Winter is prime TV watching time in Canada, so I'll be dumping many notes about the series I completed.
Truly, what a luxurious time we live in to be able to watch a whole season of anything from start to finish. Young people would be horrified to hear Gen X tales of VCRs set to the wrong time (or someone taped over your show!), Dads vetoing
Diff'rent Strokes for the news hour or, worse, the station only bought two years of a syndicated show to run ad nauseum.
There's a reason why I'm prefacing my post about Patrick McGoohan's cult classic with this ramble--one episode didn't air in the US (and presumably Canada, if you received US stations) because it was considered anti-war. When
The Prisoner reappeared in the 90s on A&E along with
The Avengers, it was impossible to follow because the episodes were out of order. I watched the first episode, or maybe it was the second--and just didn't get it.
Fast-forward 30 years, and it's on Plex! For free!
It's disappointing that the show only ran 17 episodes, and many people hate the final episode, but let's appreciate what
The Prisoner is, given the late 60s TV landscape. It's a stylish show, with a handsome and intense male lead, but it's loaded with symbolism, motifs, and more importantly, colour! TOS will always be my favourite Star Trek because of its eye-popping use of colour. These shows were meant to sell colour TVs :-D
There's nothing accidental about the extremely detailed sets or stories, even when they seem strange or duddish. A second season would probably have expanded the world more, but the replacability of characters in the show, whether number 2's or number 8's, speaks to some anxiety towards a more automated and impersonal world. Number Six is a rebel devoid of any counterculture trappings, always constantly outwitting the system or toeing boundaries.
I loved the plot twists for common tropes, such as the brain swap episode, which sidestepped an obvious ending. Perhaps if
The Prisoner hade been made a couple of years later, there would be language and technology for virtual reality, but how they still communicated this idea in the Wild West episode was genius!
I understand why the finale upset folks back in the day and still confounds people decades later. It's weird! It was hurriedly written, and re-used props. Yet it was still within the theme of the show, particularly the last few moments, which implies The Village has followed Number 6 home to London and the very final scene which loops to the show's intro. Number 6 is stuck in a loop--or escaped The Village to still be trapped in a larger system.
Sometimes folks want a ending that neatly wraps things up, but that would be against the show's theme--the point is to make you think, not spoon feed you information. Even the information you receive from the episodes is often unreliable. Moreso, the finale is a major risk--and Number Six flirts with risk all the time, so it was definitely within the spirit of the series.
One character I'm extremely curious about, and I have to research this more, is The Butler. I thought The Butler would be revealed to be Number One. He's still a powerful figure, with access to keys and highly trusted by the Number 2s. When he aligns himself with Number 6, the judge lets that stand. There's no punishment for him.
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