Peter Smith is finally... home?
Number Six awakens to find the Village utterly deserted. Has he been abandoned, and can he escape back to Britain? Indeed, he makes his way onto a gun running boat, and after several days of travel, arrives in London.
A woman, Mrs. Butterworth (Georgina Cookson), now drives Number Six's car KAR-120-C and lives in his flat. Six identifies himself to her as Peter Smith. The woman allows him to look at her deed for the place, which has no record of the previous owner, and the log of the car. She also gives him some of her late husband's clothes.
Number Six must go see his old colleagues at the agency. Butterworth lets him use the car on the condition he come back. After some initial skepticism, Six's old colleagues help him figure out where the Village might be. It's somewhere near Morocco...
A fighter jet pilot takes Six up in a plane to go look at the extrapolated area where the Village might be. They find it, and Six gets ejected out. Soon after his arrival, the Village comes alive with activity as if it had never been deserted. And Mrs. Butterworth - the new Number Two - shows up at Six's Village residence.
Tropes
- Ambiguous Situation: Who is working for whom, how much was under the Village's control, and how much of this was deliberate is never made clear.
- Continuity Nod: A rare example of this: Number Six mentions that is birthday is 19 March, which he previously stated in "Arrival."
- Creator Cameo: When Number Six asks his former boss "Anyone at home?", the man behind the desk, as in the opening credits, is George Markstein, who co-created the series with Patrick McGoohan and was the script editor on the first 13 episodes which included this one, the final one to be filmed.
- "Everyone Is Gone" Episode: The episode begins with Number Six waking up and discovering that the Village is entirely deserted and everything is shut down.
- Failed a Spot Check: Number Six and his superiors determine a region where the Village could be, based on his travel direction and distance, but no one points out that they can eliminate the part of that region that would have required him to sail through Spain.
- Foreshadowing: Mrs. Butterworth has a maid, similar to how Number Two has the Butler to take care of things.
- Ghost Town: What the Village turns into one night while Six is asleep.
- Go Mad from the Isolation: Six briefly suffers from this before he realizes he can use the situation to escape.
- Hero Ball: Number Six ends up at Beachy Head with its famous lighthouse and doesn't recognise it, falls asleep on a truck without even bothering to hide himself, and subsequently goes straight back to his own home, even though he already knows from previous episodes that his former friends are after him.
- I Gave My Word: The reason why Six wants to come back and look for the Village.
- It harks back to what he told Number Two in "The Chimes of Big Ben:"
"I'm going to escape and come back. Escape, come back, wipe this place off the face of the Earth, obliterate it, and you with it!"- It's also why Number Two shows up at the end of the episode with a birthday cake. She did promise him that cake, after all.
- The Law of Conservation of Detail: Why did we see a shot of a milkman on the air base? The "milkman" was the pilot who stranded Number Six back in the Village, presumably after stealing the real pilot's uniform.
- Mind Screw
- This is what the events were all about and do one of the best jobs in battering Six's ego.
- It's worse: The whole episode is meant to be a birthday present: grant him the dream of escaping and doing what he could to expose and destroy the Village once and for all. And they let him, well, except for that last bit.
- No-Dialogue Episode: For the first thirty minutes or so, there is almost no dialogue. Whatever snippets there are come from German-speaking gunrunners, Romany-like travellers and background noise.
- The Reveal:
- Mrs. Butterworth is Number Two.
- The Prisoner confirms that he built his iconic Lotus 7 car with his bare hands.note
- Salvage Pirates: Number Six escapes the Village on a raft and encounters a gunrunning boat whose crew steals his belongings. He ends up fighting them and eventually captures them.
- The '60s: Mrs. Butterworth as an example of a jet-setting hipster woman living within Swinging London of the era.
- Stock Footage: The shot of the plane approaching the island, as seen from the cockpit, is taken from The Avengers episode "The Superlative Seven."
- Tricked into Escaping: Number Six wakes up one morning to find the Village entirely deserted of people. He creates a raft and floats to England, but is eventually tricked into returning to the Village and being re-captured. The whole thing was a plot to make him despair of ever escaping.
- Title Drop: Near the end of the episode, Number Two brings Number Six a cake and says "Many happy returns."
- The Bad Guy Wins: While most episodes end on a draw or stalemate (Number Six fails to escape but he still hasn't been broken by Number Two), this episode ends in total victory for Number Two. This is because the whole affair was designed as a charade with Number Six being completely railroaded from beginning to end. They also temporarily moved away from the usual effort to break Number Six or try find out why he resigned. So this particular Number Two was 100% successful at everything that was attempted, which in this case was to demoralize him.
- The Unreveal
- While the episode takes great pains to map out The Prisoner's journey escaping from the Village, there is still the likelihood they manipulated that as well.
- When Number Six returns to his home, he tells Mrs. Butterworth - who had moved into his apartment since he'd been gone for so long and the lease expired - that his name is Peter Smith in order to prove he was the previous tenant. Since he didn't have any reason to lie to her, it's possible this is his real name. (Although McGoohan plays it as if he's making up a name off the top of his head — a name that sounds generic, but not TOO generic.) Subverted with the realization that the Prisoner had a variety of cover names including one - Schmidt - which is a clearly Germanic version of Smith, and Smith could have easily been a civilian cover.
- The opening credits did not show us a face of the new Number Two and used a generic man's voice. It was to hide the fact that the real Number Two was a woman we'd see during the episode as Mrs. Butterworth.
- So, how many people were in on it? The gunrunners? One of them wears a striped woolly hat like many Village guards, and they're seen eating cans of "Village Food." (But they were also seen taking supplies of Number 6's raft.) Was the police stop-and-search really completely unrelated, or the way the Village actually planned on getting him to London? How many of his superiors were part of the scheme? Was Thorpe, since the same actor plays No. 2 in the possibly-later episode "Hammer Into Anvil"? Is the Village really off the Portuguese/Moroccan coast or did the Village pilot fly them to the real location? None of this is ever revealed.
- Wham Episode: Many of the episode orders put this roughly in the middle of the series as the point where Six gives up on trying to escape the Village and instead starts playing his own mindgames to defeat it instead.
