The Prisoner: Squandering Goodwill
Questions are a burden. Like the question “What the fuck did I just watch?”
Your chances of being aware of The Prisoner vary considerably with age. Aired in 1967, the 17-episode show focused on an unnamed secret agent (played by series co-creator Patrick McGoohan) who has a crisis of conscience, retires from the service, and is kidnapped. He wakes up in a strange resort called only The Village, where everyone is assigned a number. He is Number Six. The administrator of the place—who is regularly sacked and replaced—is Number Two1.
Number Six assumes he has been taken by the other side—i.e., the Soviets, one assumes from the time period—to be broken open like an egg so his precious secrets can be scooped out2. But the possibility that he’s been kidnapped by his own side either as a bizarre loyalty test or because his “crisis of conscience” was really cover for being a double agent is tantalizingly possible. In other words, this is a series that lived in the margins, a series that delighted in keeping the audience guessing.
It was brilliant. For 16 episodes3. The 17th episode of the series is a testament to why you should know how your story ends before you release it.
Be Seeing You
If you’ve never watched the show and you want to, you can find full episodes of The Prisoner online pretty easily enough. And I encourage you to watch it, if only because it’s what this essay is about, and without having seen it this becomes sort of like me being That Guy who insists on discussing obscure pop culture regardless of his audience’s interest level4 5.
Here’s what The Prisoner got right: It built a world. The world it builds is relatively small and self-contained, because it’s actually not very interested in verisimilitude, so it kind of hand-waves the reality outside The Village. We never get any idea of what sort of work Number Six actually did, or whether he’s actually a spy or not, as opposed to an insane person going through a Shutter Island-style elaborate therapy session6. And that’s fine! One of the great lessons of The Prisoner for writers is that you don’t have to build the world entire—you only have to build the world you need for the story.
And the world McGoohan and company build is wonderfully weird. Sure, it’s very 1960s in its fashion and design (it was filmed at a real resort in Wales), but there’s a cohesiveness to the visuals that works terrifically well. From the piped blazers to the boat shoes, the capes and the umbrellas, the show manages to create a visual universe within the first few seconds and never overdoes it. We never see the bathrooms, because we don’t have to7.
The Prisoner uses its world and its very vague premise to tell stories—something else more writers should think about. Building a world is fun and necessary, but you build a world to tell stories in, not to sit and admire that world, not to glory in the intricate tax code you wrote for your fantasy kingdom, for example, or to regurgitate all that research you did concerning 1960s computer security for your retro spy thriller. You build worlds to set stories in. The Prisoner is smart in the way it only supplies details on an as-needed basis. The first episode, for example, establishes the physical parameters of The Village with a brisk, efficient sequence as Number Two gives the new arrival a quick tour of the place. This is great information that serves the subsequent stories very well—but we never return to the subject of what’s in the immediate area, because we don’t need to know. It’s established that The Village is cut off from the world—by mountains, by the water, by the bizarre, creepy weather balloon called Rover that smothers anyone who tries to escape. Knowing more about the universe they’ve built wouldn’t help us, so they wisely don’t bother.
What’s truly remarkable about the series is how little we learn about anything. By the end of the series, we don’t know the name of our protagonist, we don’t know which side—if any ‘side’—has taken him, we don’t know what the folks who run The Village want. It’s a glorious exercise in mindfuckery, really. It’s so stylish and so confidently presented you think you’re watching a story, but in fact The Prisoner lacks most of the ingredients that a story requires. The main character doesn’t change or evolve. The conflict is never resolved. The mystery is never revealed and there’s no reason to believe that anything that ever happened on the show meant anything or had any impact on the universe at all8.
All of this you can blame on the final episode.
Answers are a Prison
Throughout the first 16 episodes of The Prisoner, things are experimental but steady. The shows enjoys playing with our assumptions based on our knowledge of spy thrillers like the James Bond films or Patrick McGoohan’s own TV series Danger Man. The show also purposefully denies us any sense of closure or explanation, which is fine. It has fun telling sci-fi flavored stories—there are super computers and mind-melting drug trips, there are riffs on the superficiality of democracy and children’s stories. This isn’t a show that takes its central premise too seriously, but it does mostly drape its experiments in the basic outlines of that premise—that Number 6 is a retired secret agent struggling to figure out who has kidnapped him and why9.
Episode 16, Once Upon a Time, suddenly snaps the central premise back into focus. Number Two—rarely, one we had met previously—decides the time has come to use Degree Absolute, a psychological technique involving psychotropic drugs and regression therapy. He takes a drugged Number Six back to his childhood and begins moving forward from there, putting Six in stressful memories and acting the role of authority figures as he tries to bully or trick Six into revealing the reasons behind his retirement.
Your mileage may vary on how believable you find this off-the-cuff psychological torture, but there’s a terrific sense of desperation conveyed by Number Two (Leo McKern). You really do get the sense that Number Two’s masters will not be happy if he fails to break Number Six. Then Number Six turns the tables, clawing back control over his own mind—an event that shocks Number Two so much he eventually suffers a heart attack or stroke and apparently dies. At this point Number Six is asked what he wants, and he says he wants to meet Number One.
Which brings us to Fall Out, the 17th episode of The Prisoner.
I won’t attempt to recount all the batshittery that happens in this episode. Number Two is brought back to life, a secret congress of weirdos informs Number Six that he is special and can now rule them as their king, Beatles songs are played and a rocket is launched. Oh, and Number Six encounters Number One and tears off his mask to reveal ... a gorilla mask. Which he tears off to reveal ... himself!
Yes. It is that terrible10.
Our hero winds up driving a prison cell back to London (don’t ask). Now, on the one hand, this episode has generated a lot of controversy and theorizing over the years, and having your audience engage so hard with your work means you’ve done something right. But I’d argue that what McGoohan and others had done right was make 16 pretty interesting episodes of a show. Those 16 were so good we are willing to beat our brains bloody trying to figure out Number 17. Fall Out is a crap episode, because McGoohan wanted it to be a crap episode.
It is 45 minutes of Patrick McGoohan pissing in our faces.
This isn’t entirely speculation. The episode was filmed a year after Once Upon a Time, after the producers had shortened the episode run from 26 to 17. McGoohan admitted he’d written the episode just a a day or two before shooting began. He was clearly tired of the show—and tired of playing spy characters. And everything about this final episode is a clear swipe at the audience. We get nothing we want. We get much we don’t want, including song and dance numbers. McGoohan is clearly offering a withering assessment of the sort of people who watch shows like The Prisoner—and he clearly has no idea how to end the story11. Worse, he clearly never did. There’s really no other way to explain this:
Or this:
Over the years, McGoohan has tried to sell this as a deep and clever deconstruction of genre, typecasting, and audience expectations, but it never feels like anything more than someone riffing desperately because the script is literally due. McGoohan’s desperation to do something clever reminds me of the story of The Beatles recording the mediocrity “If You’ve Got Trouble” and Ringo desperately shouting “Aw, rock on anybody!” in a pitch to transform a trash song into a catchy hit via magical thinking12.
In other words, if you’re working on a story, have the ending worked out before you try to sell/publish it. At the very least, if you fail to do that don’t serve up a flimsy troll piece and then blame the audience for having too much sense to accept it. It will save all of us a lot of grief in the long run.
Next up: Celebrating Black Summer’s poor markspeople.
Your chances of finding the name of this character hilarious also depends largely on your age.
One reason I would never make the cut as a secret agent is the fact that if I woke up and found myself in a quirky resort where I could sit around all day staring at the ocean and playing chess on an enormous public board I would probably be perfectly happy to stay there for decades.
Well … to be fair, a couple of those 16 episodes were very obvious filler. But the finale elevated their overall score on the curve.
That Guy is also That Guy who brings a growler of craft beer to a party just for himself and keeps telling you how good it is. Don’t be either of those guys.
Which, now that I think about it, is exactly what this newsletter is, and now I am sad and worried about myself.
This is my own go-to explanation for any moment in my life where I experience even mild discomfort. It’s marvelously comforting to believe you’re the subject of a cruel psychological experiment instead of simply a slightly stupid dingus.
Based on the set design elsewhere in the show, one can only imagine the toilets in The Village were Lovecraftian in their aesthetic.
And yet, if I could purchase Number Six’s wardrobe from the show, I would. But then I also purchased things from the J. Peterman Catalog when I was in my 20s, so my taste level and common sense are obviously suspect.
Watching this show you get the feeling that Patrick McGoohan’s sole talent was somehow making being an incredible asshole seem charming. The way he smirks when he destroy’s his latest adversary in The Village is phenomenal.
Sine the Internet is terrible, you can reliably find people who will argue in lengthy Youtube videos that Fall Out is in fact a brilliant hour of television. These people deserve our pity.
If there’s one thing American pop culture has taught us, it’s that having contempt for your audience isn’t a detriment. In fact, it’s often an asset.
Fun Fact: I often whisper aw, rock on, anybody to myself when a story I’m writing refuses to magically turn into gold.