Once Upon a Time: Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner

Many expected The Prisoner to be another Danger Man–style thriller, but it was immediately clear that this was something else. Part of what makes The Prisoner so enduring remains the fact that it resists interpretation. It featured opaque symbolism, intellectual and philosophical rigor, and avant-garde surrealism. The visuals, juxtaposing Fritz Lang futurism with Roman classicism, ornate and archaic symbols of British aristocracy such as penny-farthings, periwigs, and piped blazers with colorful mod attire, boasted a distinct psychedelic edge. Nearly every episode of The Prisoner begins with the same montage, wordlessly laying out the show’s premise: a nameless intelligence agent (McGoohan) angrily resigns from his post, only to return home and be knocked out by an emission of white vapor. Upon awakening, he finds himself in a strange place, peering out to find a village, location unknown. Despite the extravagance to follow, this opening maintains a grounded, Cold War sensibility, asking the question “What does a government do with retired intelligence agents?” But this fairly conventional setup, one that would easily slot into the sea of humdrum that bored McGoohan, was a smoke screen. Following this prologue, each episode opens up to the expanse of The Prisoner’s allegorical, dreamlike prison.

The pilot episode “Arrival,” quickly establishes the show’s uncanny atmosphere. Little by little, the nameless agent starts to make sense of his surroundings, an anachronistic capriccio where classical sculptures overlook a cluster of Italianate buildings. He is met with the same phrase “Be seeing you,” delivered by inhabitants and accompanied by an odd wave of the hand (McGoohan would tell a castmate that this was an ancient, esoteric Christian gesture, the sign of the fish). The only maps he can find are bound by the perimeter of the Village itself; each inhabitant he comes across is a cipher, assigned a number instead of a name, and sports the same modish uniform, capes, and parasols. As much a metaphysical state of mind as a geography, the Village reveals itself to the Prisoner, now designated Number Six, as a state apparatus devoted to his complete undoing, psychologically and spiritually. And at its head presides a rotating cast of Number Twos: the top administrator of the Village and the architect of its many psychological campaigns to break his resolve, to learn the true reason for his resignation. And, naturally it follows that if there is a Number Two, there must be a Number One . . .

Among the Village’s many clever and vexing aphorisms, one of the most iconic remains “Questions are a burden to others, answers a prison for oneself.” The Prisoner at its core revolves around two burning questions: “What and where is the Village?” and “Who is Number One?” It was here that McGoohan was deliberate: these are questions that were never meant to be answered, at least not satisfactorily. McGoohan conceived of the show as fairy tale or myth rather than as straightforward drama. Speaking with United Press International in July 1966, he spelled out his intentions clearly: “The trouble with television is that it takes an idea and milks it to death. They keep it going until they’re scraping the barrel for plots . . . but The Prisoner will be different.”

At the beginning of production in 1966, McGoohan instructed his cast and crew not to say the word television. Shot on 35 mm color film stock (before color television was broadcast in the UK), on-location in the resort town of Portmeirion and at MGM-British Studios (coincidentally at the same time as 2001: A Space Odyssey was being shot), the show’s lavish production, set design, and costuming were unprecedented. Television had become a myopic enterprise: budgets were slim; there was never enough time to film, edit, and produce; and shows were often canceled before reaching narrative resolution. The suggestion that televised storytelling could have a true conclusion would come, just a few weeks before The Prisoner’s debut, with America’s milestone The Fugitive finale. But McGoohan was already on this track. “Initially, I proposed only seven episodes, not as a series, but as a serial,” he would explain, aiming to produce a long-form piece of television that was meant to conclude definitively. Two key collaborators were story editor George Markstein and producer David Tomblin, the latter of whom would cofound the show’s production company, Everyman Films, alongside McGoohan. Markstein assembled the writing team and set the course of the show’s first production block, but he would leave after thirteen episodes due to creative differences. This departure gave McGoohan full creative control in the final leg of the program.

The show is comprised of seventeen episodes, beginning with “Arrival,” where we first meet our indomitable hero and the stakes are set, and ending in the bewildering two-part finale of “Once Upon a Time” and “Fall Out”—the former being perhaps the most autobiographical, a Freudian tête-à-tête formed around Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Men, and the latter a beguiling denouement of masked juries and cryptic symbolism. In between, the episodes resemble an extended Sisyphean struggle, an endless escalation of the Village’s sometimes outlandish, oftentimes terrifying techniques to break Number Six’s will, be it constant surveillance, dream therapy, farcical elections (“Free for All”), or the subliminal advertising found in “The General.” Each of these is a variation on the same theme: the oppression of the individual in society. By the closing credits, Number Six always finds himself returned to a starting position and a little worse for wear. The game, it seems, is always a losing one.

“This place has been going for a long time,” Number Six is told in the eighth episode, “Dance of the Dead.” The Prisoner has been questioning how long the Village has existed, his voice rising: “Since the war? Before the war? Which war?” An implacable state of oppression, the Village could be anywhere. “Chimes of Big Ben,” the second episode, comes closest to commenting on the Cold War with its clever use of double agents and a ruse to make it seem that the Village exists somewhere in the Eastern bloc. But Number Two soon indicates, “It doesn’t matter which side runs the Village,” suggesting that both sides are becoming identical. Language also uproots any sense of place: in the pilot, Esperanto is spoken; later in the series, French, Russian, German, Romani are. The Village vernacular contributes to a linguistic mode of suppression—not quite newspeak but enough eerie dispensing of pleasantries and tallyhos to create an atmosphere of insincerity.

Key to the enforcement of the Village’s many tyrannies is Rover—a large, ominous white balloon that arrives in response to any act of insurrection. Making its first appearance in the pilot, the Village guardian sprouts from a fountain with a deafening howl, targeting a lone individual who suffocates in its plastic membrane. The revolving door of Number Twos (there are, in fact, more Number Twos than episodes) also present a challenge to Six, particularly when their identities are purposefully obscured. In “Checkmate,” episode nine, the battle of wills between Number Six and the Village is actualized in a game. Villagers play pieces in a live chess match, directed by two players who relay their strategies over trumpeting megaphones. When a lone rook disobeys instructions to make a move of his own will, he’s swiftly taken away, for, as the White Queen plainly notes, “It’s not allowed—the cult of the individual.” Flanked by the Summer of Love and the 1968 protests, by Sgt. Pepper’s and 2001, The Prisoner arrived in the midst of a cultural revolution. But it concerned itself not with the immediate ideals of a younger generation, but instead with more abstract threats to freedom, on the idea of your identity being no longer yours to keep—the show’s eternal, quaking cry: “I am not a number, I am a free man!”

The Prisoner suffered the same fate as the many shows it sought to break away from. Picked up for two blocks of thirteen episodes, the show only made it to seventeen. And despite McGoohan’s claims to the contrary, Lew Grade would say that McGoohan admitted to being in over his head, not knowing how to end it. Foundational to the show’s lasting impact, “Fall Out” was slated to be the show’s grand reveal, to finally give viewers answers on the Village, and the identity of its éminence grise, Number One. George Markstein would later declare the finale an “absurd pantomime.” McGoohan, who wrote the script in a dizzying thirty-six hours, stated that it was the show’s only and logical conclusion. Picking up immediately from where the previous episode left off, “Fall Out” instantly subverts expectations as Number Six is escorted down a dark corridor jukeboxed (with heavy irony) by the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love” before viewers are whisked away on a confounding but exhilarating odyssey of madcap lunacy. To McGoohan’s delight, the uproar the night of its broadcast was deafening: the jammed switchboards, the irate responses, the madness of it all. “As long as people feel something, that’s the great thing. It’s when they’re walking around not thinking and not feeling . . . that’s where all the dangerous stuff is.” When questioned about the meaning of the finale he remained elusive, “One can’t expect an answer on a plate.” Pressed on what his intentions were, McGoohan would say, “I wanted to make people talk about the series. I wanted to make them ask questions, argue, and think.”

In the ensuing years, the show would reach cult status, enjoying a longevity that McGoohan never expected. Within a decade, university classes were taught on the subject, fan clubs arose. Its idiosyncrasies and mystery have spawned an entire field dedicated to obsessive (over)analysis of its ending; a theory that Number 6 was in fact Danger Man’s John Drake; speculation on what could have been McGoohan’s original seven episodes; and debates over the true episode order (the Criterion Channel presents the show in its original UK broadcast order). Bruce Clark, who served as the American coordinator of the Prisoner Appreciation Society for forty-three years until his passing, rather provocatively contended that next to the Zapruder film, The Prisoner is the most analyzed film in history.

McGoohan would never again wield such complete creative control, nor attempt to realize such a bold endeavor. Reflecting on the show in 1989, he commented, “I had the chance to do something as nutty as I did. A chance that might come only once in a lifetime.” And while the show’s influence is apparent in everything from Twin Peaks and The Truman Show, to Pluribus and The Matrix, it remains sui generis. Fantastique writer Jacques Sternberg, scenarist of Alain Resnais’s elliptical Je t’aime, je t’aime, would find that one of the most compelling qualities of the show was that no imitations, no radical transformation or paradigm shift in television, came about as a result of it: “Like many avowedly revolutionary works, by rejecting the conventional, The Prisoner seems to have inspired no other work of the same kind.” It was as striking an attempt as any to mold television into something more, away from the stifling qualities of the commercial age. An individual cry of philosophical expression, with television as its messenger.