I’d Like To Know His Breaking Point!

   “Well” said Number 6 “you could make that your life’s work!” What’s more it wasn’t only the doctor Number 22 who wanted to know Number 6’s breaking point. Her predecessor Number 40 also saw that everyman has his breaking point! And yet he would have gone further, and would have damaged the brain, just looked what happened to Roland Walter Dutton. But it was always thought Number 6 had to be handled very differently, seeing as how important he is. That was said as far back as the first Number 2. Even he knew that Number 6 had to be handled very differently. Although his successor did say that if Number 6 didn’t give them what they wanted, he’d take it. And didn’t Number 2 also say that he didn’t want Number 6 broken, that he didn’t want a man of fragments. More than that the tissue mustn’t be damaged, in other words no lasting brain damage! Number 2 also said of Number 6 that he’s not like the others, that there are other ways, he must be won over. And when it was suggested that a leucotomy should be performed on Number 6, to isolate the aggressive frontal lobes by the doctor-Number 22, to which Number 2 said he’s too valuable, and he’s sure they can help him adjust without such drastic treatment.
    So what changed by the time of ‘The Schizoid Man?’ It would seem that Number 2 was allowed to go as far as he needed, possibly given free reign. After all Number 6 was within an ace of breaking. Number 2 could tell that when he and Curtis were watching Number 6 in something of a mental turmoil on his bed. It seemed that he was having more than a nightmare! And sometime after, when Number 6 was feeling more like his old self, had exchanged places with Curtis, he told Number 2 that he wanted Number 6 broken, so he’d broken him. He wasn’t to know Number 6 would go berserk! Did Number 2’s brief really allow him to go so far, to have left Number 6 a broken man? When previously he’s been seen to be a man who had a future in The Village?
   Number 2 did threaten to “hammer” Number 6, and yet it was Number 2 who was broken in the end. And for a second time a leucotomy was threatened, and that’s all it was, simply a threat. I wonder if those watching {meaning the television viewers realised that?} after all if Number 6 was so important, why the leucotomy? If they had really chosen to see that operation through, they really could have lost Number 6!
    Another time Number 2 set out to break Number 6 was in ‘Living In Harmony,’ which is something of a misleading title. Number 6 is put in a dangerous environment. He’s given love, that love is taken away, he’s forced to kill, having first been fed hallucinatory drugs. Break him, even in his mind. Was this Number 2 really allowed to go so far? Perhaps the idea for ‘Living In Harmony’ was down to Number 8, after all he said it had always worked before. But as it happens its Number 2 who would have to pay for this failure. Not that any previous Number 2 has not had to pay for his or her failures, it wasn’t so much in what he said, but the way Number 2 said it, there was panic and fear in his voice. Anyway what did he think they would do to him, turn him into a brainwashed imbecile and put him on the Town Council?!
    Then came the fairytale! Well I suppose it was worth a try Number 2, and yet at the same time it seems that trying to get Number 6 to loosen his tongue with children by telling them a fairytale, well that they were running short on ideas in order to break Number 6. But then of course came the ultimate test, and that always struck me to mean that this was it, the last of the sixteen tests or ordeals. But even with Degree Absolute Number 2 warned that they don’t want to damage him. Well that was because they needed him as the new Number 2, and what a story that might have made………………..

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