The Irony of It!

    There is irony in the fact that the Prisoner is put on trial during the ‘Dance of the Dead’ for the possession of a radio set, a radio set which was originally smuggled in by Number 43! The Prisoner had no radio of his own, there was no such radio he could have borrowed, so when acquiring one......just a minute I thought there was no radio the Prisoner could have borrowed?! So where did the prosecutor imagine the Prisoner had acquired such a transistor radio? Perhaps that didn’t matter, perhaps even in The Village possession is still 9 tenths of the law! It was actually having the radio that mattered, not where he got it from, which was Number 34’s trouser pocket. I should have thought listening to the radio would have been a bigger breaking of the rules, as listening to a radio is not permitted. Although the radio did work, which is surprising really, the radio having been immersed in sea water for a length of time in the dead man’s pocket, after all the leather case was hardly waterproof!
    The trial is absurd, as is the sentence of death, to be carried out by the people in the name of justice. Courtrooms are as much to do with theatrics as well as justice, besides Number 2 cannot allow anything to happen to Number 2, she has already said he has a future with them. A baying mob screaming for blood would have completely ruined that, if they had actually laid their hands upon the Prisoner. They might well have torn him limb from limb!
   The Prisoner is not given a costume for carnival. Number 6 interprets that as being still himself. Seeing as his own suit is delivered especially for the occasion. Perhaps it's because Number 6 is still himself, or on the other hand it might be because the Prisoner is above such “bourgeois enfantine!” Either way by the end of the episode Number 6 no longer exists, he’s dead, as Number 2 puts it, “locked up in that long box…in that little room.”

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