The Prisoner

At the beginning of the 60s TV series The Prisoner, an unnamed secret agent apparently working for Britain one day angrily storms into his employer’s “headquarters” in London and slaps his resignation letter down on the desk. After storming out of the place, he goes to his apartment and packs up for what appears to be a tropical island vacation. But before he can finish packing, someone releases a kind of knock-out gas into his apartment. When the agent awakens, he is in a strange resort-like place called “The Village”. None of the residents/prisoners there have names; they instead are assigned numbers. The “guards” have numbers, too, and are mixed in with the inmates so that none of the prisoners really know “who’s who”. Our hero is henceforth referred to as Number Six. The “mayor” of the Village, which changes each episode with a guest star, is Number Two. Which begs the question: who is Number One?

The Village is an open prison, location unknown (until the end of the last episode), and run by the “bad guys”, whoever they are. The inmates are political prisoners, spies, and anyone else deemed to have important information to impart to the Village authorities. With Number Six, there is one overriding question that he is continually asked: “Why did you resign?” But he successfully resists the temptation to reveal his reasons, which are implicitly important but never stated.

The Prisoner, which lasted two seasons in the late 1960s as a summer series on CBS, consists of seventeen episodes. The star is Patrick McGoohan, “Number Six”, whose character alternates between foiling Number Two’s schemes to extract information from him, sabotaging the works of the Village, and making unsuccessful attempts at escape (often dodging an oversized self-propelled beach ball/monster called “Rover”, which incapacitates people, sometimes even suffocating them, by sitting on them).

In spite of its relative brevity, The Prisoner stands as a truly great series in the history of television. Several of its episodes would rank right up there in my all-time favorite television episodes list. Perhaps the most important theme expressed in it is the question we all face: With our dual nature as individuals and social creatures, where do we draw the line and curtail our individuality for the sake of the group? And furthermore, how do we define what the “group” is? The people immediately surrounding us, or a more abstract conceptualization (country, family, humanity, etc.)?

All of its greatness notwithstanding, the final episode of The Prisoner, written by McGoohan himself, was rather disappointing and very confusing. I remember my mother, a very ardent Prisoner fan, becoming furious at the ending. I’ve watched it a number of times, thinking that I may possibly have missed something, and have finally concluded that it was a “rush job” and intended to be more symbolic than realistic. And decided to try not to let it detract from the rest of this excellent series.

Here are my personal top five Prisoner episodes:

#1 A, B, and C---Number Six’s dreams are manipulated and televised with the aim of surreptitiously getting him to reveal the reason for his resignation through his underground connections, using three people he had known (with the code names A, B, and C). A great concept, and an utterly brilliant ending!

#2 Free For All---It’s election time in the Village, and Number Six is pushed into running for Number Two’s “seat”. The deceptions, folly, and cynicism of campaigns and politics are mercilessly exposed in this disturbing episode.

#3 A Change of Mind---Because of his defiant actions, Number Six has been adjudged “unmutual” (I love that word). The remedy: a lobotomy-like laser operation. Will this be the end for Number Six? I’m not telling, but this episode has another knockout ending! (So I guess that means it's NOT the end for him, as you probably already knew.)

#4 Living In Harmony---I see this episode as the conceptual forerunner of the Matrix movie series. After all, Number Six is no longer in the Village (or so it seems, at least on the surface). He instead is a loner cowboy, like Clint Eastwood in those old spaghetti westerns. Instead of the Village, he is stuck in a violent western town that he cannot escape from. The town’s judge tries to get Number Six to agree to be sheriff. The sometimes thin barriers between the scripted characters that people portray in their various social roles and the reality of their own personal feelings are examined in this episode, exploding at its conclusion.

#5 Checkmate---Number Six is determined to escape. He selects some fellow prisoners to join him in an escape plot. First, he points out to them, it was important to know just who in the Village were the “prisoners” and who were the “wardens” disguised as prisoners. Number Six shows his accomplices how the demeanor of those around them could reveal their true allegiances. And the (once again) surprise ending bears this out very ironically.

Get a hold of The Prisoner on DVD, if you see some around for sale. With only seventeen episodes, I doubt that it would set you back very much. You, like me, would probably become very intrigued by this provocative series. And if you do this and can figure out what the final episode means, let me know!