No.6 is interrogated in his sleep by No.40 (the Doctor) using the voice of na ex-colleague, Dutton, who has been brought to The Village. No.2 intervenes, No.6 mustn't be damaged, he has future there and she doesn't want him broken.
The next day No.6 is invited to the Carnival, and No.2 suggests he settle down and find a girlfriend. He chooses No.240 (Bo-Peep), but is told she is unsuitable. She is in fact his Observer. No.6, tired of never seeing the night outside, tries to escape but is stalled by Rover. Waking on the beach he finds a washed up corpse with a radio. He amends his wallet to show no.6 and The Village. At the cave he meets his old colleague Dutton. He's told them everything he knows but The Village don't believe him. He will return to the hospital for more extreme treatment which will destroy him.
That night at the Carnival there is a kangaroo court where No.6 is put on trial for possessing a radio. Found guilty, he is sentenced to death, and is chased by the villagers.
Anthony Skene's third and final episode, as superbly realised by director Don Chaffey, is this quite chilling tale, the darkest of all the episodes as it mostly dispenses with the playful veneer (Carnival excepted) to show The Village in it's true and most brutal light. It's a concentration camp that uses medical and psychiatric techniques, some experimental, to extract information from its prisoners. It doesn't care whether this treatment lobotomises or kills the victim.
This was the fourth episode produced, in the same block as Chaffey's two other episodes, but eighth shown. No.6 says he's new there, and only recently arrived, and given that this episode shows the true face of The Village, it should perhaps be shown earlier, perhaps as episode 3 after The Chimes of Big Ben. Interestingly, Bo-Peep says that The Village has been in existence for a long time.
Skene's dialogue is superb in this episode, probably the best ever. It drips with lines delivered that strip away the pretence and display the cold-hearted nature of the beast. There is a lot of play on the fact that the outside Worlds is just a dream and that The Village is reality. When No.6 runs on the beach at night, No.2 simply says "He'll eventually go back to his room. It's the only place he can ever go", all the more chilling for its seeming banality. When Bo-Peep shows sorrow at the news of the death of a villager, she says "I knew him" to which the supervisor replies "well, he didn't know you". People are just commodities.
Most frightening are the dialogue about the perversion of medicine and psychiatry by The Village, No.2 and the Doctor calmly chatting about how they will have to use more extreme measures to get Dutton to talk. No.2 calmly states it'll give him a chance to experiment as unlike No.6 he's dispensable, in a manner as if discussing an academic study. Dutton realises he's doomed in one of the saddest exchanges ever heard in the whole series. No.6 "There's still hope" Dutton "No, my friend, not for me. Such noble thoughts are long dead. Soon Roland Walter Dutton will cease to exist". He's told them everything and still they don't believe him. This is a pain we all can empathise with from our childhood experiences of being chastised by parents for something we didn't do or don't understand. When we see him at the court, where No.6 has called him as a character witness, a drooling blank faced lobotomised idiot, dressed as a fool, the sheer horror is visceral. His execution order seems almost excessively unnecessary.
No.6 however is of more value, for the moment. There are teasing snippets throughout the episode that No.6 is not simply there as a prisoner. When he discovers his costume for the Carnival is his own suit, the maid asks "What does it mean?" "That I'm still ... myself?" the maid's reply is "Lucky you". Lucky No.6 indeed. It shows superhuman willpower for him to constantly resist, he's even able to do it in his sleep, does he never worry that eventually he'll be whisked off to the Hospital, where he will inevitably disappear? At the conclusion No. 6 swears that he will never give in to the Village. No. 2 then laughs and wryly observes, "Then how very uncomfortable for you, old chap!".This is why Bo-Peep's sudden sense of humanity at the conclusion of the trial, when she feels it's gone too far, is all the more shocking. It's reminder of real community, of real human empathy and feeling, qualities The Village (and our society?) only sees as useful tools of manipulation.
There's also a nice Borgesian or Kafkaesque undercurrent to this episode, to counter the psychological horror. As No.2 points out, to the outside World "which you only dream about" he'll be presumed dead, though this is "a small confirmation of a known fact". This ties in with epistemological or ontological interpretations of the series. With The Village predating No.6 by some time, could it simply be a dream state of No.6's, that every episode he awakes from the gassing being a symbolic representation of falling asleep every night and awakening the next day with a fresh instalment of one's life. Each episode is then a dream, where his ego and id battle with his superego, or his dreaming state creates a World in which he is in reality a prisoner, with the waking world of the London drive in reality the dream state. Or could it be an allegory of life, The Village representing some after-life, some purgatory, in which No.6 must face a Sisyphean task of escaping out of it back to life, but being continually thwarted by either the limits of his knowledge, his human fallibility, or by the superhuman nature of The Village that sees all, knows all, and rules all. His court would then lead to a second, deeper level of death, further down the descent into the unconscious Underworld (significantly under The Village). Is No.6 just trying to escape himself, or death?
The actors, aided by such great dialogue, rise to the occasion. Mary Morris is only one of two women No.2's, her pixie face and haircut disguising a cruel inhuman mind. Duncan MacRae is just chilling as The Doctor, treating each torture victim with scientific relish, and positively salivating at the prospect of interrogating No.6. Oddly, for this series, there are quite a few strong female roles. Along with Morris, Norma West nicely moves from passive observation, to impassioned outrage and confdusion at no.6's behaviour to concern for his welfare at the end. The delectable Denise Buckley, a regular of ITC shows, is wonderfully arch as the maid, and Camilla Hasse all cold-blooded pragmatism as the supervisor. Praise also to Alan White, for his doomed humanistic portrait of the victim of a cruel society and injustice .
The direction is exemplary, with a sense of the despair of the plot, notice the scenes at night on the beach and the chase and how they nicely alternate with the exchanges between characters. We also have another nod to Danger Man when No.6 infiltrates the Town Hall. It's very well edited, and though the music mostly uses the abandoned Farnon & Joseph tracks from Arrival, there is a wonderful celeste theme during the final chase, and for the music box theme at the Carnival the below library music from Farnon.
A great episode, one of my personal favourites, ands a nice corrective to all those who dress up as villagers and head off to Portmeirion for their conventions. And notice that odd, troubling, sense of magic at the end when the destroyed teleprinter comes back to life. Hidden function disguised by everyday surface, much like the symbolic pantomime of the court. This is a dark night of the soul, not a Summer Holiday camp.
Incidental Music
Village Rating (out of six): No.6
Cast
The Prisoner ................................................................. PATRICK McGOOHAN
Number Two ................................................................. MARY MORRIS
Doctor ........................................................................... DUNCQAN MacRAE
The Butler .................................................................... ANGELO MUSCAT
Girl Bo-Peep.................................................................. NORMA WEST
Town Crier .................................................................... AUBREY MORRIS
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