A Circle Within A Circle

     'The Prisoner' is a vicious circle. As a man who having resigned is abducted to The Village. He is put through a number of tests, and having survived the ultimate test, is then given the opportunity to finally meet Number 1. After that meeting there is a violent revolution, the Village is evacuated and in the mayhem of that evacuation, the Prisoner escapes and eventually returns to his home in London. Effectively ending up back where he started!

   In ‘Many Happy Returns’ the Prisoner wakes to find The Village deserted. He sets about escaping The Village by building a sea-going raft, and setting off on a voyage into the unknown. Because he doesn’t know where he is sailing from, he doesn’t know where he is sailing to! However, the Prisoner does eventually make it home in London after an arduous journey. But because that’s not good enough for the Prisoner, seeing as he still has questions he needs answers to, he sets on a journey of discovery to find The Village, and ends up back where he started! Having come full circle. It seems to me that ‘Many Happy Returns,’ apart from being a story in its own right within ‘the Prisoner,’ also encompasses the whole ethos of ‘the Prisoner’ compressed into one episode.

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