The Prisoner
“I will not make any deals with you. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, index, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. My life is my own. You can’t hold me here.”
If you have seen the Prisoner before I do not have to explain it to you. If you haven’t seen the Prisoner before I cannot explain it to you.
In 1967 before there were miniseries invented allegedly by PBS, CBS ran a 17 episode Limited series, over the summer, that actually had a beginning, middle and an end.
If I had to give you my favorite TV show of all time, this would be it.
There is one simple trick to enjoying this TV show. It asks a lot of questions, but never attempts to give an answer. So don’t expect any .They give you the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, but you have to put it together. And doing so you find out there are quite a few pieces missing.
The story begins when a government agent, play by Patrick McGoohan, resigns his job, but doesn’t tell his government employers . He is then kidnapped and placed on a futuristic looking island which is called the village. At first glance, it looks like a pleasant place, but we learn very quickly that it is a prison where people are being forced or coerced to conform. No one here has a name, instead they are given a number. His number was 6. The show very quickly becomes a statement of our political and social order. I was surprised to discover, seeing it very recently, that it is not in the slightest bit dated. The issues it raises are still with us. And believe it or not the technology that they imagined is with us today so it looks very current.
How did this start:
Patrick McGoohan starred as secret agent John Drake, in the 30 minute TV show, Danger Man. This was televised a couple of years before the James Bond movie era began. When when the James Bond movies became popular, they brought the series back and expanded it to 60 minutes. It was then called Secret Agent Man and became very popular.
In real life, McGoohan and the producers met up with people from the actual spy agency for British intelligence. They ask them, “What do you do with a spy who retires?” the very simple answer was that they give them a home in a nice neighborhood and make sure he’s financially OK.
So they began to wonder what would happen to John Drake if he retired?
So The Prisoner, who remained nameless throughout the series, was John Drake. Well sort of. You see, if they named him, John Drake they would have to pay the producers of the original series a lot of money. So everyone, including me, who watched it thought he was John Drake they just didn’t say it.. but that was part of the mystery.
everyone wanted to know who was running the village, what side were they on?So many people were dissatisfied with the ending, the last two episodes. It was very abstract and did not give any of the answers that people wanted. It was not a traditional ending to a TV mystery. But this was the time when few TV shows actually had endings.(The Fugitive was an exception.) so I was a bit confused what I was young and sorted for the first time. A year later, I saw it again and saw that the last 15 seconds gave you the real ending.
I must say that the Blu-ray is spectacular. I originally saw it in black-and-white and the colors here are outstanding. The sharpness is unexpected for a TV show made over 60 years ago. The scenery of the village is just beautiful and you actually would like to live there. In real life, it is a resort that people vacation in.
The music is wonderful and the 5.1 track is outstanding. Everything on this disc will lure you into the village. The extras are also outstanding. They show you the original un aired pilot with different music and a few other redos of other episodes. There are tons of commentary.
There are often discussions on what is the correct order for the episodes to be shown. The discs give you the orders in which the shows were originally aired in Great Britain. Others prefer the order that the shows were written. I give you my list of what I think is logically the order.
So what does the Prisoner mean? That’s simple. But that would be telling.
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