And so the third serial begins mid-way through an episode, from the moment the ring is placed on the salver. A great shot from the night outside shows him throw a rope out of his second-floor window and abseil down the castle wall to the stony foundations. That frankly seems a little drastic: still, Christoph does guard Will’s room at night, and it makes solid television to emphasise the prison-like nature of the Chateau with a Colditz-like escape. We have just one last glimpse of the reception, and it confirms that Sarlat’s selection of Eloise has entirely healed his rift with the Count: much as if Will had never been there at all.

The boy himself is now riding quietly down the glacis. (A nameless white horse with a bushy mane in the series; a chestnut gelding named “Aristide” in the book.) He takes a Romantic last look back at the Castle framed in the night sky, though in his winter-green riding cloak and tweed jockey’s cap he looks more Elmer Fudd than d’Artagnan. New musical themes soon build a sense of escape, and of pace. “Take your horse, get the wind on your face,” the Count had suggested earlier, and now we really do, cantering through the edge of forests, galloping the fields. A horse with no special training can make about 35km in a day, which is just about the distance Will needs to make up, if he keeps at it all night — but in one of the series’s great surprise moments, he runs straight into a screaming Tripod whose green lights, never more sinister, fire up. He’s thrown from his terrified horse, is grabbed by the Tripod’s tentacle and lifted, wildly struggling. He has watched Tripods take his best friend, and then his fiancée, and now it’s his turn. But at the critical moment he loses consciousness. Like The White Mountains, the television series wisely withholds the true nature of the Tripods at this point, and we don’t see further inside.

Full light on a misty morning. Will is out cold, full-length on the grass by a riverbank, his horse contentedly cropping the grass. His leather shoulder-bag is laid neatly out beside him. He wakes, checks for the Tripod, it’s not there, grabs his hair, he’s not Capped, checks the map, he still has it. He doesn’t understand. Will washes his face in an evidently very cold stream, takes to horseback and rides through a long day to the towpath of a river where, at dusk, he’s looking for shelter.

In the cabin door of an abandoned boat… he’s grabbed by Henry and Beanpole. This is a tricky moment for the script, because after all, what are the odds of them meeting like this? But the moment was prepared for. Will had after all marked out the way for them to take; and a towpath is a linear route, with few shelters on it. So it’s lucky, but not wildly lucky. The novel has a less plausible meeting on a random hillside.

We are at 14:03 into the episode and have been completely without dialogue, not counting murmurs to the horse, since 5:20. That long wordless stretch, more than a third of the episode’s running time, is elegantly shot and has an inventive soundscape, and makes an excellent bridge from one serial to the next. “I see things are now back to normal,” says Beanpole cheerfully, which is as close as the show gets to breaking the fourth wall and addressing us directly. We know exactly what he means, but it’s still slightly paradoxical. True, almost two whole episodes have gone by since the three boys were together. But in the story, their parting was only thirty-six hours ago. As for what’s “normal”, they travelled as a trio for just about five days back in July. “Normal” was the chateau. Beanpole has spent this summer making plans with his close friend and fellow squire Henry, while that unreliable cousin (what was his name again?) was always off somewhere else. But this is, in the end, a children’s book, and children’s books have rules. Like the core friendship-group at the heart of every great classic — like Harry, Hermione and Ron, or like the Swallows and Amazons, or like Stalky, Beetle and McTurk — they give us a sense of rightness when gang gets together. In that sense Beanpole is right, and the viewer can relax.

As night falls, there’s thunder and hammering rain, and the cabin makes a beguiling shelter, a tight space where the boys eat a dark stew from old enamel plates around an oil lamp. Will tells his story, and they speculate that the Tripods may be vehicles — the script rather deftly using the boat itself as a metaphor.

You don’t need a civilisation-ending apocalypse to make central France startlingly empty, and the boat is in the middle of nowhere. They’re about halfway between Paris and Dijon, headed southeast. The river is, if you like, the Yonne, near Auxerre, and next morning is 29 August. Over the next few minutes of screen time, the boys travel for a week or more, by far their greatest unimpeded progress to date. The book makes explicit that they pass from a natural watercourse to a “straight-river”: the wide overgrown canal which Will’s horse pulls their boat along. The river Yonne does flow into the Canal de Bourgogne, built in 1775, so we could call it that, if we like: ancien-régime canals are an iconic feature of southern central France, and make a pleasant daydream for English writers. Beanpole is impressed with it, too, which amuses the Parkers. But in due course — a few days later? — they’ve given up the boat and are leading the horse through a cornfield, in a shot stylishly featuring a decayed, half-fallen electricity pylon behind them (though, a pedant might object, it’s an English pylon design and not the French one). Note the way the boys are headed slightly right-to-left, a subliminal cue that something… is going wrong. That something is quickly revealed to be a Tripod which is stalking them, and creeps into frame top left.

This seems the perfect moment for a mini-adventure, and we get one. We make camp on, let’s say, 7 September, in an abandoned farmhouse. The horse hangs out in an enclosed courtyard which is quite ruined, though not as ruined as it’s about to be. The boys climb to a blown-out window and look out over the foothills of the Alps to see the (for some reason) pulsing green City in the very far distance, with spidery Tripods crawling towards it. (None are going the other way: are Tripods like cows, all coming home at night?) Will gets into an awkward monologue about his emotional troubles, which comes to a merciful end as the Tripod demolishes what’s left of the farmhouse roof. In a moment probably lifted from The War of the Worlds, the Tripod’s tentacle smashes through a window, groping for them. Henry strikes matches and starts a fire in the wooden debris, though there are ominous green jerry-cans marked GASOLINE and ESSENCE, which must have been pretty well-sealed for the contents not to have evaporated in a hundred years. They escape in the smoke, grabbing the horse, and the farmhouse half-explodes, causing the Tripod to turn its head lazily in surprise.

Cut to the mouth of what seems an old railway tunnel, though the lines are long gone. We can still see the smoke from the farmhouse, so they can’t have got far. There are wooden frames and fences built from old sleepers, to one of which they’ve hitched the horse. Will chooses this moment to confess that there is a device like a button implanted in his side — in the book, this is done more deftly, with Will revealed to have been under hypnotic conditioning not to be aware of the button, and the others catching sight of it by chance. They quickly realise this is how they have been followed. A grim little talk increases the jeopardy as Will realises he must remain in the tunnel-mouth while the others escape. “And you, Will?” “I’ll be free too, in a way.” That key word again: and so the episode ends on Beanpole’s face as he concurs.

This is a very varied episode, packing in some ambitious effects sequences. There’s good direction, the music comes to the fore, and the landscape filming returns triumphantly. But the plot slightly falls victim to the 25-minute spacing between cliffhanger endings. It wasn’t quite enough screen time to get from the taking of Eloise to the discovery of the button and still convey a long journey with an active pursuit. It would have been better to have episode 7 end on Will’s escape from the castle (shortening episode 6 to make room), and expand here on the chase. We don’t quite sufficiently take the point that the boys know they are being followed, so the cat-and-mouse suspense of the novel at this point is lost. (In the book, the boys try various ways to outwit their pursuer, but can’t shake it off.) On the other hand, the burning of the ruined farmhouse is entirely new to television, so you might equally say that it’s the book which missed an opportunity. In any case, what the BBC did broadcast is cracking adventure-story stuff.

Next: Aside — Tunnelling Out of The White Mountains ● Prev: Episode 8 (first half)