The Prisoner: episode 17: Fallout

And Well Done.

A (side of the) truth in every considered scene, distorted, confused by cacophony and simultaneously offered angles; divining a representative view, (and) composing a statement accessible by all interests (may have) required the eclectic, wild, disparate, (cubist?) style manifested in this final episode where Number Six, McGoohan, hegemony, youth, history, now (the late 60's) collide into a single, reflexive space.

Under The Village: a missile, subterfuge, new-speak, the Beatles singing "All You Need is Love," reflections behind ape masks behind theatre masks under cloaks behind cameras, resurrection, insurrection, defection, dem bones dem bones, and an open-sided trailer barreling along the highway as the greatest escape... succeeds?

The jilting journey ends with an electronic hum, and we are left wondering: How big, really, is The Village?

-DM

This post is very, very overdue…8 months overdue to be exact – perhaps the time it takes to be away from The Village and to be able to look back on it and make sense of that experience, or perhaps the time it takes to miss The Village and long to be back. And what’s not to miss. In the final episode The Village breaks down into the chaos I had hoped for, into the cacophony of sounds and the blur of images, the masks, the chanting, the singing, the chasing, the moment we always knew was coming (could we really have expected Number 1 to be anyone else?). Finally we are set in motion, perhaps propelled into motion – marching down tunnels, chasing around rooms and through rooms, barrelling down highways – all set to music, familiar enough to be catchy, ill-fitting enough to be slightly unsettling. McGoohan and Kanner put in perfectly fitting over the top performances to wrap up their characters, and just enough of the inner workings of The Village were revealed to answer some questions but leave a few mysteries behind.

…and then, like Number 6, we simply step out and disappear into the quiet of everyday life. It all ends as suddenly as it began, much like this project – but like so much in life, also with the chance to repeat itself, perhaps with slightly less anticipation and surprise than an entirely new experience, but with the benefit of familiarity and the opportunity to be retold and relived through (hopefully) wiser eyes.

as.