Tuesday, 3 July 2018

A Favourite Scene In Dance of The Dead

    “You, you of all people……..I’d never have believed it!”
    “Roland Walter Dutton!”
    “Who was he?”
    “His body was washed up on the shore. How long have you been here?”
    “You don’t know?”
    “Would I ask?”
    “Its difficult to say, a couple of months, and you?”
    “Quite recently.”
    “How’s
London?”
    “About the same.”
    “Yes, places don’t change……only people.”
    “Some people.”
    “I want to talk about it anyway.”
    “Let’s go inside.”
    “I told them.”
    “What?”
    “Everything I know…………the irony is they don’t believe me. You know I didn’t have access to the vital stuff.”
    “Yes.”
    “They’ll take me back to the hospital, and by the time they realize I’m telling the truth it will be too late.”
    “When?”
    “They’ve released me for seventy-two hours, so that I can reconsider in the peaceful atmosphere of …the…..The Village.”
    “There’s still hope.”
    “No my friend not for me………….such noble thoughts are long dead. Soon Roland Walter Dutton will cease to exist.”
   Dutton cuts a tragic figure, he is resolved to the inevitable. Seeing as he didn’t have access to the vital information, it makes one wonder why he was brought to The Village in the first place. Perhaps he is one of those who know too little. It also gave the doctor-Number 40 the opportunity for experimentation.
    It’s clear that Dutton was surprised to see his old colleague in such a place as The Village. Perhaps he thought a man of his calibre would be the last person he should find in such a place. But at the beginning of their encounter there was mistrust, Dutton might well have thought his old colleague was working for The Village, and this was an attempt to get close to him in order to get him to talk. But Dutton has already told them all he knows, there’s nothing left to extract.
   It’s a strange place for Dutton to show up though, outside the cave. It would have been more usual for them to have met up somewhere in The Village. But then it does seem usual for Number 6 to meet up when there is no-one else about. Like Cobb on the ward in the hospital. Had Dutton simply gone for a walk to be alone and simply found himself down on the beach outside the cave? Or was the meeting arranged, if so for what purpose, to deliberately meet with Number 6? They had tried to use Dutton before as a communications medium, perhaps they are trying that a second time. Using him as a warning to Number 6, if you don’t talk you’ll eventually end up like him! This is all pure supposition and guess work of course, in an attempt to reveal the underlying message.
   And the body on the beach, Number 6 assumed it had been washed up on the shore. But what if it had been placed there during the night for Number 6 to find……? 


Be seeing you

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