The Therapy Zone

The Chimes of Big Ben

  McGoohan didn't like "in-Jokes" being put into the episodes of the Prisoner, unless of course he put an in-joke in, and at the expense of others. Such as during The Chimes of Big Ben when No.6 suggested that No.2 could wink a blind surveillance eye, meaning that one of Leo McKern's eyes is false!

Ups And Downs

   Edgar Allen Poe had The Pit and the Pendulum, the Prisoner has the Control Room and the See-Saw. The Pendulum is seen as an instrument of torture during the time of the Spanish Inquisition, and this tool was used to convey fear into the inhabitants of the land. But can the See-Saw of The Village underworld be seen in the same way, as an instrument of torture? The definition of See-saw is an up and down, back and forth movement, but I don't think that the two men sat at either end are being tortured, but the simple "up and down, back and forth" movement helps prolong the two observers attention to their monitors that bit longer.

   Yet in the deeper underworld of The Village, in that dark and dank cavern of fall Out, this see-saw device is put to a more obscene purpose, now fitted with heavy machine guns, that it should protect the community, as the President would have it. But that's not it's purpose in the underworld, it is maintain security at the trial of three rebels!

   In The Village a child’s innocent toy is employed to prolong observers observational duration. Some might say that it evolves into a symbol of the unfair rise and fall of power, and ultimately becomes a symbol of war, rendering both death and destruction.

Many Happy Returns

    It states in the original script of this episode, that Edgar is a "ruddy computer." That we fed in everything you gave us sir, meaning the Colonel, with all the variables, it came up with a possibility, this while calculating the search area for the village. This reads like the computer in which No.2 had researched and computed the Prisoner's whole life in ‘A B & C!’

Be seeing you