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STUDY IN "S"

"Dance Of The Dead" is merely a pretence in order to bring to the forth the surreal properties of reality.

It’s also with Kafka that "The Trial" does take place not within a building of justice but in remote attic chambers and obscure back rooms. Thus, the trial against Number Six is held in the town hall which isn’t one, of course. According to Number Two it is usually used for "amateur theatre".

Music and dance are declared and every citizen is informed by public radio that carnival has been decreed - invaluable words indeed (at least if you’re German).

But there isn’t a real carnival, either. The ceremony suddenly tilting over into some grotesque trial against Number Six for illegally possessing a transistor radio, blending into a travesty of a French Revolution summary court and absurd theatre.

The verdict on Number Six is capital punishment. Number Six takes a run, a mad and cheering crowd hot on his heels. He hurries through labyrinthine corridors into rooms furnished with semitransparent mirrors and ghostly working teleprinters. And he is supported, interestingly, by Number Two - a woman this time. She knows about the raging crowd, her intention is to convince Number Six into cooperation because he’s privileged.
"Mustn’t damage the tissue" the doctors are always told."Dance Of The Dead" - the title does make sense. Intellectually dead and lacking of initiative, that’s what the Village inhabitants are, conformists or simply decoration. Best irritations on the way in this episode. The ending according to the script was altered but this doesn't make the episode more "intelligible". McGoohan kept saying he hadn't read Kafka. But there must have been a certain influence on this episode by the film version of THE TRIAL made by Orson Welles in 1962, with Anthony Perkins and others.

"Once Upon A Time" (the German-French title "Pas de deux" suitably refers to playing a game for two) is basically a staged play. In Number Two's words, "The whole world is a theater." The set and its lighting are quite visible. For reasons of narrative economy time has been compressed, it’s mostly dialogues. Due to excellent camera work and editing there is nothing of a letter-boxed stage.

"Once Upon A Time" is a chamber play, psychotherapy (stage of life) and gambling for power, all in one - a game/gambling until a lethal end. It’s a heavy burden for Number Two to be successful, to decide on Degree Absolute for him and Number Six in the confines of the locked-up room - the Embryo Room which is the Place within the Village.
Leo McKern’s impersonation of Number Two, a patting-on-shoulders, very jovial type of guy is one of the best castings. McGoohan is the director and it’s obvious that he’s in control now. Something he wasn’t able to reprise again for the finale of "Fall Out" where things do drift out of his hand. Those episodes literally decompose the series, there is hardly a plot and things are becoming quite detached.