On The Circle Line!

   ‘The Prisoner" gives the impression that it is a vicious circle. This understanding has come about with the ending of ‘Fall Out’ being the commencement of ‘Arrival.’ The Prisoner living out the consequences of having resigned his job, over and over again. However that then brings into the question, memory recall, having escaped, how much the Prisoner might remember from his previous time in The Village when he returns there? It might be that upon having arrived in The Village again, that he has had a memory loss. Certainly he doesn’t have any memory of where he is, why he’s there, or who Number 2 is. He tells the maid in ‘Dance of the Dead’ that he’s new in The Village, and to Dutton he says he’s arrived quite recently. So perhaps because he cannot remember why he’s had to be brought to The Village, that’s why he has to start from the beginning again! And what about Number 1 and Number 2, do they have any remembrances of the previous time Number 6 was brought to The Village?

  But does ‘the Prisoner’ have to be the same every time the vicious circle begins again? Fictionally speaking, when we watch ‘the Prisoner,’ are we watching a particular cycle of events, and those events do not alter no matter how many times we watch them. Because when we watch ‘the Prisoner,’ as often as we wish, all we are doing is replaying the first time the Prisoner is in The Village. If indeed it was the first time! But perhaps the series of events do not alter, perhaps they are not supposed to alter, perhaps ‘the Prisoner’ is all there is. But if events do change within that vicious circle once the Prisoner has resigned again, we cannot say what happened since ‘Fall Out’ on the next occasion. Because we are only privy to one cycle of events, there may be many more, before and since.

Be seeing you