There had been a spiralling set of stairs at the back, but upon approaching then to ascend, The Prisoner found the strangest thing begin to unfold. He found himself, against his own accord turning backwards and ascending the steps with his back turned. However he tried, he couldn’t seem to turn to face the correct way facing the upward stairs, he found he could stop, but any attempt to move back down the steps were to no avail. He moved up the steps then realising his movements were unnatural and strange as if what ever strange force was at work, was making him move in such a way it defied the law of nature. Within another moment, he realised his movements were in reverse, as if he’d actually been walking down the steps but that set of actions had now been set in reverse sending him back up the steps, yet he had no memory of every being at the top or walking down. The Prisoner, as far as he could tell had no choice and so simply submitted to ascending the stairs in this otherworldly fashion. Reaching the top he found him self in another room, the walls abstract and ethereal, his motion still in reverse as he walked away from some previous event he had no memory of.
As he went further backwards toward what ever event had just happened, the sense of wrongness percolated once again as shadows in his peripheral vision came into view. These quickly grew into forms coming within his line of vision, and terrifyingly enough, there was The Observer, lifeless, hanging from one hand by some tether above somewhere. But as he went further back, he saw another, this one hanging from a leg, then another from the other hand. With mere moments dozens of them appeared, all hanging in different manors like plastic dolls hanging from a shamans tree in a cursed forest. His stomach went in knots, was this his doing? Had he actually killed her? What was happening here?
He’d gone back at least a dozen steps before turning to see the dead body of The Observer bloodied and lying motionless on the floor, his body now seeming to move at its own accord as he found himself stamping down on her head in reverse. Blow after blow he unleashed on her, a symphony of violence playing out in rewind, not quite making sense but the damage of each blow reversing her condition as it unfolded impossibly real before him. The Prisoner began exiting the blow that had sent her to the ground in the first place before she fell in reverse back up to a standing position. She’d been speaking to him in some bizarre mantra of reverse tongue he couldn’t decipher, her tone calm, expression relaxed, how had this devolved into violence?
The events continued to unfold backwards, before the talking has started, The Prisoner saw the effigy of her, flickering as if it were some computer generated image stuck in a glitch. The hanging copies of her now disappearing one after the other around the room until it was empty. The Observer materialised then dematerialised in rapid succession, glitching from one place to another around him, her location not one exact place, her existence not confirmed. The Observer had appeared then, touching him, he then realised she’d been kissing his mouthless face. The events continued backwards as she approached him becoming increasingly more distant. The Prisoner found himself back across the room to another set of steps, again he’d began to ascend in the same reverse order he’d come to know just a little, climbing several steps up, he’d then turned. Facing the steps the right way, he found he could move freely again, suddenly no longer a prisoner to that strange convolution of time. His first instinct was to look back at the previous room, in fact he wanted to go back down to make sense of the events that had just unfolded, or had those events not happened yet? Something, or maybe some part of him urged him not to go back, that perhaps going back could somehow cause a singularity in time, some anomaly unexplainable, trapped in a space time glitch. He looked back just once, but there was nothing, just a strange light, as if it were a distorted mirror image.
A conflicted reluctance kept him going upwards and to the next floor, although at this point he’d been pretty sure something had gone very wrong, that Ukko’s Ladder wasn’t what it was supposed to be, that this whole prison wasn’t either.

CONTINUED IN EPISODE 6