Prisoner: Who are you?
No.2: The new Number Two.
Prisoner: Who is Number One?
No.2: You are Number Six.
Prisoner: I am not a number, I am a free man!
I wanted to have controversy, arguments, fights, discussions, people in anger, waving fists in my face.
Patrick McGoohan discussing the meaning of "Fall Out," the final episode of The Prisoner
A 1967 British
Science Fiction drama with
Super Spy elements, produced by and starring Patrick McGoohan, about the conflict between individuality and authority, cast in the form of an unnamed man's attempts to escape from a surreal
Dystopian penal colony. Almost uniquely, it had a distinct
Story Arc. The episodes had no clear progression, but the series did have a distinct beginning, middle and end in the form of the final two episodes capped off by the
Grand Finale "Fall Out".
The characters:
- Number 6: A nameless former spy who has resigned as "a matter of conscience". (He does not elaborate.) The only character to appear in each of the 17 episodes.
- Number 2: A succession of leaders who live in the Green Dome. They all try in their turn to break Number 6. Each episode has a unique Number 2 (or in a couple of episodes, more than one per episode). Only those played by Leo McKern and Colin Gordon appeared more than once.
- The Butler: A dwarf played by Angelo Muscat who doesn't have a number and serves Number 2. He never speaks. He appears in all but a few of the episodes.
Believed by many to be a sequel of sorts to McGoohan's previous series,
Danger Man, with the eponymous character — a/k/a "Number Six" — actually being
Danger Man's John Drake. Drake and Number Six drive the same car, there is at least one
shared character, (or possibly just a character with the same name and actor), and Number Six's "civilian" clothes are distinctive outfit usually worn by Drake. Official
Prisoner novels flat out name the Prisoner as Drake. For many years, McGoohan publicly maintained that the Prisoner was
not Drake, but it is suspected that he was just being contrary (see below).
Some have even theorized that both characters are also the same person as the secret agent McGoohan played in the film
Ice Station Zebra. Certain small differences in behavior between the three characters (for example, Drake does not drink, the Prisoner drinks occasionally, and the
Ice Station Zebra character is a borderline alcoholic) have been taken as hints toward the reason Number Six resigned his job (his refusal to divulge this reason is the
Mac Guffin for the series; his antagonists figure that if they can break him enough to get that information out of him, the rest will follow).
Another one of the primary topics of fan debate is
what order the episodes are meant to be in. There are five principal orders out there, and to be honest the original broadcast order is the one that makes the least sense.
The Prisoner is known for its obscure, often confusing subtexts and plot twists, which culminated in a
Grand Finale which raised more questions than it actually answered.
A
remake, in the form of a six-hour miniseries with Jim "The Passionate Christ" Caviezel as Number 6 and Sir Ian "The White Wizard" McKellen as Number 2, is set for November 2009.
This show provides examples of:
- All Just A Dream - The resolution of a number of episodes.
- As Long As It Sounds Foreign - An Estonian with a Polish name and a (poorly faked) Russian accent in an episode, in spite of Estonian not being related to either language.
- Hearing an Estonian speaking Russian back in 1967 (or nowadays, for that matter) wasn't exactly uncommon. Same thing goes for Russians with Polish sounding names, Poles with Lithuanian sounding names, Lithuanians with Slavic sounding names, et caetera.
- Poland at the time was a de facto Soviet republic in all but name.
- The Butler Did It - As good a guess as any.
- Catch Phrase - Several. "Be seeing you!", "Why did you resign?", "I am not a number, I am a free man!", "Who is Number One?", etc.
- Cold War - Subverted. See Government Conspiracy below.
- Companion Cube - Rover!
- The Dragon - The multiple Number Twos.
- Dystopia - The Village, a more subtle example than most.
- Failure Is The Only Option - Escape the Village.
- Franchise Zombie - McGoohan wanted to make only seven episodes, but meddling executives wanted 26. In the end, they compromised on 17 episodes.
- Gainax Ending - After footsying around with metaphor and allegory for the entire series, the Grand Finale goes completely allegorical...
- Government Conspiracy - Exactly who the conspiracy is is a complete mystery, and No. 6 is frustrated in early efforts to determine which side of the Cold War is running the Village. One No. 2 suggests that it really doesn't matter, as the two sides of the Cold War are becoming increasingly similar.
- Grand Finale - Where the Prisoner escapes, or does he?
- Heel Face Turn - Leo McKern's No. 2 in the Grand Finale.
- Individuality Is Illegal - See "A Change of Mind" in particular.
- Instant Sedation - The knockout gas in the first episode (and opening title) and a doctor's hypodermic in "A Change of Mind", both used on Number 6.
- Lighthouse Point - "The Girl Who Was Death."
- Locked In A Room
- Logic Bomb
- Loners Are Freaks - Subverted since in the Village, the fact that Number 6 is a stubborn loner is his greatest strength. Doubly subverted in the episode "Checkmate".
- Mind Screw - The series as a whole, individual episodes in particular and the Grand Finale, of course, most of all. Eat your heart out, EVA.
- No Ending - The series ended with Number 6 getting home, flash of lightning, wait... it's the opening credits!
- No Name Given - The Prisoner's real name (although many fans assume he's John Drake); in fact, he's not even called "Number Six" in the scripts, except by other characters.
- In the episode "Many Happy Returns", Number 6 called himself "Peter Smith", but this could be an assumed/false name.
- Ontological Mystery
- Salvage Pirates - episode "Many Happy Returns
". Number 6 escapes the Village on a raft and encounters a fishing boat whose crew steals his belongings. He ends up fighting them and eventually captures them.
- Sauna Of Death - With Number 6 trapped inside.
- Soundtrack Dissonance - Some truly masterful Mind Screw examples in the Grand Finale ranging from Carmen Miranda to "Dem Bones" to "All You Need Is Love".
- Spiritual Successor - Even if the Prisoner isn't John Drake, the show is at least a spiritual successor to Danger Man.
- Spy Drama
- Story Arc - Number 6's struggle to escape the Village and his growing strength inside it.
- Tap On The Head - Number 6 knocks out two Mooks with a bop on the top of the head in "The Girl Who Was Death", one with his fist and one with a grenade.
- Uncanny Village - Gotta watch out for those idyllic seaside resorts!
- Or desert resorts in the remake.
- The Voiceless - The Butler.
- Write Who You Know - Number Six is to an extent a stand-in for McGoohan, unsurprising given that the series is all about his own views on individuality and authority. A prime example of how Tropes Are Not Bad.
- Xanatos Roulette - Many of the ploys designed by the Number Twos involve very convoluted chains of events to work.
- You Are Number Six - Trope Namer.
- You Can Never Leave
Be seeing you.
