The Therapy Zone

Self-Sufficiency

   The Village is a self-contained unit of your society, but is it so self-Sufficient? I mean how do they get here the milk, ice cream? the potatoes, and the aspirin?

     We enjoy all of the usual amenities here in the Village, water which means there is a large reservoir, electricity - means a modest power station, gas - by pipeline, there's a sewage plant close by, and a land-fill site for all the rubbish generated by the community here. We also have a farm which produces all the fresh vegetables we need, milk, cheese, cream, butter, and of course meat.

   What we don't have is a factory, a factory which produces all the tinned "Village Food," that is canned some place else, given the "Village Food" label and then shipped out here to the Village. The same goes for record labels, Village Film, Village Cooking Oil, and packets of Village Needles, clothes, deck shoes, umbrellas, etc, etc, as well as No.2, all of which are imported. As for our exports, of which my fellow reporter wrote once "Will cover every corner of the globe," well what exports? The Village doesn’t actually produce anything, except information. I suppose there's always a market for that. So you see, the Village maybe a self-contained unit, but it is far from being self-sufficient, and needs exterior support from the homeland, wherever that maybe.

   I've often wondered if this is not some take on evolution, and if Patrick McGoohan was doing a take on Kubrick's ending to his film 2001, because that was about evolution - wasn't it? And here No.6 tears off No.1's black and white mask, to reveal the mask of an ape, and then man himself! Yet, judging by that last image of the montage, well make up your own minds as to what it's all about!

That Bond Connection!

    Last Sunday, I sat watching the 1964 James Bond film Gold Finger. Now as you know Mister Goldfinger had a mute Butler who went by the name of Oddjob. Now I have no idea if Oddjob was the first mute Butler to appear in literature, but I can tell you who the next one was, the supposed mute Butler and manservant to No.2!

   Now that is not the only other Bond Connection with the Prisoner. There is a scene in Thunderball in which James Bond uses a pole to secure Count Lippe in a steam-box, and that's just what the girl who was death does to Mister X at the Turkish baths! And finally there's Moonraker, the novel not the film, in which Drax is planning to destroy London by the use of a nuclear device and a German WWII V2 rocket, just as Schnipps was planning to do in the episode The Girl Who Was Death, in fact the central plot for this episode of the Prisoner seems to be lifted from the Moonraker novel! After all Schnipps is planning to destroy London by a missile, and originally Schnipps was to have been a German scientist, perhaps even Hitler himself!

Be seeing you...............not shaken, but a bit stirred!