What a Palaver!

   What a performance 'the Prisoner' can be at times. So many elaborate plans and schemes developed with one intention, to gain the reason behind Number 6’s resignation!
    Take him all the way back to London, put him in an office he knows so very well, face him with two ex-colleagues, and give him the opportunity to talk freely. All that without hardly having left The Village!
    ‘A B and C’ gains access to Number 6’s dreams, and Number 2 learns what would have happened had they not got to him first. Yes, he may well have been abducted by ‘A’ to find himself in a Village on the other side of the Iron Curtain!
   Free For All’ is a very poignant episode at the moment here in Britain, as we are in the middle of a run-up to a General Election. The Administration of The Village stages an election, and Number 6 stands as candidate against Number 2. Number 6 expects that if he wins he will organise a mass breakout, but the Administration is already aware of this, but let Number 6 continue with his plan anyway. Because there is no-way he can succeed. They bruise the tissue a bit, but without damaging it. And what was achieved at the end? Number 6 hasn’t escaped, and Number 2 has not extracted one word of information out of the Prisoner!
   ‘The Schizoid Man,’ Number 6 is abducted from his home! Well that’s not the first time that’s happened to him. But then to wake up as someone else, well that’s a different matter! Not only have they taken away Number 6’s identity, but they have turned him into someone else, who is then told that his appearance is to be amended so that he can impersonate himself!
    ‘Many Happy Returns,’ that was a risky business, they could have so easily have lost him at sea. But at least this time Number 6 made it back to London, even though his suspicions took a little convincing!
    The Prisoner put on trial for the possession of a radio! There was never any real danger of the death sentence being carried out on Number 6. Because much earlier in the episode Number 2 herself had said that Number 6 has a future with them. That being the case, why go to all the rigmarole of putting the Prisoner on trial for the possession of a radio, then face him with death? Perhaps to try and break the Prisoner in his mind, or maybe in The Village no-one is above the Rules!
    Why go to all that trouble of ‘It’s Your Funeral,’ when all that had to be done was to round up all the malcontents in The Village and dispose of them? After all The Village is hardly the pocket democracy it once claimed to be! They needed a scapegoat, and the watchmaker Number 51 was it. The only flaw in this elaborate scheme was Number 6. When Number 6 is figured in the equation, failure invariably follows!
    They might very well have lost Number 6 had they really undertaken to give Number 6 a leucotomy, in dislocating the aggressive frontal lobes. He may well have ended up as one of those brainwashed imbeciles of the Town Council! But there was never any great danger of that, Number 6 was simply being kept sedated. So perhaps this is a more straightforward plan to get Number 6 to talk, after having Number 6 declared as being disharmonious, together with making him think he has undergone the complete personality change by ‘Instant Social Conversion.’
    ‘Do not forsake Me Oh My Darling,’ another risk, but one worth taking as those behind The Village need to find Professor Jacob Seltzman, and the last person to see him was the Prisoner. Number 6 has gone through a change of mind before, but now he physically does. But to have his current situation reversed, he must find Professor Seltzman. And once again Number 6 finds himself back in London, but not appearing as himself, but as the Colonel. And as with ‘The Schizoid Man’ ZM73 has to prove his identity!
    ‘Living In Harmony’ is anything but! Put the Prisoner in a dangerous environment, isolate him, make him kill, then face him with death….just a minute, hadn’t three out of those four been tried before?!
    ‘Once Upon A time’ two men were sealed in a room, the Embryo Room’ it’s called. There life can be re-lived from the cradle to the grave, and one man in his time can play many parts, as Number 2 does. The mind of Number 6 is regressed back to his early childhood, while Number 2 eventually digs a pit and ends up lying in it himself. The cradle to the grave!
   There was a ‘falling out’ between friends, the final desperate manipulation of Number 6. So what did they do, eventually they faced him with himself again. Perhaps in the hope that if he thought that it had been himself who had been behind The Village all the time, that they could break him in his mind. Well it strikes me that it was Number 1 who was off his head! Poor old Curtis, he hadn’t died at the membrane of The Village Guardian after all, but kept “on ice” somewhere in some out of the way place in The Village, as with The Man In The Iron Mask confined to the Bastille!

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