Character profile of Number Fourteen from The Prisoner episode "A.B. and C."

The Prisoner in “A.B. and C.”

One of the most remarkable things about literary criticism is being able to squeeze meaning out of just a few syllables. Poetry is like that. The interpretations can sometimes take multiple pages when the poem itself is only a few lines, or words, long.

Based on one line that gets used twice in this episode of The Prisoner, one can deduce a lot about a rather minor character. The doctor, Number Fourteen, is like this. Admittedly, there is nothing dynamic about this character. She is just the scientific doctor. Any person would do in this spot. We get a couple of splashes of character in lines like “Nothing like a good party,” but for the most part, these are generic lines that could be given to any character. It is the one line that gets repeated that tells great things about the inner moral struggle about Number Fourteen.

“We all make mistakes; sometimes we have to.”

Envision Number Fourteen as just an average scientist but with a fabulous new idea about a dream-controlling machine. Drugs are involved. Electric equipment is required. These things cost money. Somehow, her experiments were approved as line items on company expenditures. Eventually, bigwigs in the companies start to look at these expenditures, especially when no immediate payoff has been perceived—we know for a fact that she has not yet finished testing it on animals. How many years of research have gone into this without any tangible, or monetary, reward?

Yet somehow her budget gets approved. Sooner or later, a government agency gets wind of these experiments, as they most probably do. Someone sees the benefits that a government agency could pull out of an experiment on controlling dreams.

For instance, questioning prisoners in a dream must be more beneficial. Torturing answers out of spies will get the answers without ever really touching the outside of the prisoner. Spy scenarios abound—teach people languages, customs, anything in a dream versus reality. Think of the combat training, like The Matrix, without physical constraints. Machine gun shoot ‘em ups without paying for a single bullet and other combat scenarios would save enormous dollar amounts. We do lots of things like this now with video games and even more recently with virtual reality. Imagine the things that cannot be imagined yet.

So eventually Number Fourteen gets into bed with some people she would rather not have, had she really known what was going on. She just knows that her budget for the next year has been approved—she doesn’t know who exactly her new bosses are. This happens all the time in scientific labs. Scientists develop something and didn’t know their company is really owned by some other company. All of their research is not theirs anyway. If a company paid for it, it is owned by the company. Now Number Fourteen has got to work with departments and people she really didn’t want to, but it is too late now. She must go on with her baby, her life’s work. She cannot abandon it now. What else will she do? Even if she wanted to start something else, she is probably under contract. If she goes somewhere else, the company still owns her baby. She’s stuck.

But she made these mistakes because she simply had to in order to continue developing the dream-controller.

From her perspective, she is doing a wondrous service to mankind. Think of all the benefits that may be reaped from this technology. For instance, psychological conditioning that fixes problems, educational benefits, real life learning scenarios, and games and recreation lead the list. Surely, there are more benefits that have not been grasped yet. And she sees all of the astounding profitability that her device could bring about. So she doesn’t mind getting into bed with these people right now. She can figure it all out later.

That time, however, never comes. So she uses that phrase repeatedly to herself to justify where it has all started. “We all make mistakes; sometimes we have to.” It becomes her mantra. She probably wakes up saying it, goes to bed saying it, repeats it all the time when the owner is asking something else from her. When she finds out it is a governmental agency that runs something like The Village, even if she is appalled by it, she still has to give in. So she says that phrase repeatedly to get her through the day.

That’s why she slips up and says it again when she is putting her words into B’s voice. She is so used to saying it that she says it again without it even thinking of it. Number Six easily picks up on the slip. She doesn’t even know where she slipped up.

And that’s why she is so proud of Number Six for succeeding at the end. Her experiment has failed out but that is her escape. Now The Village, or whoever is behind it all, won’t want it. It is a flawed experiment with no more potential if it is so easily beaten. Maybe she can take it her way now, once she figures out what went wrong (if anything could be said to have gone wrong, exactly).

In extension, Number Two’s character comes into focus a little more here with this experiment. Remember, he comes back in “The General,” yet another experiment. This supervision is his line of work. I think that's why he gets to come back to The Village again in that episode.

Clearly, "The General" comes second because of Number Two saying that Number Six and he are "old friends." And this time, it isn't even about Number Six. He's not trying to get Number Six in any way, shape, or form. It's all about the General experiment.

Imagine that he's shipped out after "A.B. and C." Somehow, somehow, he is able to work himself back into another experiment. He gets one, the General. After a while, as the experiment progresses. somebody probably brings up the idea that they need test subjects. It jumps into Number Two's head (or whatever he is called then) a memory of the perfect closed experimental system: The Village.

Amazingly, little tidbits of literary material can wonderfully expand upon what we know of the characters.