The Therapy Zone

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.

Return Of The Native

If There's One thing I've Observed About The Prisoner........

........It's The Way He Takes Things In His Stride.

    I mean if I'd returned home to find someone living in my house, with six months still to run on the lease........and what's more Mrs Butterworth had possession of his kar. I'd have been as mad as hell. But I suppose having spent six months in The Village where nothing is ever certain, the Prisoner could still be unsure of the scenario he was now faced with. That's why when left alone in the study he searched for those little reassuring things, like the dialling tone of the telephone, the patch of dry rot behind the bureau which was made good. The sliding door to the bathroom, and the hot and cold taps which had been put on the wrong way........the Prisoner took it all in his stride, even when he was unceremoniously returned to The Village and finally confronted with another new Number two-Mrs Butterworth!

    It would appear that there was supposed to have been more to this fellows return than we actually see on the screen. For example, once No.6 reaches London, filming was to have taken place in Regent Street, Piccadilly Circus, with specification being made to a sequence outside Lilywhites, where a passer-by gives No.6 a two-shilling coin, thinking the man to be a beggar! No.6 uses the coin to deposit the roll of undeveloped film in a left luggage locker at Piccadilly Circus underground station for safe keeping, before passing through Trafalgar Square and Whitehall in the direction of his house.

     The closing scenes of Many Happy Returns essentially remain true to the script, although when Mrs. Butterworth is ultimately revealed at No.2, apart from presenting him with one of her home baked cakes, a birthday cake in fact with six lighted candles upon it, she also has a birthday gift for No.6, a box tied with pink ribbon in which there is the undeveloped roll of film he deposited in the safe deposit box earlier in the script. She also has the nerve to ask him "Why did you resign?"

WHY?

   This is Australian singer Roger Whittaker, and yesterday I was listening to The Very Best Of Roger Whittaker, when my imagination was caught by his song "WHY." The last line of the song goes "Will the last word ever spoken be why?"  I don't know, it just struck me as somehow being Prisoneresque. That's it there's nothing else, I suppose it was the WHY in the song, that made me listen more intently.

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