Shattered Visage - 'Fall Out' Re-examined

'Fall Out' Re-examined

Shattered Visage addresses "Fall Out", the surreal, dreamlike final episode of the series, in a variety of ways;

• The trade paperback opens with the text of a classified intelligence report on the Village. This report describes the events of Fall Out as "a theatrical tour-de-force involving actors as well as hallucinogenic drugs," organized by Leo McKern's Number Two. It refers to Number Two's death and resurrection as "staged."

• Later in the comic, Number Two says Six was "driven mad" and finally accepted a number; Number One. In "Once Upon A Time", the penultimate episode of the TV series, a brainwashing device is used to regress Six to childhood and force him to relive various periods of his life. In Fall Out, Number Six is given a ceremony that lauds his revolutionary spirit and the President describes Number Six as "the only individual" and therefore the ideal leader of the Village. Later in the episode, Six unmasks Number One, he sees his own face.

• According to the text piece, the Village was liberated by UN troops shortly after the finale. This suggests the gun battle and helicopter evacuation seen in Fall Out were the skewed perceptions of a drugged Number Six as rescue finally came. The episode Many Happy Returns provided Number Six's superiors with enough information to eventually locate the Village.

• As Number Two recounts the events of Fall Out, two panels show a wide shot of Number Six driving a mini-moke and then a close up of his face behind the wheel. This mirrors the title sequence of the TV series, reused for the final shots of the finale episode. In the final episode, this served as a hint that Number Six had not escaped or would not be free for long. This similar sequence appears when Number Two establishes that Number Six never left the Village.

• When Alice Drake finds Number Six stargazing in the Village control room, she also comes across a mask with the face of a monkey. Number Six removed such a mask from the face of 'Number One' in Fall Out. This means that while the events of the finale episode were hallucinatory, some aspects of them existed physically. This is later reinforced when the comic revisits the underground location of the final episode, encountering the jukebox and the chair.

• Near the end of the comic, a squad of soldiers led by a pair of intelligence agents venture into the underground caverns seen in Fall Out, and uncover a full complement of nuclear missiles, the warheads still usable and deadly, explaining the Village as a covert nuclear arsenal. According to Lee, the idiosyncrasies of the Village were a distraction. "You got so distracted by the surface," Lee tells Thomas, "that you couldn't see beneath the surface. You've got to brush away all that rococo crap and expose the truth!"