The opening episode adapted the first quarter of the novel: chapters 1, 2 and most of 3. This second episode covers just the tail end of chapter 3 with a few pages of 4. So it cannot sustain the rapid pace of the pilot. In an age before “Previously…” recaps, we need to allocate some time to give viewers a second chance to get on board, which also slows things a little. But the larger difficulty is that our third main character has yet to appear. Three boys, one a little unlike the others, is really the minimum complement for an adventure story (compare, say, The Coral Island, 1857,[1] Stalky & Co., 1899,[2] or Space Cadet, 1948[3]), and at this point we only have two. The novel fills this space with an illustration of the inexperience of our runaways — walking by night, they think they’re being chased, but it’s only a flock of sheep — and with some psychodrama — Will trying to ditch Henry and go it alone, Henry outwitting him. But the sheep-chase would be unfilmable, and on television their mutual enmity has largely been dropped, so until we reach the coast the episode has not much by way of plot. The two-hander dialogue scenes are instead, in a naive sort of way, ideological. What are their beliefs? Why are they running away? But since the two cousins basically agree about everything, those scenes somehow only slow the pace. That’s a pity, because otherwise the episode rattles along rather well.

We open on recap number one, and that kitchen clock again. It is seven a.m. and, this being July, broad daylight. Mrs Parker, in her everyday apron, pours milk from a willow-pattern jug, but the boys are gone. She goes up to their shared bedroom, which is a murky room of heavy dark furniture, with an oil lamp, candlesticks, jugs and dewers of water. The set reminds us: here is a world without plumbing or electricity. With remarkable consideration the boys seem to have stopped to make their beds before running away, so the camera has a clear shot of the note they leave behind. Reading this note aloud then recaps what they are up to. Mr and Mrs Parker are, respectively, angry and bewildered in their poky sitting room, which is seen for the only time. What will their lives be, now? But Jack reassures them that his father’s horsemen will soon find the boys.

Cut to Will and Henry, who have not reached Five Ways on time because they have been hiding under a farm lean-to for two hours, with the Tripod behind them still watching. I have to say that this jeopardy isn’t perfectly communicated in a shot hindered by the sheer scale difference between humans and Tripods: surely they could crawl away? And why does it even care about two boys out before breakfast? Anyhow, the sound of a hunting horn — the posse getting under way — distracts the Tripod and the boys take their chance to escape. This is a neat cliff-hanger resolution, but one which probably read better on paper than it plays out on screen.

The Five Ways scene is notable because, for once in the show, there’s no shelter: no lean-to, no tunnel, no secret place. Ozymandias, who has experience of callow runaways, waited longer than he said he would, so the meeting takes place, but it never feels safe because he has nowhere better to brief them than crouching down among the ferns. This scene is the business end of what, in the book, was a single conversation with Will alone: splitting that scene in two helps the TV show by moving some dialogue out of the very full episode 1, and giving what amounts to a recap in episode 2. All good practical screen-writing, but it does come at a cost. In the novel, Henry never meets Ozymandias, and so at this point has to take an awful lot on trust from Will — who doesn’t even show his cousin the map. Splitting the Ozymandias briefing between episodes means that Henry is present for the second half, and so there can’t be any secrets between the Parkers. Television’s Henry is a recruit on an equal standing with Will.

Stakes are raised as the Parkers realise, for the first time, that they have to make their own way to the White Mountains. “Two boys, travelling with a Vagrant? We wouldn’t get past the first village.” Maps are spread out, one of England, then one of France, the latter an important prop for the next two episodes. The source is a genuine engraved atlas page — a historical European map, though it has been appealingly over-painted, and on paper which folds as heavily as linen. The best television props are always objects of desire, things which as viewers we want to hold ourselves. (It would be so much less picturesque for Ozymandias to give them, say, a folding Michelin road map of France as sold by a 1980s garage.) As in the novel, the boys don’t even know what a map is. But follow the actors’ fingers, here and in later scenes, and you will find they are pointing to the right places. That confirms that television’s Wherton continues to be located near Winchester, even though the dialogue never actually says so. Ozymandias instructs the Parkers in using the compass, and gives them the name of a ship to find. This being television, he also gives them a charcoal drawing of the ship’s captain, which is not entirely plausible if you stop to think about the practicalities, but never mind. Then all turns chaotic as the pursuit riders very nearly catch them — Will has one last glimpse of his father John, a nice touch — and now we’re running across the windy tops of scrubby hills. That evades the issue of how exactly horses at a gallop can be searching a forest, but it is a slight stretch to see how these two landscapes mesh together. After Ozymandias sacrifices himself for the boys, though, the villagers pull his body over the back of a horse, deep in the woods. Here, and elsewhere, the camera steers carefully around the horrific. But a little grime and a trickle of blood go a long way, and this is a very effective shot. The music closes off this whole chapter of Wherton and its world on a death-chime of finality.

And so now we’re walking to the coast by what amounts to the North Downs Way. “If you keep up a good pace, you should be there in a couple of days,” though these are days wisely conveyed only with suggestive shots of ever more woodland — post-apocalyptic England seems to have been reforested. This concise sequence ends on a crane shot giving a sense of extension ever onwards: a lot of trouble to the camera for only a small, and yet worthwhile, effect. But then comes a sudden painterly frame as the boys confront a very blue sea from a clifftop. Perhaps by accident, but it’s reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich’s Chalk Cliffs on Rügen (1818), a key work of Romanticism. This is really the first time we experience a trademark editing device of the show, the cut to a new vista. It’ll happen again later in the episode, and often throughout the series.

The English Channel has never looked so sumptuous. (This is the rare example of a BBC drama filming at a location more scenic and spectacular than the place it is supposed to be.) It has taken three days to reach, not two, and even so the boys must be in good shape since Winchester to Rye is about 90 miles as the crow flies. When they rest on the gorgeously filmed sand, the frothy waves breaking against the rocks, Henry asks: “What day is it?”, and Will replies: “The date, you mean? July the 9th.” This leads to talk of Henry’s dead mother, whose birthday that was, but that tidy little segue in fact takes us only to a puzzle. Why does Henry say the Tripods killed his parents? This narrative beat does prefigure later events, but somehow for want of an explanatory line the script has momentarily lost its thread. In the novel his mother dies of illness and his father is still alive, so something in the televised story must be different, but what? We will learn in episode 4 that they died long ago, and in episode 6 that people are sometimes killed by Tripods in accidents, but nowhere does the script join these dots. Episode 1 was about Will, episode 4 will be about Beanpole, and I suspect the writer meant this scene in episode 2 to tell us about Henry. But it’s too faltering a dialogue, and the tide is coming in fast; the elusive Henry only just grabs his knapsack in time.

Rhymney — it was Rumney in the novel, which also doesn’t exist, but was a fictionalised version of Rye — is a complex production all by itself. This 10-minute mini-adventure draws on books like Treasure Island[4] or Jamaica Inn,[5] or the running-away-to-sea stories which were a staple of the Boy’s Own Comic in the formative years of British children’s fiction. There is only one interior and one exterior, but both are satisfyingly complex. The exterior is the quayside, with boats warping in. Its narrow linear space is crowded with goings-on, forcing the boys to push through a crowd, in a striking counterpoint to the deserted first half of episode 2. That visual density is increased further by intercuts with long shots from the decks of boats, so that the action is seen through rope, netting, crab-pots and masts, and we feel the sway of the water. The music picks up a sprightly hornpipe in a major key, which is a little on-the-nose, but it works. As in Wherton, we walk through a busy diorama of professions, but now in a seaside variety. Souwesters, cargo, fresh fish, grapes, pineapples, and — this still astonishes me — a camel from Morocco.

Fantastic grow the hats as we enter the Harbour Inn, a lively, murky and split-level interior lit by many candelabras. The prohibition on electric light in The Tripods obliged lighting designers to find endless creative solutions, and you get away from the bland, over-bright lighting which is the curse of many productions of the period. Dark it may be, but the Inn has a lot to see. The barmaid has long geometric tattoos on her bare arm, and a moon and stars. The untuned street-piano is being hammered by a thin man with a straight glass of beer and, under his hat, long hippie-ish hair. The drinkers behind the Parkers are in Chinese and African national dress, except for one in a white Phyrigian cap. There is a tall bronze samovar. A rather odd Oriental painting hangs on the wall. This is practically the Star Wars cantina scene, albeit with two Lukes and no Obi-Wan, and it serves a similar purpose: to be a gateway out of the mundane. There’s one last piece of recap dialogue (Henry confirming they have been walking three days: you really will not catch this script out), and then an encounter with sailors, who press-gang the boys. Want to know how hard this bosun is? So hard, he has a necklace of bones. A short brawl is stylishly arranged, giving the barmaid a nice turn — note Henry’s nod of thanks — and the half-demented piano melody shades into darker synthesiser chords. The soundscape does a lot to sell this brief scuffle as a major event. But the boys should have been watching the bosun, not the mate. They’re shut up in a tight cabin and promised a “good long run to Africa”, having tantalisingly seen the enigmatic Captain Curtis walk along the hard. And with that, our second cliff-hanger, the episode ends on the boys slumping dejectedly down in captivity.

Works cited:

  1. The Coral Island (1857), by R. M. Ballantyne. Wikipedia
  2. Stalky & Co. (1899), by Rudyard Kipling. Wikipedia
  3. Space Cadet (1948), by Robert A. Heinlein. Wikipedia
  4. Treasure Island (1883), by Robert Louis Stevenson. Wikipedia
  5. Jamaica Inn (1936), by Daphne du Maurier. Wikipedia

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