In order to reach the Village’s boardroom and broadcast center, you have to put a tiny disc in a little slot. Once you do this, a tiny blue plastic hand emerges from a little box and grabs the disc, snatching it away and disappearing back into the box. After this point, you — and I should mention here that you’re dressed in a top hat and black coat with black sunglasses indoors — can pass unimpeded through the forcefield-protected entrance.
Is there a reason that a tiny little blue plastic hand has to emerge from a little box to grab a disc before you can get in there? Considering that virtually every inch of the Village is monitored by video and patrolled by guards both human and spherical in nature, no, not really. You could just have some guy wave you in after you show an ID card. You could have Rover the floating orb (who does not appear in this episode) act as bouncer. You could do pretty much anything. But The Prisoner chooses to have a tiny little blue plastic hand emerge from a little box to grab the disc and let you in.
Photo: Prime Video
Why? Well, the Village is very impressed with its technological prowess and, simultaneously, possessed by the aesthetic sensibility of an outsider artist — the better, perhaps, to bewilder the straightlaced cop types who become intelligence officials. This is a facility that seemingly spares no expense in creating elaborate, even baroque machines and procedures that Occam’s razor, if applied, would slice to ribbons. In that sense, the little blue plastic hand is exactly the kind of shit these weirdos would set up.
However, I think a different explanation gets to the heart of it. The Prisoner is based on a simple concept: What if you made a TV show that was interesting instead of uninteresting whenever a choice between the two was available?
I mean, yes, absolutely, you could have a guard stand in front of that hallway, letting people in based on an approved list of Numbers allowed to attend the board meeting or work in the broadcast center. Indeed, there’s a whole new cadre of guards invented in this episode for just this sort of work — grey-jumpsuited, helmeted, shades-indoors goons with white batons who’ll gladly beat the shit out of you if ordered. They’re literally standing around waiting to do a job like letting people in to a top-secret area.
But the little blue plastic hand that picks a disc up out of a slot and yoinks it back into its tiny black box? That’s something better than plausible: It’s bitchin’. It’s mint. It’s just some of the weirdest, coolest shit you’re gonna see on your screen this week, I guarantee. Would Patrick McGoohan and his Prisoner collaborators put it in quite these terms? No, probably not. But we’re free to call a spade a spade, you and I, and this show is cool as hell. It feels like it’s trying, really going for it, at all times and in all ways, and that is vanishingly rare.
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