‘The Prisoner’ thoughts, Episode 14: ‘Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling’
Even though he’s doomed to be in the wrong body, even though he’s doomed to inevitably return to the Village to complete the procedure, even though he initially demurs rather than scare her away with the crazy-sounding truth, he has to convince her he’s the man she loves, and not through anything as dry as handwriting analysis. So after tracking her down at a party, he tells her to grab the receipt he needs to pick up the slides and meet him outside, where he’ll deliver a message from “Number Six”.
The message is a kiss. Boy, is it ever. In a long take, over electric guitar music that is almost ambient in its plaintiveness, he shows her who he is. “Who else could have given you that message?” he says afterwards. Oooh-whee, that is romance.
Photo: Prime Video
It’s also not Patrick McGoohan. Six finally scores (sex afterwards is faintly but legibly implied), including a big on-screen kiss, but he’s not Six as we know him. Remember, the devoutly Catholic star of this secret-agent show had a no-kissing clause.
Still, we needed this, I think he realized. We needed to know that there was more to Number Six’s life before the Village than a stint on Her Majesty’s Secret Service, a stormy resignation, and a stubborn refusal to explain why. We needed to know that he cared about someone other than himself, had other ideals beyond independence and personal liberty. Personally I think it’s safe to assume he does, that he soured on the work he was doing in some way. We know from “A. B. and C.” that he didn’t resign to sell out or switch sides. In “The Chimes of Big Ben” he began to explain his resignation by saying “I resigned because for a very long time, I—” before the eponymous bells toll. Some kind of moral reason is implicit.
But love? Love indicates he’s more than a man of principle. He’s a man. There’s a woman he loves waiting for him back home. There’s a life that’s been taken from him. If he can have that life back however briefly, in however strange a way, he’ll take it. If he can pay back the people who cruelly taunted him with it only to yank it away by helping Seltzman escape and trapping his enemy in the wrong body, he’ll do that too.
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