The Therapy Zone

   I knew of course that the Therapy Zone wasn’t an actual place in The Village, rather it was a set at MGM film studios. I’m not even sure if it was a Therapy Zone at all, but simply a cave made out to be the Therapy Zone, for Number 6’s benefit in ‘Free For All,’ simply designed to be used in order to administer the drug. Or had others have been taken to there in the same way Number 6 had been?
    The next time we see the interior of “Therapy Zone” is during ‘Dance of The Dead,’ where Number hides the dead body. As for the exterior, the mouth of the cave is down on the beach, whereas in ‘Free For All’ the entrance to the Therapy Zone is through some bushes just off the top of the sea wall. So presumably both caves cannot be meant to be the same. 

  Anyway upon my first visit to Portmeirion back in 1988, I took a walk along the sea wall and along the cliffs to find myself standing by the lighthouse on top of the cliffs. Only it’s not a lighthouse at all, just one of Clough’s follies. And yet, there was the same cove in which Number 6 found the body on the shore in ‘Dance of the Dead,’ and later in the same episode when he used the body to try and get a message to someone, anyone, in the outside World. By having tied the dead man’s body to a lifebuoy and setting it adrift in the water to be carried out to sea on the out-going tide. {With special thanks to Arno for the picture}
   And yet as I stood there, having followed in Number 6’s deck shoes so to speak, there it was, the entrance to a cave set in the cliff. Not a very large entrance I warrant you, more of a slit really. And through that slit there wasn’t much of a cave really, not all that wide, and it didn’t go all that far into the cliff for that matter. But it seemed to me that this small insignificant cave was perhaps the inspiration for the cave on the set at MGM film studios, seeing as it was supposed to have been in the same cave, and where Number 6 met Dutton. Perhaps had that cave been a bit larger, there wouldn’t have been the necessity for the cave on a set. As for the Therapy Zone, there was no sign of it, so I had to have a pint later in the Hercules Hall!

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