I’m New Here!

   The episode of ‘Dance of the Dead’ is the eighth episode in ‘the Prisoner,’ so it becomes curious what Number 6 says to the maid Number 54, "I'm new here." After Number 6's arrival in The Village, he's been duped into thinking he escaped The Village during ‘The Chimes of Big Ben, had the privacy of his dreams invaded in ‘A B and C,’ In ‘Free For All’ he ran for electoral office. After that he met his doppelganger The Schizoid Man, and destroyed the General by asking a question, supposedly insoluble to man or machine. Then one morning having found that he is the only inhabitant The Village, Number 6 made himself a sea-going raft and set out on a sea adventure. So to say "I'm new here"........just how long does a citizen of The Village have to be a resident so as no longer to be new? It may be supposed that by the time ‘Dance of the Dead’ came along, Number 6 would have been an old hand of The Village! He certainly sounded like an “old hand” in The Village when he was giving new arrival Nadia Rakovsky directions to the Green Dome, and explaining the local taxi service to her, during ‘The Chimes of Big Ben,’ and that was only the second episode of the series. Yet having only arrived in The Village in the previous episode. And there’s the crux of the matter, in the library or production order of ‘the Prisoner’ ‘Dance of the Dead’ is the second episode. In that scenario the line “I’m new here” holds water. And yet having said that, Number 6 did only arrive recently, in  the previous episode, at the end of ‘Many Happy Returns,’ so in a way Number 6 was new in The Village, only recently arrived!

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