local mayors are collecting taxes, with coins placed in a treasury chest. A flustered chatelaine, dressed in something like a nun’s habit, is setting out a large buffet: apples, sausage, cheese, kegs of ale, fat-marbled joints of meat, green peppers, pewter jugs. Avert your eye from the dish of bananas just briefly in shot, unless you want to think about how they could possibly have been carried here from southern Spain, and still be ripe on 28 October. And then, after that huge setup… all that happens at the festival is that the boys steal some food and run for it. The little girl in the crocheted hat, from the cart earlier, melodramatically points out the thieves to the Guard. There’s a decently-filmed chase, food flying everywhere, music pumping, and the boys reach the shelter of some trees just ahead of the hunting dogs.

Everything thus far in episode 11 is expanded from a single, quite striking page of The White Mountains, where we do indeed have a river to cross, a village festival, a tolling bell, horses and traps, and the stealing of food. But the striking part of that page wasn’t the theft, which in the book is just a cynical burglary. The text is really spent on Will’s subsequent pang of conscience. He concludes that they are right to steal, because “we were not strangers, we were outlaws… Every man’s hand was against us in the enemy country through which we marched… none of the old rules applied.” What we see on screen is more visual, for sure, but has no dramatic purpose. Having the boys make a hash of it only exasperates the viewer: whatever happened to the competence we saw earlier? But at least it’s over quickly, and the next scene, entirely new to the television version, is more interesting.

As low-lying Alpine woods can be, this forest is thick, misty and dark. The camera gives everything a Grimm’s-Fairy-Tales quality, not least because of the skulls on the boundary poles. A French cauldron hangs over a smouldering fire, and we have unnerving glimpses of a strange encampment, featuring, for example, a graffitied-up red car door, and a Cold War-era sentry post. (The former Swiss border is very close here.) In pride of place is a tall wooden fetish of a Tripod, built from logs, which the Vagrants use to re-enact the Capping ceremonies which destroyed their lives. When they grab the boys, they perform the same ritual of head-examination we saw the Black Guards of episode 5 follow, even using the same words. A wooden Cap like a crown of thorns is produced, and the boys are swayed up in the air by the Vagrants, turned around as if by the Tripod’s tentacle. It’s played as black comedy, with vignettes like the game of catch two of the Vagrants play with the hand grenades. But it’s also played for horror, or pity. These damaged people seem much more dangerous in France, perhaps because they are treated so much worse than in England. The boys escape by completing the re-enactment of the Capping ceremony, simulating having become Vagrants themselves. Beanpole makes himself a sort of French Ozymandias with a French nursery-rhyme, Will and Henry make animal noises, then they all grab their equipment and run, Henry stealing the little tomahawk of the (it pains me to put it this way) Red Indian one. And with that, we have heard the eerie soundtrack echoes for the final time. Take a bow, Vagrants: you will never appear in the show again, and series 2 will forget that you even exist.

After this clever escape the boys stupidly retrace their steps and run straight back into the Black Guard. That feeling of it all being for nothing — they might just as well have been arrested back at the site of the old petrol station — contributes to a sense of the story going nowhere. Another structural oddity about the plot structure here is that, after a moment shot very like a cliff-hanger ending… we simply resume, just when we were expecting the closing titles. Possibly the original episode outline did finish here. That might also explain why the river crossing at the start of the episode, and indeed the ruined garage sequence, seem trimmed down from longer footage. Maybe episodes 12 and 13 overran, and needed to push a few minutes of material into episode 11 in order to make it all fit.

Those minutes are certainly shot in the manner of a typical Tripods episode-opening. We advance time slightly, and re-establish the situation in a fresh location, with a new melodic theme in the soundtrack to match. Specifically, the travellers are taken under guard to an Alpine base town, through a lane of curious townsfolk. This is in daylight, so (even given that it’s late October) some hours must pass before the next scene, in the candle-lit council chamber, where the magistrates poke through their belongings: the map Will took from the Chateau, the travel permits Daniel gave them, and the hand grenades again. (Notice how often the existence of the grenades is being recapitulated? It’s almost as if they’ll be needed soon.) The boys sit in front of a table loaded with fruit, brioche and cheese, but have lost their appetite. “When there is no Cap… then the thought in the head is strange,” says the sympathetic Guard captain. “This is no crime.” But the theft of food was not civilised, so they will be put on trial. The lack of mutual comprehension here perhaps tries to catch some of the book’s reflection on whether our young thieves are, morally, in the wrong, but the boys never put their own point of view. And so, after the episode’s false ending, its genuine one.

I’ve given this episode a more negative writeup than it deserves. The opening mountain scenery is fresh, the Vagrant woods are well-realised and poignant, and outstanding work is done by the costumes department. But it’s hard not to be just a little underwhelmed by a story of three boys, who largely deserve to be caught, being caught.

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