Dance Of The Dead

   Episodes of ‘the Prisoner’ tend to have their own subject, such as escape and the desire for freedom. The struggle of the individual within society. The suppression of both the individual and society. The question of personal identity. Human experimentation, and the conditioning of the mind. ‘Free For All’ which deals with the question of democracy, and ‘The General’ with education. But by far the darkest of the 17 episodes of ‘the Prisoner,’ is ‘Dance of the dead’ which has death as it’s central subject. Commencing with No.6, who finds the body of a dead man, No.34, on the beach. The man having either been drowned or suffered suffocation by The Village Guardian. Then keeps the cadaver so he can attach it to a lifebelt and cast it adrift with the amended wallet in his pocket, a message for however may find it!

   The Prisoner is then put on trial for the possession of a radio, and is found guilty, the sentence is death. The sentence is in the name of the people, the people carry out the sentence in the name of justice. Think what might have happened had the mob screaming for the Prisoner’s blood have done to him, had they managed to lay their hands upon him. It would have been a bloody mess as they tore the Prisoner limb from limb! Well that's the mental image I always get when I watch the episode.

   After sentencing, the Prisoner leads the citizens in a dance of the dead along the corridors of the Town Hall. At the end, the original script called for everyone to have died in a frenzied dance, everyone that is except the Prisoner. Would that have made the Prisoner Death?! The scene was cut and so never took place, Norma West {No.240} said the scene had not been filmed, as she had marked in her script the scenes to be filmed.

   And what about Roland Walter Dutton? Seeing what kind of state the good doctor’s experiments had left his mind in, Dutton would have been better of dead!

   There was also another cut scene, one in which the doctor-No.40 is over seeing the burial of one of his failed medical experiments. And of course the original costume for No.2's costume character was intended to have been that of Jack the Ripper, which was changed to Peter Pan. There is also No.2's own intended use of that cadaver of No.34 which was retrieved from the sea, to be amended so that it is No.6 who has died in an accident at sea. ‘Dance of the Dead,’ an apt title for the darkest episode of ‘the Prisoner.’

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