Number 6 was a Plant: Checkmate

The introduction to this series of posts considering the theory that Number 6 didn't resign at all and is a 'plant' in the Village, may be read here: https://culttvblog.substack.com/p/number-6-was-a-plant-introduction

In this series of posts I have been veering towards the realisation of how truly traumatising for Number 6 it must have been to experience the Village he had heard so much about. I have also been assuming that he set up his fake resignation off his own initiative to hear the rumours of abuses he had heard, and I think that this script makes the theory fit the series very snugly. However I hadn't realised that for Number 6 the people he is now surrounded by are, theoretically, colleagues in some way. I have never worked in intelligence, but I think you would sign up expecting that the people surrounding you have some competence and integrity.

You know if you belong to a particular profession and keep on seeing terrible things about your profession in the news? Catholic priest, say? It becomes very wearing: not just the having to tell the public you aren't all like that, but the realisation that actually many more of your profession are like that than you thought were.

Thus I think the worst realisation for Number 6 would be the realisation that his profession is actually full of cabbages and sadists and is really not what he had assumed.

'Most of us have joined the enemy against ourselves' is an accurate summary of what he is actually discovering here, and the division between the prisoners and the warders is largely artificial. Elsewhere in the series Number 6 tells one of the Number 2s that he is also a lifer, which Number 2 accepts. In a very real sense the prisoners and warders are only roles: in fact the prisoners can become warders by gaining trust, and vice versa. Number 6 has gone to the trouble of appearing to resign merely to have the bottom knocked out of his world.

In fact this episode always reminds me of a nurse I used to work with who I'm always reminded of when I read all the commentary on Twitter by people who are really fed up to the back teeth of mental health services. She was the person who made me realise that if a nurse talks about someone as non-compliant or tells the patient they are in charge of when the will be released from a restraint because they've made the staff do it, the power balance there is wrong and it's going to be less painful in the long run just to assume that the nurse is a shit. It's that kind of realisation. As it happens she didn't do as well for herself as I was expecting her to do because the staff were non-compliant and eventually she threw a massive fit and went off to that haven for psychopaths, commissioning.

Identifying the various organisational behaviours are a necessary part of Number 6's investigation of what is happening in the Village.

Now just in case you're thinking that I'm making too much of this and seeing something that isn't there, I would invite you to consider that this episode is based around nothing less than the most dysfunctional team building exercise in history, and I defy anyone to say it isn't.

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