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Monday 22 September 2014

That's A Curious Thing

    With the original screening of ‘the Prisoner,’ indeed anyone watching the Prisoner series for the first time, the viewer has much in common with Number 2. For as eager as Number 2 is to discover the reason behind the Prisoner's resignation, we the viewer are just as keen to find out why Number 6 resigned.
    We thought we were about to be told during ‘The Chimes of Big Ben’ “I resigned because for a very long time…… and then there came the chimes and the moment was gone! It wasn’t until ‘Once Upon A Time’ that we get close to being told anything like why the Prisoner resigned. “For peace of mind, because too many people know too much, I know too much. I know too much about you!” And that's as much as we get. Number 2 wanted the Prisoner to tell him again, but he’d been told, and so had we, no matter how much we might have felt by the inadequacy of the answer. However to some degree, this Number 2 was successful in attaining some kind of explanation as to why the Prisoner resigned. In fact he is the only Number 2 to extract any information from the Prisoner, save for the time of his birth.
   So why did Number 2 push the Prisoner further? Why persist when he’d been told? To push the Prisoner to the edge, perhaps to drive him over the edge, because he must know just how good a man the Prisoner is. And he is good, because eventually the Prisoner turns the tables on Number 2, in fact he changes places with Number 2. Number 6 knew all about Degree Absolute and explains its operation to Number 2, a recognised method used in psychoanalysis. The patient must come to trust his doctor, sometimes, in extreme cases they change places, and that can be a dangerous thing, if the doctor has his own problems. “Why don’t you resign?” is the Prisoner’s suggestion. But when push comes to shove something has to give, and in this case it was Number 2. If it wasn’t the drink then it must have been the Prisoner who drove Number 2 to his death, perhaps a heart attack brought on by the stress of the situation, and yet there are the words “Die Six, die, die, dieeeeeeeeeeeeeee DIE.” It could be interpreted that the patient in having changed places with his doctor, it was Number 6 who died in that cage, and that Number 2 walked free from the Embryo Room.

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