The Village where “The Prisoner” is set looks like a nice place to live. Most of the residents walk or get about on bicycles or golf carts along winding, narrow streets. The gardens are immaculately kept and the architecture is charming, even quirky. The mandatory Muzac piped into every home gets annoying, however, and the relentless cheer broadcast over public loudspeakers strikes a hollow note. But the real problem with the Village is that leaving it seems impossible. Even in death, it’s only a close walk to the cemetery.
“The Prisoner” already attained cult status during its initial run in 1968, and the British program has held an audience over the years for its Brave New World theme of freedom versus comfortable confinement in a surveillance society. In one episode, Number 2, the spokesman for the unseen puppet master called Number 1, even proposed the Village as a model society for the whole world to emulate. The original series has been reissued in a Blu-ray collection with clean color prints of all 17 episodes plus bonus material, including a making-of documentary.
It’s hard to imagine 40 years on how groundbreaking “The Prisoner” must have looked on network television in 1968. The protagonist, a brusque, angry man played by the series’ producer-director Patrick McGoohan, is never named or identified except by allusion. The wordless montage opening each episode shows him racing down the streets of Swinging London and resigning from an unidentified but important looking position, only to be immobilized with sleep gas in his apartment by mysterious pursuers. He awakens in episode one in the Village, and spends the series sparring with his unknown captors and trying to escape.
Audiences in the late ‘60s related “The Prisoner” to McGoohan’s previous series, “Secret Agent,” and assumed an identity between McGoohan’s earlier character, the spy called John Drake, and the captive of “The Prisoner.” Perhaps Drake developed moral unease over the Cold War games he played so well and tried to quit, only to be held against his will because he knew too much? But “The Prisoner” was teasingly open ended, even if its peculiar whimsy was sometimes at odds with its serious purpose, and the back-story was never resolved. It remains intriguing decades later, partly because it was a puzzle with pieces deliberately missing. Hopefully, the new AMC rendition of “The Prisoner” (starring James Caviezel and Ian McKellen) won’t try to answer too many questions.
