“What do you require?” the Supervisor asks.
“Number One” Number 6 tells him.
“I’ll take you.”
What then follows is the fantasy of an
unhinged mind. A delirium or fantasy? ‘Fall Out’ is just that, a falling out of
former friends. It is also the final escape from fantasy into the world of
reality. And yet Number 6 was not permitted to let it rest there. Patrick McGoohan
made certain of that, with just one word “Prisoner,” and spelt it large on the
screen.
If ‘Fall Out’ was supposed to be the ultimate
victory for Number 6, then he was going to be disappointed, it was a hollow
victory, seeing as he was to blame for the whole sorry affair. He’s his own
worst enemy, and we are not much better, because we, the viewer, put Number 6
through the whole blessed affair again and again each time we put the video or DVD into the machine and press play!
As for The Village, its leaders, its Administration
become faceless men hiding behind theatrical black and white masks, and dressed
in white robes who demand conformity from others. Number 48 who had been with
them but then he went and gone. Youth which rebels by wearing clothes not of
the accepted norm, rebelling against nothing it cannot define. A “late” Number
2 once a good man having given his life for the cause, now accused of biting
the hand that feeds. But who eventually sees the light, and if he is going to
die, then he’ll die with his own mind, and will no longer be mesmerised by
Number 1! And Number 6, well now he’s not Number 6 or any number of any kind.
His defiance, his resistance has been part of a private war. He vindicated the
right of the individual to be individual.
He knows the way, now he must show them!
In other words lead them, lead them or go.
The once Prisoner-Number 6’s turnkey was in
fact……himself. A self which he has no qualms of ridding himself of, confining
him and sending him away. But in gaining his home it’s just the beginning, and
the cycle commences all over again, to be played out over and over again, but
to no advantage.
The tragedy of ‘Fall Out’ is, there is no victory,
no escape. There is only one place the Prisoner can go, and that is to withdraw
into himself. Physically he may appear have escaped the torture chamber,
mentally he’s still there.
It is curious that the Control Room of the
red 1
rocket is exact to the one in the rocket of the lighthouse built by Professor
Schnipps, except for the numerous World globes set out on the round table in
order to try and hide the map of London. But then you might say that’s simply
reuse of a former set, and that might very well be the case. And yet, in the creation
of that rocket within Number 6’s imagination {The Girl Who Was Death} might
that not originate through the mind of Number 1 from the confines within that
rocket?
What is left to be said of ‘Fall Out?’
Certainly that there had been nothing like it before, people were shocked by it,
angered by it, confused. Viewers felt cheated, because they expected all the
questions to be answered, and all ‘Fall Out’ did was to confuse matters even further!
And almost 48 years after the event we are still making what we will of ‘Fall
Out.’
Be seeing you
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