Fall Out

    Goes right back to that moment in the Embryo Room when Number 2 and Number 6 change places, and Number 2 asks him what he wants “Supper” Number 6 tells him. From that moment Number 6 is finally in control. He has Number 2 pleading, nay grovelling at his feet, begging Number 6 to tell him again the reason behind his resignation. Number 2’s authority has crumbled away. The Village belongs to Number 6 now, and there’s only one challenge left….Number 1. Even the Supervisor-Number 26 recognises Number 6’s new found authority, as he is the victor, and Number 2 lies dead on the floor of the cage!

   “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.’

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