The Chimes Of Big Ben
Another change to the script comes when No.6 is sitting at a table atop of the cliffs over looking Nadia down on the beach, when No.2 comes to join No.6 at his table, and the conversation is as follows.
Prisoner: What do you want?
No.2: To ask you a question.
Prisoner: I resigned as a matter of conscience.
No.2:Oh, that! No, no, no! There are people who talk and people who don't. Which means that there are people who leave here and people who stay. You're obviously staying.
Prisoner: Has it ever occurred to you, you're just as much a prisoner as I am?
No.2: But my dear chap of course! I know too much! If I wasn't in the village, they'd have to send me here! we're both lifers! that's why I'm so anxious we get along. You're doing very well, I must say. Beginning to make reality judgments.
Prisoner: What question?
No.2: What do you think of Nationalism?
Prisoner: Depends on whose side you're on.
No.2: Laughs.
{If this dialogue had been retained as it was, then No,.6 would have talked "I resigned as a matter on conscience" he said. If No,2 had had to accept that, then it would have meant end of episode, and the Prisoner would have been free to leave the village, having talked!}
Prognosis Report On No.6
Daily the subject takes a stroll around the village. Well that doesn't take long. Have you ever taken a stroll round the village? You can only draw it out, by walking slowly!
An Element Of Culture
If you have observed, and listened closely, you will have learned that the Prisoner-No.6 is a cultured man. He knows his French Revolution history in ‘Dance of the Dead,’ Quotes Cervantes in Hammer Into Anvil, and Shakespeare in both ‘The Schizoid Man’ and ‘Once Upon A Time,’ as well as witnessing a Biblical interpretation of Ezekiel in ‘Fall Out.’ But when quotations and proverbs fail him, he appears to make up his own in ‘A Change of Mind,’ "The Butcher with the sharpest knife, has the warmest heart." Not perhaps a true quotation, or proverb, but I take it's meaning, do you not?
However there are those who cannot define the meaning or origin behind of what fans deem to be the most mysterious quote of them all, not one of No.6's I have to say, but one over heard on the radio "Tonight when the moon rises, the whole earth will turn to silver." To gain any kind of origin behind this quotation, you have to look to the messages transmitted by the British to the French resistance groups during World War II.
It's All In The Mind!
If the events of the Prisoner are all in the mind, or partly, in Number 6's mind then the natural starting point is whatever pushed him over-the-edge into his current mental state. At what point in the series in the mental loop actually begins is, of course, still open to more debate. Some of the more obvious candidates are;
* The resignation itself, so that everything we see in the village is imaginary.
* At the end of, or at some point in Fall Out, the confrontation with No.1, having faced himself, to what he had become.
* The return home, having apparently 'escaped.'
* In fact, any sufficiently significant or traumatic event within the series.
Be seeing you
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