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Monday 10 October 2011

Can We Be Sure Of Anything?

    There are those who arrive in the Village with no sense of timing. They have no idea how they got there, or actually how long they've been there, and that includes No.6. When Dutton, in Dance of the Dead, asked No.6 how long he'd been in the Village, No.6 replied 'Quite recently' which is odd, because he'd been in the Village a few months by that time! And Dutton said that it was a couple of months, and if that's the case, why hasn't No.6 met with Roland Walter Dutton before? One answer might be that Dutton had been a patient at the hospital since his arrival in the Village, and had only then been released for seventy-two hours in the Village, at which point he met with an old colleague No.6.
   Cobb, in Arrival,  was no better. When the Prisoner asked how Cobb arrived in the Village, who brought him, and how long he'd been here, Cobb was just as vague 'Three, four weeks, months, its difficult to tell. I was in Germany. I went back to my hotel, I think I went to bed.....I was here!' With Cobb, I think for the Prisoner to have been on the same hospital ward as Cobb, was a mistake. That the Prisoner should not have met Cobb, hence his faked suicide by suggesting that Cobb had jump through a hospital window, and the use of a faked funeral, so to the Prisoner Cobb is dead!
   We do know, by the watch of Post Five in The Chimes of Big Ben, that the time in the Village is the same as English time. But there is no-way of knowing the date. The only time we know the date is during that episode of The Schizoid Man, by the day-date calendar of No.6's, and the date of The Tally Ho February 10th. But No.6 had been taken from his cottage on Feb 10th. He had effectively been taken out of circulation for quite some time, at least five weeks depending on how long the Village Festival lasted, and at the start of The Schizoid Man it was one month to the Village Festival, in which time No.6 had grown a beard. Yet when he woke up in that strange apartment as No.12, the date was still Feb 10th, even though it wasn't!  If there is one thing we can be sure of, we can be sure of nothing!        Be seeing you

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