TV - The Prisoner (1967-1968)

So, I've got a long and convoluted history with the short run British TV show THE PRISONER (created by George Markstein and Patrick McGoohan), which ran for just 17 episodes from 1967 to 1968. After hearing about it for a few years, it was actually going to be broadcast on a local channel when I was 16 in 1986. For various reasons dealing with schedules and my most annoying high school classmate being overly enthusiastic about it I only ended up watching a few weeks of  it (in retrospect, I should have just told him I stopped watching it while continuing to watch it).  In the years since there was always something coming up whenever a chance to watch it would come up, from missing tapes at the video store  or library to power outages to broken VCRs to scratched discs. In most of those cases I could have missed a few episodes and still watched the ending, but at some point I convinced myself I had to watch them all in order the first time through or not at all. Of course at any time in those years I probably could have just bought a set of tapes/discs, but my interest and the price just never balanced out on the right side of that equation.

(Oddly somewhere in there I did acquire a set of Dean Motter's sequel comic book series, though I never got around to reading it past the first issue. Also read most of Jack Kirby's unfinished mid-1970s adaptation of the first episode. Curious about Gil Kane's unfinished version, done after that, too. Wish they'd release those in an affordable mass market edition as opposed to the expensive original art facsimile edition)

And of course for the last five or so years it's been trivially easy for me to watch the show, but somehow I never got around to it. And it's not like I haven't watched a lot of junk TV that I knew I would like a lot less in that time. Anyway, I finally got around to it over the last three weeks, one episode most days.  For the most part I liked it, definitely came out feeling less like I'd wasted my time than with many shows (yes, I'm talking about LOST, always assume I'm taking a shot at LOST...).  I mean, there are some truly awful episodes towards the end, before the two-part finale, but even those had a few stylistic touches that made me not regret watching them. Except maybe "The Girl Who Was Death", which I'm pretty sure was a script from GET SMART that accidently got sent overseas.

(actually, just reading up on it, I see it was apparently an unused script from Patrick McGoohan's previous show, DANGER MAN. Which makes me much less eager to try watching that series, which I had been considering. Seriously, if it wasn't just the finale left after that I might have given up)

Anyway, conclusion is you should probably watch it, but if you're not determined to watch all of them you can very easily just pick the top half and watch the following:

Ep. 1 - Arrival

Ep. 2 - The Chimes of Big Ben

Ep. 3 - A. B. and C.

Ep. 5 - The Schizoid Man

Ep. 7 - Many Happy Returns

Ep. 9 - Checkmate

Ep. 10 - Hammer Into Anvil

Ep. 16 - Once Upon a Time

Ep. 17 - Fall Out

And honesty, you can probably drop out either "A. B. and C." or "The Schizoid Man" if time is tight. But not both, you need at least one.

And if possible space them out a bit more than I did, maybe two a week maximum. That's what I'll probably do for a rewatch eventually. That makes a pretty entertaining modern day season of a TV show which definitely doesn't feel like it's over fifty years old.

More spoilery stuff follows, only for those who have watched it or never will.

I think the furthest I ever got before was  the episode, "Dance of the Dead", so everything after that was new. I'm not surprised, that was maybe the second worst episode, and I probably wasn't inclined to jump through hoops to continue after that, and was looking for an excuse to drop it. Almost did this time, when the effort to watch it is trivial. And that would have been a shame, because my god, the next two episodes are so good. "Checkmate" was probably the best since the debut, fully realizing all the potential I saw in the series, and then "Hammer Into Anvil" blew that away, showing the series has potentials I didn't even dream of. Maybe one of the best hours of dramatic television I've ever seen. 

Of course, the series never got anywhere near that again, with a series of episodes that are at best filler until we get to the concluding storyline.

Now, that conclusion, I wish I'd been able to come into that cold, but I've had over 30 years of cultural osmosis about it clouding my head. With that in mind, I'd have to say I kind of liked it, admired parts of it, thought it had a lot of potential, could have been better, was an utter mess. I'm conflicted, is what I'm saying. I suppose the only real way to interpret it is as an allegory, but that's unsatisfying. I find it kind of interesting that the interpretation I keep coming back to involves using mostly aspects of the show that really only pop up in episodes that I didn't like and plan to skip in the future. I mean, if we accept that the world we're in has aspects of technology that involve complete mind transference and an almost complete and total ability to selectively wipe out and restore memories than it seems obvious that our escaping quartet, No. 6, the returning No. 2, young No. 48 and the butler, all have modified duplicates of the same mind, the person running the Village as a grand experiment, presumably the actual No. 1 (with the ape-masked laughing No. 1 with 6's face being a failed version or there to shock or divert No. 6). I'll be curious to see if I feel the same way whenever I re-watch it without the episodes that utilize those elements.

Well, that's probably enough about a 55-year old show. Maybe more when I've read the comics. Be seeing you. Damn, that's a cliched way to end it. Would you believe "Missed it by that much..."?