You make a show like The Prisoner to make an episode like this.
Written and directed by creator and star Patrick McGoohan, the auteurist masterpiece “Once Upon a Time” is a clear move toward the series’ endgame, advancing the overarching plot (!), ending on a cliffhanger (!!!), and promising us that in the next episode both Number Six and we in the audience will, at long last, meet Number One (!!!!!!). That’s thrilling enough, and a textbook case of The Prisoner breaking the rules it’s established for itself in basically every way conceivable at one point or another.
But as important as all that is, as much as we’ve been waiting 16 episodes for it to happen, it pales in comparison to the execution. “Once Upon a Time” is one of the most boldly experimental episodes of television ever filmed. You’d have to fast forward to the finale of Twin Peaks Season 2 or the phantasmagorical eighth episode of Twin Peaks Season 3, I think, before you found anything comparable.
There have been other mightily sophisticated, groundbreaking, stylistically innovative shows that weren’t made by Patrick McGoohan, Mark Frost, or David Lynch, of course. But to cite two representative examples, The Sopranos‘ dream episodes are the clear product of the everyday mind of the main character, and Nicholas Winding Refn and Ed Brubaker’s magisterially bleak Too Old to Die Young operates in the same basic soporific register the entire time. Only in The Prisoner and Twin Peaks did things already start out “both wonderful and strange,” then somehow find a way to become wonderful and strange even by their own immeasurably lofty standards.
I reviewed the penultimate episode of The Prisoner for Pop Heist. Gift link!
Tags: pop heist, prestige prehistory, the prisoner, TV, TV reviews