It’s Your Funeral

    “Must get on with my work,” that’s one of my favourite lines from this episode, indeed from the whole of ‘the Prisoner’ if it comes to it. I pity the poor little Watchmaker-Number 51, he had no idea he was being used. Today we’d say he had been radicalized by Number 100 for means of a terrorist attack. But as they say, everyman’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. Not that I condone such activity, Plan Division Q was simply a plan of murder, and a complicated plan at that. One which might not have succeeded without Number 6 giving it credibility, but the plan didn’t succeed because of Number 6’s involvement. But why such a complicated plan in the first place, when Number 2, or Number 1, had the power of making people simply disappear in the night? And yet it could all simply have been another test to put Number 6 through, to see if he could stop the assassination of the retiring Number 2. No wonder the new Number 2 was in a sweat, why he rushed through his speech, he wanted to get the bomb from off his neck and shoulders. If Number 6 had failed the test, in not stopping Number 50 from pressing the detonator, it would have cost Number 2 his life! Instead he was left to live and look forward to his own retirement one day.
   There are other stand out episodes, ‘It’s Your Funeral’ is another for several reasons. A retiring Number 2, a Number 2 who has been away on leave, and a change in the time for the publishing of The Tally Ho. It used to be daily at noon, but now the broadsheet is available from 10.20 in the morning!
    I wonder when Number 6 stopped using The Village gymnasium? It must have been sometime between the end of ‘Hammer Into Anvil,’ and this episode. Mind you he hadn’t stopped using the gym altogether, there was still his semi-weekly Kosho practice. But then that was something he could hardly conduct alone in the woods!

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