Doomed to be the stodgy middle of the Chateau Ricordeau story, this episode is the first to show us mostly the same places and people as the episode before, and just not enough happens in it. The final scenes are dramatic but until we get to them there’s a feeling of the wind having fallen off the sails. A good 15 of the 25 minutes could have been cut.

Or so my notes say. This episode for me was the one which most demonstrated the difference between watching and re-watching. Sitting down fresh, I found it all interesting enough. Each character had an individual goal and pursued it, and the talky scenes about the meaning of “freedom” and “choice” felt properly relevant. Solid screen-writing, not like the meaningless burning-off of unwanted screen time you used to get in episode 3 of an old-school Doctor Who serial. It was only when I went back and took notes, scene by scene, that I became jaundiced about the focus on Will’s ineffectual attempts to come to terms with his situation. Give Henry and Beanpole a side-plot?, my notes say.

My inner pedant got off on the wrong foot from the very first frame, because the dateline has to be incorrect. We are told it is still “July 2089”, but this is impossible to square with what came before. Episode 7, only a couple of days later, is much more plausibly captioned as August. So my guess is that in fact (“in fact”) both episodes take place in the last week of August, and that it’s about the 23rd when this one opens. M. Guernichet, the portrait artist, is painting Eloise while the Countess, in a fascinator hat, appropriately plays “Für Elise” on the piano of her sitting room. Guernichet has a marvellous range of hand-made paints, but is sadly incidental to the story except for producing a key prop, the locket. Outdoors, it is nearly Tournament season at Chateau Ricordeau, and a splendidly high shot looks down into the narrow, mossy courtyard where practice is under way. (It must be conceded that although episode 6 stays in the same castle as episode 5, it does show us new locations within it.) There’s some watchable demonstrated fencing, but Will and the Ricordeaus are just spectators. Henry and Beanpole give us a plot recap while setting up an archery target, but don’t do any archery themselves.

There’s another conference of the runaways in the Squires’ cellar, where an extra finishes polishing his boots and leaves to give the boys some privacy. Will sits heavily at the table they’ve just (for some reason) carried in before confessing that he’s agreed to stay with the Ricordeaus and, therefore, to be Capped. Henry is angry, Beanpole is rational. Will advances an alternative plan of recruiting Eloise and running away with her, a plan which Henry dismantles while Beanpole looks on miserably. As Will rationalises, Henry turns on him and they fight like English village boys, not like French chevaliers. Beanpole breaks it up and Will storms out, a marvellous shot showing him framed for a moment in the sunlit doorway at the top of the distant stairs, as if this is goodbye.

Will is still angry as he strides into his own bedroom to find Sarlat insolently lounging on the bed. (If The Tripods were a more popular show, there’d be a lot of fan-fic about this homoerotic moment.) Sarlat has been going through maps Will has borrowed, and the scene is a little like an aria from an opera where the villain takes centre stage. Sarlat urges Will to leave quietly. “There will be no… pursuit.” His point of course is that Will can at any time betray the Count, jilt Eloise, tell some lies, steal some stuff and run for it: though of course, that wouldn’t exactly be noble. When Sarlat openly threatens Will’s life, the camera catches Will almost shielding himself behind the shining signet ring, which represents the Count’s protection. “You are important now,” Eloise says later, after fumbling through the same music still on her mother’s piano. “All our rooms are guarded at night.” Doubtless her next remark, “It is the custom for those who are to marry”, means that keeping them out of each other’s beds is the actual agenda. Still, stakes have been raised, so it’s a pity this is never paid off with a juicy sub-plot involving daggers in the night.

Eloise and Will are now sitting as if to play four-hands piano, and meandering through a fitful conversation in which Will makes no progress recruiting her. He keeps not coming to the point, which is just as well since it’s a terrible plan, and instead tries to get her to heal the quarrel with Henry and Beanpole. That goes wrong too. We cut to the family Ricordeau on the terrace one evening, maybe 25 August, with two black dogs lounging beside them. Sarlat, out of favour, is not invited, but for once Beanpole and Henry are. They have been lent presentable clothes for the first and only time, but Henry leans on a pillar, physically outside of the charmed circle. There’s some gentle comedy in which Beanpole discovers champagne, Will tells a story about the schoolmaster at Wherton, and Henry displays the most abominable manners. But the moment darkens when the Count is baffled to find that Henry and Beanpole did not even know about Will’s engagement. Henry drinks the couple’s health with a look that suggests he now understands that Will is a lost cause.

Cut to the middle of the night, and the action of the episode finally begins. In the cellars, Henry and Beanpole make a stage-whispered plan to get away at once. (Beanpole pleads for Henry to understand Will’s predicament, and that keyword of the serial, “free”, comes up again and again.) In his much plusher bed, Will is sleeping badly, against little echoes of old dialogue representing his troubled thoughts — the only time this hoary old film trick is used. He’s woken by the scream-call of a Tripod, an entirely real one, with a cut to a moonlit shot of the Tournament grounds to prove it. Next morning, the day before the Tournament, the trio meets in a stone-walled hiding-hole of a room. Partly outdoors, it’s at the end of a claustrophic corridor, framing the camera’s shots nicely. Henry pushes the point: “We go, Beanpole. Tonight.” Will makes a self-justifying speech which doesn’t convince, and Henry demands a map and compass, a little menacingly. Will goes to the Count, who is too busy with last-minute Tournament planning to tutor him today. “This year a Tripod has come,” says the Count, who evidently didn’t know that in advance. It’s slightly hard to imagine what extra admin this can possibly mean — it’s not as if he has to feed the Tripod, or find it some enormous bed — but we see a recognisable draughtsman’s plan of the grounds. Will ingeniously suggests that he be allowed to copy one of the old maps, for practice… and now we are in the study, and it has become evening. The lamp we saw earlier is now lit, there is an elegant floral arrangement, and — a little surprisingly for a show which has no problem with teenagers drinking alcohol — Will has a glass of milk for company. The topmost map he copies shows the whole of France and is not unlike the lost one from Ozymandias, but if you’re the sort of suspicious-minded pedant who checks, you’ll find it’s not the same prop. What they do have in common is that their coastlines and boundaries have been thickly recoloured to improve their contrast on screen. Eloise, dressed for bed but still turbanned, makes a moonstruck declaration of belief in their future happiness. “You will be a great man,” she says, and gives him the locket painted by M. Guernichet (remember him now?), in which she has a chin-up noble bearing. This prop endures into series two, and will be Will’s only souvenir.

In the middle of the night, Will steals down a long flight of stairs, down and down to the hiding-hole room, and out onto the glacis which slopes even further down, and away from the Chateau. Prudently, Henry and Beanpole emerge only when certain that he’s come alone. He gives them a home-made map and a star chart in lieu of a compass, and they say their farewells, Henry making one last hopeless try: “You could come now.” In its way, this is the most touching moment of episode 6, because you hear that Henry’s pissy aggression has been an attempt to save his cousin. And even though it has been trailed too many times, the actual parting comes as a shock, rather as the complete failure of the Fellowship does at the end of book one of The Lord of the Rings.

In a well-done spot of physical acting, we cut to Will jolting awake in the hiding-hole hours later, now very much alone, and still somehow shielding himself from the Tripod outside. It’s full light on something like 27 August: Tournament day. Eloise finds him, and Will gets haltingly into talk of the White Mountains before catching a glint in her hair, which is less frontally turbanned than usual. The camera has always loved her face, but this huge closeup — closer than in any scene thus far — is suddenly ominous. And so we get the hammer-blow at the end of Act II of our three-act play: Eloise was Capped all along. The camera backs inexorably away from her, back through the dark tunnel into the Chateau, leaving her ever tinier body framed in an archway which shrinks to become a chink in the darkness.

In the novel, Will knows that she’s Capped almost from the start. Withholding that until now makes for a good surprise, but doesn’t really change anything. Eloise was never going to run away: she’s not headstrong, not disaffected, and not an orphan. In so far as this ending dashes any hopes, then, it only dashes hopes that we never believed in. Just the same, the last five minutes of episode 6 were melodramatic in a way that the first twenty were not.

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