avevale_intelligencer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
avevale_intelligencer) wrote2014-10-15 11:03 pm
avevale_intelligencer) wrote2014-10-15 11:03 pm
The Man In Room 17
Watching the first season of The Man In Room 17, which I missed the first time around due to being too young to appreciate it probably. Fantastic stuff, beautifully written and featuring lots of familiar (and good) actors. I could do without the generic big band theme tune, but you can't have everything.
Apparently it was written and produced in two halves; they brought in a writer and director to provide the situation, and then the series creator and his director wrote and shot the Room 17 sequences in which the investigators solve the mystery. Presumably it must have been something of an interactive endeavour; I'd love to know how they did it.
Well, that's the question, isn't it, and nobody else seems to have noticed. Two men in Room 17 there definitely are, Edwin G. Oldenshaw (played by Richard Vernon) and Ian Dimmock (played by Michael Aldridge), who's later replaced by Imlac Defraits (played by Denholm Elliott). They talk, they play Go, they drink coffee, they entertain visitors, they fight crime, all without leaving their office. And yet the title of the series obstinately remains "The Man In Room 17."
There's a clue, though. Apparently at the end of the final episode they do venture forth into the outside world, to feed the ducks in a nearby park, each carrying an initialled briefcase: E G O and I D.
That's the answer. There is only one man in Room 17. The two men we see are merely elaborate figments, aspects of his mind, arguing, puzzling, teasing the truth out of a mass of conflicting evidence from within the confines of the human head, where we all live.
The question is...who is he?
Apparently it was written and produced in two halves; they brought in a writer and director to provide the situation, and then the series creator and his director wrote and shot the Room 17 sequences in which the investigators solve the mystery. Presumably it must have been something of an interactive endeavour; I'd love to know how they did it.
Well, that's the question, isn't it, and nobody else seems to have noticed. Two men in Room 17 there definitely are, Edwin G. Oldenshaw (played by Richard Vernon) and Ian Dimmock (played by Michael Aldridge), who's later replaced by Imlac Defraits (played by Denholm Elliott). They talk, they play Go, they drink coffee, they entertain visitors, they fight crime, all without leaving their office. And yet the title of the series obstinately remains "The Man In Room 17."
There's a clue, though. Apparently at the end of the final episode they do venture forth into the outside world, to feed the ducks in a nearby park, each carrying an initialled briefcase: E G O and I D.
That's the answer. There is only one man in Room 17. The two men we see are merely elaborate figments, aspects of his mind, arguing, puzzling, teasing the truth out of a mass of conflicting evidence from within the confines of the human head, where we all live.
The question is...who is he?