“I want him with whole heart, body, and soul,” Number Two says early on, while rejecting the usual offers to use more extreme methods to break Number Six. That is the way of fascism. It’s not enough to submit: You must embrace your own submission. That this itself is a destruction of heart and soul does not concern the regime. Your heart and soul are your masters’, and they will remake you in their grey and grinning image.

I reviewed the fifth episode of The Prisoner for Pop Heist. (Gift link!)

Number Six is his own worst enemy. But you don’t have to take my word for it: just ask the administrators of the Village. For two episodes in a row now, they’ve used his own determination to smash the security of his prison and break free to drag him down deeper into their morass of mind games. 

I think this is why Patrick McGoohan works so well in the role. Sure, he created the show, stars in it, wrote and directed several episodes, uses his own professional headshot for Six’s dossier photograph, uses his birthdate for Six’s right down to the second, et cetera. (This is partly why co-creatorship claims by McGoohan’s collaborator, the writer and script editor George Markstein, strike me as exaggerated.) 

But beyond that, he’s developed a very physical style of acting that meshes well with the man of action he portrays. I’ve joked before that Six has three settings: lurk, lurch, and loom. His movements are sudden, almost erratic. Quick-cut editing makes them seem even choppier and more unpredictable. Even his style of hand-to-hand combat, which he’s deployed in two episodes running now, is all stiff punches. This guy’s gonna hit you till you fall down, full stop. He’s gonna get where he’s going at top speed. He’s gonna get answers from the people he wants answers from even if he has to chase them down and pop out of the woodwork to grab them. 

He’s unstoppable, and that’s his problem.

I reviewed the fourth episode of The Prisoner for Pop Heist. Gift link!

But the most unnerving thing about the episode is the way it depicts Number Six’s fellow Villagers as mysterious, fundamentally unknowable people. Some of them are brainwashed automatons. Some of them are active agents of the enemy. Some seem reluctant to fulfill their duties, others positively gleeful. They spend their days in endless parades and celebrations, blasting John Philip Sousa marches and screaming at the top of their lungs — except for the times when they’re eerily silent and still. 

How can you possibly live in a society constructed of people this unreliable, this unstable, this incapable of conceiving of genuine common good and working towards it together? How can you live with people who’ve collectively abandoned reality?

My latest review of The Prisoner is up at Pop Heist. (Gift link, but please subscribe, it’s worth it!)

“I am not a number! I am a free man!”

To this last declaration of Number Six, the final line of the dialogue that from here on out is a standard fixture of the opening sequence of The Prisoner, the new Number Two only laughs. Everything else Number Six says to her, she dignifies with some sort of response. The idea of freedom garners only mocking dismissal without a word.

I reviewed the second episode of The Prisoner for Pop Heist. (Gift link!) Please note! If you’re following along you’ve already noticed we’re watching the show out of order vs. how it’s listed on streaming sites. That’s because it was not really intended to be watched in the order it was aired! Fun, right? We’re using Zack Handlen’s so-called AV Club order, which you can find here, in a nifty table you can rearrange according to the various suggested viewing orders floating around out there with a couple of clicks.

The Prisoner can largely be credited, or blamed, for the mystery-box genre via its outsized influence on Lost, which in many ways feels like a sexier, less severe version of this show — The Prisoner: Pacific Nights, if you will. Certainly the question of who runs the Village and why they’re so obsessed with Number Six is of grave concern both to the audience and Six himself. 

But what I take away from this episode is not a puzzle to solve but a person to study. Here’s a guy who did Her Majesty’s dirty work, and apparently with enough aplomb and success to drive a preposterous sportscar. He was so good at his job of being a spy for a Western government that the Village, whoever or whatever is behind it, has dedicated its resources to cracking his brain open and seeing what’s inside. 

And what is his attitude towards all this? Lol yeah right, best of luck, assholes. Is he confused, is he angry, is he frightened? Oh, for sure. But he has a single conviction, and it is this:

“I will not make any deals with you. I’ve resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. My life is my own.”

The most talked about and praised show of the year is Andor, Tony Gilroy’s exploration of violent insurrection in the face of fascism, set in the Star Wars universe. The reason it has resonated so much with people, I think, is because its eponymous character shares this sentiment. 

For all its maddening — and intentional; it serves fascists well to confuse their opponents and victims — contradictions, fascism presents us with a straightforward proposition: We are human only to the extent that we fit the regime’s perpetually constricting definition of who is human. Resisting fascism is in large part a matter of personal integrity: My words will match my thoughts, my actions will match my words, I will be the person I am and not the servant they want me to become, I will not betray my soul. Number Six, who in this episode gives Patrick McGoohan’s birthdate as his own down to the minute, will not go along with any of this either. He’s not the machine-man with a mind of gray sludge that Number Two and his masters want him to be. He is a human. He is not a number. He is a free man. 

So are you.

Oh boy! Starting today over at Pop Heist, I’m launching a new series called Prestige Prehistory, about stone-classic pre-Sopranos dramas that helped (re)define what you could do on television. My first show is Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner, beginning with its premiere, “Arrival”!

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