Episode 13
We open on our cloudiest, bleakest mountainside of all: “The White Mountains / — November 2089 AD —”. Is it the same day? Unclear, the weather being rougher, but I think it’s meant to be. The party’s resting just long enough to recap their predicament. Henry is, correctly to my mind, already regretting that they left the equipment behind. “There is only one way now. We need no map,” Beanpole says, as they make for Mont Blanc — by now, they’re saying “the White Mountain”, singular — but the pursuit is on. So episode 13 is the last throw of the dice. If there are no free men after all, they’ll die of hunger and exposure, even if the Tripods don’t get them.
In the novel, the destruction of the Tripod leads to a systematic manhunt lasting for several days, which the boys escape by hiding under a rock over a stream, the worst of it being at night. Television can only show this effort in a cut-down form: the result is a sequence of our heroes cowering against a rocky outcrop while Tripods relieve their frustration by firing laser-bolts more or less at random. Perhaps the director wasn’t able to find a suitable rock ledge to conceal them from overhead view, but the result, though impressively nightmarish, doesn’t quite make sense of exactly what either the boys or the Tripods are trying to achieve.
That doesn’t mean that “les voyageurs” are let off lightly: as usual, the script simply transfers their ordeals to a more human-mediated form. As they emerge on the morning of 7 November, the boys are immediately captured by mountain men with crossbows — the first we’ve seen since the Tournament. The warning bolt thunking into the hillside just beside them is a great shot: unlike the warrior Tripods last night, these guys, who are Capped and look serious, can shoot straight. Our heroes are equally wary and are alert for chances to escape, since it’s still just two against three even if the two do have crossbows, but their captors know what they’re doing and lead them past an ancient pipeline to some sort of pumphouse… where, as they enter, they’re suddenly outnumbered by uniformed Black Guards flanking the door. The Guard captain is called for, a figure of thumping authority who won’t be as easily mollified as those they have met before. The black feather cockade in his hat looks very Revolutionary. Very much a level boss, he’s the Black Guard analogue of the red Tripod.
And now the show morphs into a Le Carré-esque interrogation, where we lose track of time. It certainly takes several days: different questioners, together and apart, sleep deprivation, the prisoners kept cold and hungry. This is all an ingenious idea of the script’s, not drawn at all from the novel, and it glues the whole sweep of the journey together. Their cover story, which had fooled the court earlier, enables them to tell a tale which is mostly true. But these interrogators are not so easily satisfied. The boys haven’t revealed their true purpose. Twice they are split up, held in barred, basement cells, and put under more individual pressure, and twice brought together again. Henry is reduced to tears, and all of them are weak by now. Their blankets are taken away, as are Beanpole’s glasses and Will’s locket. The Guard captain tells them their fate. There were always just four outcomes for them: to be Capped, to be a Vagrant, to be a Black Guard, or to join “les gens libres de montagne”, the Free Men of the Mountains. But those last are “a legend, a counterfeit”, and so the Captain declares that Will will be Capped, Henry will be a Black Guard, and Beanpole a Vagrant.
These are well-performed scenes, with each of the travellers having different weaknesses to exploit. Will remains loyal to the Ricordeaus even after everything, so the Guard threatens to show him Eloise’s dead body. Henry, in the worst physical condition, needs to be liked, and is provoked by being belittled. Only Beanpole has the alertness to be triangulating back from their questions. He almost gets the better of the interrogators: but not quite. “A man who makes… such as these…”, the Captain says, holding up his glasses, “would be totally wasted with a destroyed brain.” Beanpole is the only one they fail to break, though they do provoke him to anger, something we’ve rarely seen before. We continue, all the while, to expect another Scarlet Pimpernel-like escape. Instead Henry and then Will yield up first the destruction of the Tripod and then the reason for it all. By the end, they have no secrets left, only the consolation that — as they have all now realised — the “small band of Vagrants and bandits” described by the Guards really must exist. Will — who has not been the central figure for some episodes now — reassumes a sort of leadership of the band by making a final bravura speech. And then, in one of the show’s most memorable surprises, the Captain lays a kindly hand on his shoulder and says: “I believe it, Will Parker.” It confirms something we have had just an inkling of: that the Captain wants to believe they are true runaways.
How should this story finish? The book ends in a way which would be unsatisfying if it weren’t for its sequels. “Then we came down into a plain, and there was a stretch of water so immense that one could not see its end: the Great Lake of the map.” That’s the sole description of Lake Geneva, and from that point they are still at least a fortnight’s hike from central Switzerland, which the book describes in only the most glancing of sentences. An incident in which the boys are chased down by two Tripods who turn out, at the last minute, not to be interested in them at all, makes for a final barb of irony; and then the narration of the journey simply ceases. No moment of arrival is described at all. We’re not told how they find the hideout, who meets them, or what it looks like. The final page is simply a sketch of Will’s new life, bare of any characters or dialogue, and even that is rather non-committal. “Our leaders keep their counsel, and we are only newcomers and boys — we could not expect to know what the projects are, or what our part in them may be.”
I hesitate to call that ending anticlimactic, but it is far too vague for television, and its lack of sentimentality is again remarkable for a children’s readership. I remember an American middle-school teacher, who regularly assigned The White Mountains to her classes, telling me that while her students always enjoyed the book, they wanted Ozymandias to show up again at the end, and say: Good job, guys. Adding a couple of panels like that was the one real liberty taken by the otherwise immensely faithful Boy’s Life comic adaptation of the book. The television Ozymandias’s return from the dead, or from the distant past of episode 2, serves another function, too: the travellers have been told so many lies that the story now needs an unimpeachable source of truth to move forwards. Ozymandias provides that.
Back in episode 4, Beanpole had said the walk would be “thirty days, if we are lucky”. They weren’t lucky: they last met Ozymandias on 7 July, and here we are on about 11 November. This second meeting, like the interrogation, is a chance to reflect on how far they’ve come. The screen time of about 5 hours 20 seems longer because of the vast number of places they’ve been in, and because so much has happened in the fictional time of four months and one week since we first met the Parker boys sitting in their white children’s smocks by the millpond. The question posed by episode 1 was what they would be when they grew up. And now we know: Jack may have become a professional wood-cutter, but Will and Henry took up a different profession, and are revolutionaries. Either way, childhood is over, and the show won’t reflect on it again.
So, then, the boys wake to find their cages unlocked. There’s a continental breakfast laid out on a small table — brioche, sliced meat, cheese, eggs and a surprisingly elegant French coffeepot-set — and the Guards are gone. A cloaked figure at the top of the stairs turns, we hear the watch-leitmotif, and… it’s Ozymandias after all. He hugs Will and Henry like long-lost children (though he met them only very fleetingly and months ago), and greets Beanpole (whom he has never met at all) warmly. Since there needs to be some exposition now, the breakfast gives the other actors something to occupy themselves with while the Vagrant talks. It’s explained that the Tripods know of the existence of the free men, and send false recruits under hypnosis. As in the best murder mysteries, we realise in retrospect that we should have known. When Ozymandias was asked, back in Wherton, how to find the Free Men, he replied: “They have many lookouts. They will find you.” That’s exactly what we saw happen.
Despite all the spy-talk about infiltration, this breakfast is the beginning of a feel-good ending, ushering in a final quarter-hour which surges with optimism, with triumphant music to match. Given almost nothing in the book to work with, the script does a fine job of evoking the excitement of discovering the Free Men. Ozymandias is emblematic of the Free Men as a new family for these lost boys to belong to. Even the Captain was avuncular. And the travellers are soon to be taken to Julius, the ultimate father-figure of the books.
We cut to a brief sequence, later that morning, of pure white. These are the Alps in proper snow, with a party of the free men traversing the lower slopes to a tunnel entrance. It’s only a token sequence of Alpinism, but still, it’s a much-needed moment of the White Mountains living up to their name. Ozymandias leads, and our crossbowman does a fine actorly bit of getting himself one last closeup as he scans for danger behind. Within, we find a powered mine railway — Ozymandias teaching the Parkers the English word. (I think the script thinks it’s a running joke that they didn’t know.) And with that, our brave excursion into foreign languages ends. The rest of this episode and the whole of series two will be in English throughout. The free men of the television show have rediscovered electricity, we find: “it also lights the lamps”, Ozymandias says. Having wanted to ride a working railway for the entire series, the travellers make one final journey, as solid trucks trundle through angle-arched tunnels. And so to the innermost room of the secret place of resistance under the highest mountain in Europe. That really is the end: once you are at the centre of the world, there’s nowhere further to go.
As luck would have it, an important moment in history then takes place only seconds later. Julius, leader of the Free Men, makes his first speech in what is also the final monologue to conclude the series. He begins with a brief welcome to the trio, as the camera pans over a surprising number of female faces. Ozymandias rises from the seating and heads for the back with the older men: but then comes an announcement which catches the room by surprise. Julius explains his plan to send young athletes — both men and women, there seems no gender bias now — to the next Spring Games, in the hope that they will be taken into the City of the Tripods. As he unveils a model of that City, a gasp goes up. “One of the rights of free-thinking, un-Capped humans is freedom of choice. I ask you to exercise that right, now. Stand, if you are willing to be selected,” Julius calls out into this acoustically marvellous cave, which can make almost any speech sound decisive. There’s a charge in the air as the young rebels stand, one by one, and then Will, Henry and Beanpole (who looks faintly unsure that this is wise) realise that the question is aimed at them too, and also stand to be counted. Ozymandias slips away into darkness, his work done. It’s rather a touching moment, this slipping-away: a farewell to the world of The White Mountains, and to all the concerns of the first book. Amid all the cheering, and a grandiose musical flourish which surges with a Fanfare for the Common Man-style brassiness, the camera at the last cuts away from a toothy Will to the City. Even as a model not to scale (it’s too tall for its width, and too small for the stick-like Tripod next to it), it looks daunting beside their remote efforts. The warning cue is heard one last time, cutting through the triumph as we then thump into the closing titles.
And so the show pivots to an epic promise about adventures yet to come. The three heroes have become three among many, not even speaking in the finale scene, which is about the fate of the world and not about them at all. When the show returns, it won’t be about growing up, or the need for family, or exploring a post-apocalyptic world. It will be a little about national differences, with some espionage thrown in. But mostly it will be a straight-up sci-fi tale about the mysteries of the Tripods themselves. It will, ironically, turn out after all to be the show that the BBC had always claimed it was:
Science-fiction adventure in which two teenagers are caught up in a battle to free the Earth from alien control.