The Prisoner: Semi-Random Thoughts - The Distress In The Uselessness Revealed?

On Thursday morning I regained consciousness. I was hooked up to a drip and although initially without pain could not actually move. I was more bewildered than anything. It took me until teatime on Friday to work out where I actually was; a nurse led me to the window, opened the curtains and revealed the familiar panorama visible from the fifth floor intensive care unit at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. Which I ran. For five years. Although familiar it still did not seem real or palpable and I took some convincing to disabuse me from my belief that I was actually in the John Radcliffe (after another week they did find a bed for me there and transferred me, painfully, to an ambulance which got stuck in White City for what seemed like 98 hours). To an extent it feels as though nothing has been what I would consider to be real ever since then, and moreover it feels like a tangible loop, endlessly making the same mistakes.

We are told in "Fall Out" that filming was done at Portmeirion, but when the truck escapes at the end it is patently travelling on the London-bound A2, the trunk road from Dover.

Why have I only started contributing actively to ILM/ILE for two months even though I have been reading it for two years? The key player in the series, Alexis Kanner, doesn't appear until episode 14 (of 17) and even then his roles are variable and hard to get a grip upon. I suppose it's just knowing when to make your entrance.

"Once Upon A Time." Beckett at teatime, explicitly indebted to "Endgame" via the umbilical link of Leo McKern. The most frightening moments in the series were the quietest ones. The part where an exhausted McKern rises from his semi-slumber, stumbles drunkenly to the cage - which of course is the actual "Village" - and simply peers at McGoohan, shrugs his shoulders and says, out of curiosity - "Why DID you resign?" Only then does McGoohan respond.

Quietness. We're all scared of silence. Make a noise forever. It saves us from thinking.

And somewhere in the dark semi-consciousness, hovering between this world and another one, Carlin is six years old again with the dimly lit Ferguson portable TV in the kitchen, wondering and wondering again.

Robin will understand this.