Plot-heavy recaps of a plot-heavy show tend to make those shows feel, well, heavy. There’s always a lot going on on Foundation, and since much of the business is very grim, cataloging it feels a bit like reading your New York Times push notifications. Collapse of civilization, fall of empire, rise of a tyrant, destruction of all that is kind and good in this world, flaying shirtless himbos with a potato peeler…It’s a lot to take in.
Not when you’re watching, though. Director Tim Southam drops us into the action with a you-are-there shot of Dawn’s huge landing craft touching down and keeps things spectacular from there. Bravodo Magnifico Giganticus’s performance is a sci-fi psychedelic musical rainbow, staged in one of those futuristic nightclubs that play EDM as heard everywhere from Andor to Dune: Prophecy. From lamplit glow of the library to the red light of the nightclub exterior, the scenery is vividly realized.
The script by Eric Carrasco and Greg Goetz, meanwhile, is full of funny little gems shining out from in between the flayings and the mindwipings. My favorite line goes to Day, who asks Song, “Are you feeling alright, darling? You’ve hardly touched your drugs.” (Second favorite is him insisting to Demerzel that “giraffe” is pronounced with a hard “G.”) Toran referring to the child princess whose archduke father the Mule killed as “your drunken toddler” is a nice bit too, as is her scampering after the Mule and his goons when they leave like she’s about to yell “Wait for meeeeee!”
And all the Cleons resting their chins on their hands in contemplation simultaneously? It’s a great visual, but it also points to how similar these three men are despite all their self-perceived differences. Like so many aspects of this show, it works on multiple levels, which is why Foundation, like any empire, works so well.
Throughout The Prisoner, Patrick McGoohan and his collaborators have been restless to the point of mania. Any rule they can break in their story of a lone intelligence operative pitted against unknowable and implacable forces, they break, even if it was their own rule to begin with. Episodes with different opening credits. Episodes with no opening credits. Every episode is about escape, until they aren’t. Every episode features Rover and the Announcer, until they don’t. Every episode has a new Number Two, except the ones that reuse old ones. Episodes that begin with twenty minutes of silence. Episodes in which Number Six is a suave secret agent in Paris. Episodes set in the Old West.
Seen in that light, “The Girl Who Was Death” is perhaps The Prisoner‘s boldest experiments yet. It alone dares to ask the question: What if an episode of The Prisoner was really, really stupid?
Stupid like a fox, of course. Working from a script by Terence Feely, director David Tomblin, a pivotal player in The Prisoner‘s production, knows that this screwball Swinging ’60s British super-spy pastiche is silly as hell.
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.
Dive into fourteen years of analysis of A Song of Ice and Fire, Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon; wide-ranging discussions about SFF literature, television, and cinema driven by our resident critic, Sean T. Collins; history and politics coverage spearheaded by our resident historian, Stefan Sasse; countless special guests, including Game of Thrones writer Bryan Cogman, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, acclaimed horror novelist Gretchen Felker-Martin, big names from throughout the ASOIAF fandom, and much more!
Friends, one of the perils of being the longest-running ASOIAF podcast on the internet is that much of our infrastructure was set up years ago, making updating it a real challenge. Until now, only the 20 most recent BLAH episodes were available at any given time via podcasting apps, and you had to dig through our download archives manually if you wanted more. We’ve hunted for a fix for years, hiring professionals and everything, so of course in the end it was something unbelievably simple that everyone had just somehow failed to catch. Ain’t technology grand?
Be that as it may! I could not be more thrilled than to present to you what has become one of my life’s great efforts and achievements. Endless thanks to Andrew Fulton for the miracle work, and of course to my illustrious cohost, Stefan Sasse, without whose herculean efforts and effortless command of countless topics this podcast would have ceased to exist long ago. This is for you, buddy.
And it’s for all of you who’ve ever listened, or ever been curious about listening. Please spread the word far and wide in the fandom: There’s never been a better time for BLAH! BOILED LEATHER FOREVER
Throughout The Prisoner‘s many strange visits to the Village, the title sequence has remained comfortingly familiar. With its sound of thunder and spy-thriller soundtrack, the wordless depiction of Number Six’s resignation and abduction is a blast to watch, culminating with him rising from his forced slumber, looking out his front window, and seeing the Village for the first time. (And the episode title, too, which must be helpful for him.) Just like that, anyone tuning in for the first time knows the backstory.
Then comes the call-and-response voiceover face-off between Number Six and each episode’s Number Two. This part of the opening sequence sets up the show’s big mysteries in a handful of koanlike questions and mantralike answers. The ominous sight of Rover, the reveal of the new Number Two, Six raging at the sky while yelling “I am not a number, I am a free man!”, Two’s mocking laughter … it puts today’s “abstract substances coalesce and morph into various familiar things from the show you’re watching” trend to shame; that’s for sure. All told, those three minutes are one of The Prisoner‘s greatest achievements.
Naturally, they went and binned it. This is The Prisoner we’re talking about — a show that breaks every mold it can get its hands on, including its own. Even the credits are fair game.
All of this is a long way to say that when this episode opens with a cowboy on horseback in the Wild West instead of a secret agent in a sports car in London, I cheered “Hot damn!” These magnificent bastards did it again!
I make nocturnally themed playlists as the Nightcrow that I love sharing with people. It’s pure vibesmithing. Here’s everything I’ve done so far. New stuff at the bottom! Happy listening, my creatures of the night!
NIGHT YACHT
Yacht rock and yacht rock adjacent music for a moonlit pleasure cruise
Sensual. Wistful. Eternal. Dark is falling, you have taken the wrong exit, and you have parked here among the 20-year-old cars. Inside the light is a dim glow that seems to emanate from the beef-scented air itself. The patrons seem to share a secret, as if they know each other, and you. But you are hungry — yes, so hungry. Welcome to NIGHT ARBY’S, where the customer is, always. [Photo by R.J. White]
“Do you feel it? The air gone stale? The common people holding their breath, watching their neighbors’ door get kicked in?” When Captain Han Pritchard asks this of the wealthy nepo baby Toran Mallow (Cody Fern) and his “wife” — marriage is the latest trend; everything old is new again — Bayta (Synnøve Karlsen), he knows what their answer will be. They’re too rich, too callow, too comfortable to hear the sound of the jackboots. When the Black Tongue, the flagship vessel of the telepathic pirate warlord known as the Mule, hovers over their honeymoon spot, their only concern is that its shadow will prevent them from getting a tan. They don’t want something so insignificant as a coup interfering with their comforts.
Not to sound like a broken record in these reviews, but boy, does that feel familiar!
Despite all his scheming and note-planting and trust-undermining, Six doesn’t really do anything to take Number Two down in this episode. He’s not actually a plant; he’s not actually working for a top-secret new commander; he’s not actually conspiring with any of the other Villagers on either side of the invisible cage bars. He’s just … there, solid and unyielding as ever. Through sheer implacability, he forces Number Two to bang and bang and bang away until there’s nothing left of him. In boxing, this is called rope-a-dope, and they’ve done it time and time again to Number Six. Turnabout is fair play.
Now, I’ve done a lot of research about this by now, and anywhere it’s discussed, a blacksmith will eventually chime in and point out that hammers damage anvils all the time. Anecdotal counterexamples aside, you get the idea, right? Compared to the solid mass of an anvil, a hammer’s as flimsy as a conductor’s baton. Bang that thing as hard as you can and you’re more likely to break the hammer, or even your own arm, than you are the anvil itself. And what is Number Two in the end if not a broken arm of the Village body? Control’s strength is finite, but defiance’s is not. Tyranny is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear.
What can I say? The rom worked, the com worked, the Shakespeare/Austen happy wedding ending worked. I’d watch a second season about their married life in a heartbeat. It’s not Girls at all, but at no point did I expect it to be. It delivers on the promise of its opening moments: It gives Jessica her grand English love story, and it gives that to us too.
Will she head back to him, or is Lena Dunham going to give us a rom-com with an unhappy ending?
Beats me, man. People often forget that though Dunham’s own character on Girls, Hannah, got a bit of a grace note, the show’s verdict on its protagonists was bitingly cynical. I wouldn’t put it past her to craft a five-hour America-dreams-of-England rom-com with a down ending, even if it is based on the real-life happy ending she found with her own husband, the show’s co-creator Luis Felber. But I doubt it. I think we’re headed for a kind of anti-Girls, in which the creator of a show all about how grand young romances are dysfunctional and doomed throws her lot in with love, actually.
So the two angrily part ways in the night, a beautiful floodlit blackness as captured by Bravo’s camera. Assuming we’re headed for a happy ending, this isn’t the end of the road, but it’s something that’s just as important in its way: the first Big Fight, the first Close Call, after that first exchange of I Love Yous. You’ve put your heart on the line, you’ve staked a decent part of your life on it, and now you’re furious at each other. Do you work through it, or do you decide it’s a dealbreaker?
“Welcome to my filth!” So says a cheery Brother Day (Lee Pace), the absentee Emperor of the galaxy, to his predecessor/older brother/imperfect clone, Brother Dusk (Terrence Mann). He’s welcoming the aging avatar of Empire to his lovely villa, where he’s “playing poverty” with his beautiful lover (and drug dealer), Song (Yootha Wong-Loi-Sing). But Day — stupid, sexy, Christlike Day, with his bare chest and his oversized drug rug and his “Common People” decision to slum it — speaks for me as well. Foundation is extremely my shit. Welcome to my filth!
I’d like to get right down to it in this review, so I’m doing something uncharacteristic and including a content warning: If frank discussion of sexual abuse troubles you in a way you’re not up for at the moment, you can skip this one. Like I said, I’m gonna get right down to it.
Everyone alright? Okay. Well then:
One of the best things I’ve ever done in my life was tell the woman I love that I was sexually abused as a child. Doing so meant, among other things, that I was finally willing to tell this to myself, to admit to myself what had been done to me. Weird verb choice there, I realize: How do I admit to myself what was done to me? How does that work? How have I, the victim, done anything to admit? But that’s the kind of infuriating anti-logic abusers embed in your brain.
More than that, though, telling my wife about my abuse was, in its strange way, a major building block in our relationship. I forced myself to trust this woman with a terrible part of my life, because I had faith that she would handle me with care. When she did, which of course she did…well, the reward has been the healthiest romantic relationship of my life. And whatever else it is or does, Too Much is a romance in the end.
It all comes full circle when she makes it to Polly’s and screams for Felix to come out to talk to her. (“There’s a bell,” he points out.) She invites him to move in, which he agrees to do — but from now on, she has to talk about her problems with him with him, not with her phone.
Now get this: That’s exactly what she does! We catch up with them some time later at her apartment, where she’s just wrapping up telling him the whole Zev story. Her conclusion isn’t even “please tell me how bad that guy sucked,” it’s “please understand this my instincts are so screwy because I have all this bottled-up anger at him with no place to go but the wrong directions.”
When Jessica ends up needing an abortion after a “look how spontaneous I’m being” fling with a production assistant at her latest gig, she finally decides to break things off with Zev. She outlines her reasons in a speech that actor Megan Stalter seems to bring forth from her bile ducts somewhere, with a clarity about who he is and what he’s done that’s hugely gratifying to hear after watching this poor woman get the shit kicked out of her for 20 or 30 minutes. “You just want to beat me into submission,” she says, accurately. “Maybe not with your fists, but with your words, and your lack of love.” She’s got him dead to rights. But she still affords him the grace of an opportunity to tell her he still loves her. The door is still open, if just a crack.
Zev slams it shut as hard as he possibly can. After first flipping the script so that it’s Jessica, not himself, who kept the other person trapped in a relationship she didn’t want, he says sure, it’s possible he’s made her feel as lonely as she claims to feel. But there’s an alternate explanation that he prefers: “At the root of it all, you really are just a fucking cunt.” The crooked-mouthed, open-jawed look of combined horror, sadness, fury, disgust, and terrible clarity that comes over Jessica’s face when she hears this shocking statement is Stalter’s finest moment on the show so far.
This is the surprisingly humane and complex note on which Murderbot ends. This is what sci-fi on television can be: a simple idea, staged in a vividly imagined universe, executed with skill at delivering both the expected thrills and the unexpected complications.
The vast majority of this episode is like a good crazy-party episode of any comedy you’d care to name, from Woody’s wedding on Cheers to Pam feeling God in this Chili’s tonight on The Office to, well, more rich-asshole-party-based dramedy episodes than I could possibly list. And since every single person in the cast is a funny actor in a funny role, guess what? It’s funny! It’s wall to wall good bits, like Boss explaining to Felix that he was avoiding eye contact because he prefers to avoid eye contact with people he might have sex with, or Jessica slurring “Icanhaveadrink onceinawhile,” or Ann talking about how her dog was there for her during “Jonno’s emotional affair with Kylie Minogue.” (“What happened to her?” “She became like a sister.” “No, I mean, like, your dog.”) You’ve got some rom, you’ve got some com. No complaints here!
The Prisoner is, no pun intended, a number of things. It’s both colorful episodic sci-fi and a bleak, Kafkaesque parable of persecution. It’s a work of dreamlike surrealism and an extended riff on swinging ’60s super-spy shows. And it’s a dystopia in miniature, its setting an eerily idyllic open-air prison instead of a gigantic closed society. Of course, at least one Number Two has suggested that the endgame for all of this can be summed up as “Today the Village, tomorrow the world.”
Of all the episodes we’ve watched, “A Change of Mind” is the one in which actor-auteur Patrick McGoohan — who once again directs under his “Joseph Serf” pseudonym — seems engaged most directly with the mid-20th century’s dystopian landmarks. Orwell’s 1984 looms large, of course, as it long has: faces of authority looming down from sloganeering posters, captives reconditioned to love their tormenters, a reassuring face replacing an image of terror in compulsory film viewing, even the Winston/O’Brien relationship between Number Six and several of the Number Twos.
The use of drugs and aversion therapy to induce reflexive compliance and nonviolence, meanwhile, is straight out of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, published five years prior. The show predates Stanley Kubrick’s infamous and stylistically influential adaptation of the novel and anticipates the director’s aesthetic approach, from its costumed droogs to its combined movie theater/torture chamber.
But McGoohan’s also firing live ammo here. Under the new Number Two (John Sharp, whose roles in The Wicker Man and Barry Lyndon yield a significant Prisoner-fan Venn diagram overlap), the Village’s methods of bringing antisocial, inadequate, disharmonious, UNMUTUAL Villagers to heel recall any number of real-world oppressions: Soviet show trials, McCarthyite purges, Maoist self-criticism sessions, the vicious conformity of little England or small-town America. The term used in the episode for its science-fictional mind-wiping procedure, “social conversion,” carries bitter echoes of the persecution of queer kids in the decades to come.
