Prismatic Reflection

      A change of mind, it was a terrible thing to do. At the beginning the Prisoner known as Number Six probably didn’t know too much about it, I expect he was heavily sedated at the time. He had to begin to deal what “they” had done to him from the moment he saw the face unknown in the mirror.
    At the beginning I should have imagined that it must have been a more terrible ordeal for the Colonel. He had been seconded to the Village, although he looked slightly uncomfortable to be there, and not to know why. It was all explained to him, that it was possible to put the mind of one person into the body of another, mind transference. However I cannot help but wonder how it was for the Colonel? Did he go willingly, or was he dragged kicking and screaming to the operating theatre? Perhaps he, like the Prisoner, had been heavily sedated. But one thing is for sure, the Colonel did not survive the mind transference ordeal. And yet he was loyal to the end, in fact his last thought was of Number 1, “Tell Number One I did my duty.” And in that there perhaps lies the answer, the Colonel being an ex-Army man, used to doing his duty, carrying out orders. He might not have batted an eyelid at having to undergo the mind transference, a stiff upper lip and that kind of thing, not the regimental way to show fear in front of the men.
    “Why did you resign?” That‘s what Number Two used to ask. “Number Two?” Chairman of the Village. “I’m here to ask the questions old boy.” I’ve always thought this Colonel to be something of a stupid …………..
   And yet what if there had been but one Colonel, the one we see in ‘Arrival,’ the same Colonel who the Prisoner went to see when making that call in the country, and more so, the same Colonel in ‘Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling.’
    I always thought Sir Charles Portland was superfluous, and that would include Janet Portland. I know the Prisoner had left the receipt for the transparencies with Janet for safe keeping or in time of trouble, but he could have simply have left that receipt in the wall safe behind the television set in the lounge of his house. It would have been safe there as anywhere, besides they still got their hands on those transparencies thanks to Mister Carmichael and a clerical error!
    However returning to the Colonel. In the previous two episodes in which the Prisoner believed he had escaped the Village he’s always gone running back to the Colonel………….but in this case perhaps the Colonel was otherwise engaged, his mind wrongly housed in the body of the Prisoner back in the Village! And that is probably why the Prisoner had to go and see Sir Charles Portland instead. I had never looked at it that way before, not in all my years of appreciation for ‘the Prisoner.’ As detective Inspector Baynes once said “I thought I had squeezed all the juice out of it, but I see there was a little over” --{The Mystery of Wisteria Lodge by Arthur Conan Doyle}.

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