D - 6

    Since the day of his arrival in The Village, Number 6 was a troublemaker. Disharmonious, he poked his nose in where it wasn’t wanted. He rebelled, failed to be a productive member of the community. Refused to settle down, to accept his situation. Refusing to wear, or respond to his number! But that wasn’t the Prisoner Number 6. Well it was, but it wasn’t the man before he was abducted to The Village. We only know Number 6, and not the man he was in his former life. All we know about him is, that he worked for a department within the Establishment which had dealings of a secret and confidential nature. Somewhere within The Foreign Office perhaps. But almost certainly within British Intelligence. He was utterly loyal, and devoted to his work. He lived in a large house, and was mechanically minded, seeing as he built his Lotus Seven which would have been delivered to him in kit car form. But that doesn’t tell us about the man himself. What he was like, what he liked to do. Who he was, what he wanted to be. All we see is a man incarcerated in The Village against his will. Of course he rebelled, rejecting The Village and all it stood for, because he was a prisoner and for no good reason that he could see.
    We learn later that ZM73 was engaged to be married, something Number 6 would not admit to being when Nadia Rakovsky asked him. And although there was a picture of Janet Portland in ZM73’s study, it was not there during the first opening sequence to ‘the Prisoner.’ Nor was the picture in the study of Number 6’s home in The Village. So really the engagement between ZM73 and Janet Portland does seem contrived. And yet it is something which must be accepted, for it is part of ZM73’s former life as written in the script.
    We know little enough of the Prisoner’s former life, we do not know for sure exactly what it was which led him to make the decision he did, and the action he took in handing in his resignation. We think that his resignation led to his abduction to The Village, but we cannot be sure. But whatever the character of a man, who would not act in such a way when his freedom and his identity are taken away from him when incarcerated in a place like The Village? Perhaps through the character of Number 6 we may perhaps glimpse a little of the man he was before his abduction. If of course before he was Six, he was Drake, and then we suddenly would know a whole lot more!

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