Episode 15

The Prisoner: The Girl Who Was Death

Synopsis

A book is opened to a drawing of a cricket game. We then cut to an actual match, with a woman (Justine Lord) dressed in white as a spectator. She replaces the ball with an explosive device, and on the next pitch, the player is killed by the ball’s explosion.

Number 6, in civilian clothes, receives information from an undercover spy disguised as a shoe-polisher. The murdered cricket player was a colleague on a mission to locate a super-rocket threatening London. Number 6 is assigned to continue this mission.

At a new cricket match, Number 6 is up at bat. The ball is switched, but Number 6 catches it and throws it away. At the scene of the explosion, he finds a note inviting him to the local pub. Once there, he begins to drink a stout, and notices a message at the bottom of the pint glass, which he can’t fully read until he has downed the beer. Once done, he reads the words “you have just been poisoned.”

He then gulps down a litany of hard liquor shots to purge the poison. After getting sick in the bathroom, he finds another note directing him to a Turkish bath.

Number 6 complies. While steaming himself, the same lady in white lodges a broom handle in the bath doors, locking Number 6 inside. Again, he escapes.

Yet another note tells him to go to “Barney’s Boxing Booth” at an oceanside resort town. His sparring partner tells him to visit the Tunnel of Love.

Inside, Number 6 hears the girl’s voice, bearing a message of love on a radio. He tosses it into the water where it explodes. After emerging from the tunnel, he chases the girl through several fair ground amusements but can’t track her down.

The woman drives off in a white car, and Number 6 speeds off in pursuit. She taunts him over a microphone, alternating love confessions with death threats. She somehow makes the road spin using just a pointed finger.

Number 6 follows the girl into an abandoned town where she announces her name as “death.” Inside an abandoned building he encounters a series of devious traps patterned after the butcher, baker, and candlestick maker. The ever-craft Number 6 manages to outsmart each.

After escaping the building, the girl lays down a hail of bullets from a gun turret. Number 6 boards a bulldozer for protection. She then fires a rocket launcher and destroys the construction vehicle. But Number 6 has taken shelter in a manhole.

The girl boards a helicopter and lifts off, with Number 6 hitching a ride beneath. She lands in a field and walks over a hill toward a lighthouse. Number 6 follows her and finds a tunnel leading to a secret bunker with computers, cots, and pictures of Napoleon and Josephine. Number 6 disables a guard and steals his uniform.

In the lighthouse we finally meet the girl’s father, a slightly insane fellow dressed in full Napoleon regalia berating some soldiers. He announces an imminent rocket launch and destruction of London.

Number 6 breaks into the armory, and sabotages the weapons. He fights off some soldiers, but the girl captures him and ties him to a chair. He learns that the lighthouse itself is the rocket, and will launch with Number 6 trapped within. The girl and her father leave to escape by boat after starting the countdown via computer.

Number 6 again manages to escape. He rappels down the side of the lighthouse and drives off in the boat. Still inside the lighthouse, the father and daughter hurl the mortars that Number 6 sabotaged earlier. The lighthouse explodes, and the Girl Who Was Death is now dead.

It’s then revealed that the reader of the book from episode’s start is Number 6. The whole adventure was a bedtime story told to some Village children. The Napoleon character was actually Number 2 and Miss Death another prisoner.

Thoughts

This episode is a fantasy, comedy, and violent adventure all in one. Much of the entertainment lies in Number 6’s continual escape from the girl’s increasingly complex attempts to do him in.

The Unmutual Archive has a compelling Sade / Freud interpretation. The death-duel between a man and a woman can be seen as a literal “battle of the sexes” with provocative, sexual implications. The girl, dressed in white, alternately wants to love Number 6 or murder him. We enter the tunnel of love at a fun fair, and Number 6 emerges from a manhole. Both wield long objects like guns, candles, lighthouses, and cricket bats - let your perverse imagination run wild.

One complaint is that the largely fantastical episode doesn’t have much connection to The Village and therefore doesn’t jibe well with the rest of the series. I would have preferred this episode as a lucid, hallucinatory dream induced by Number 2 and the Girl, with Number 6 strapped to a hospital bed under the influence of strong drugs. Perhaps that would be too similar to Living In Harmony, but it would fit better within the series.

That said, I still find this a very entertaining episode, and welcome the sadistic humor.

Other observations:

• Number 6 receives a coded message in a record shop - as he pretended to in the episode Hammer and Anvil.
• The Turkish bath scene could be a parody of the Bond movie Thunderball.
• The beer glass message in the standard Village font.
• The rocket concept reappears in the final episode Fall Out.

Next Episode: Once Upon A Time
Previous Episode: Living In Harmony

IMDB: The Girl Who Was Death
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Related Posts: The Prisoner: Living In Harmony :: The Prisoner: Once Upon A Time :: The Prisoner: It’s Your Funeral :: The Prisoner: Fall Out ::