About a week ago I was rewarded for being a sad sack in public by being invited into a discord server with some tumblr buddies. I agreed despite my typical group chat hatred because see point 1. And while there I got introduced to what I honestly think might be one of the greatest tv shows of all time?
I am a life long lover of Cold War era sci-fi. You will notice this eventually if I am dedicated in keeping this blog up. A while back I took a ‘film and television as literature’ class. So the fact that I have never heard of this until a week ago boggles me. Not only does it feel made for me in a lab, I think it’s one of the best examples I’ve seen for tv as literature.
The Prisoner has a simple premise: a spy resigns from his job, is subsequently kidnapped and spirited away to The Village, an evil gated community for ex spies and other government operatives who Know Too Much. He is assigned the moniker Number 6, and rails against the de facto head of the village, Number 2, played by a rotating cast of actors, who really, really want to know why he resigned. He, of course, refuses to tell them.
Number 6 gets drugged, hypnotized, vr mindfucked into cowboy times, age regressed, brainwashed into being left handed, made incapable of not being happy, and more, harder to describe transgressions against his body, self, and sanity over the course of 17 episodes. All the while in the bright, cheery colors the Village surrounds itself with.
This show is a masterclass in maintaining tone an also short story structure. There’s really only two weaker episodes in the entire 17 ep run, and I can’t help but forgive one of those because it’s the finale, and this show would be impossible to end satisfying every audience. And if you can’t write a satisfying ending: write a weird one. And boy did they.
There are, of course, Cold War political allegories going on here. A lot of commentary on collectivism vs individualism, the inherent violence of authoritarian structures, inherent lack of trust of one’s neighbors in a surveillance state, the nature of identity and its malleability. I am sure if I were being a Good Leftist Reviewer I would be railing against…..something, but the thing is, the Village is deliberately hard to pin point a governing ideology. They want Conformity and Obedience, but Number 6 tries in vain trying to figure out if it is, in fact, being run by his side or the Soviets and, as far as the show’s concerned, it simply doesn’t matter.
The smartest thing the show does is constantly recast its main antagonist. Each Number 2 feels a distinct villain, with their own ideology, favorite methods, and relationship with Number 6. Sometimes Number 2 is a sinister, unflappable blonde man who believes milk is ‘the perfect food.’ Once, Number 6 was a tiny, terrifying woman in a Peter Pan costume. Sometimes Number 2 is a cruel sadist, hoisted by his own petard and Number 6’s meddling. Sometimes Number 2 is just doing his job and sometimes he is vexed by Number 6 on a personal level. Sometimes Number 2 and Number 6 hate each other openly, sometimes they almost have an uneasy, friendly camaraderie. You get glimpses, now and then, that Number 6 would be very, very good at being a Number 2 and it is always delicious, that knowledge that you are so, so close to being the thing you hate more than nothing else.
Another thing that floors me is how much about future tech they got right. Cell phones that look like early cell phones decades before the tech was viable! Tvs that spy on you! VR long before it was a codified trope! Course there’s also telepathy, inserting images into people’s dreams in order to gain information (where have we seen that before?), and laser lobotomies so as always the predictive powers of sci fi are limited.
One thing I wish that had diffused into the larger culture as a codified trope is the idea of ‘degree absolute’: a mutual hypnosis situation where one party is age regressed and the other casts themself in the role of their parent, schoolmaster, boss, other authority figure, in an attempt to recreate a lifetime of memories together to extract information and/or come to a breakthrough. The trouble is, both parties are undergoing this and unraveling together and their roles can swap places. It is upsetting and delicious to watch, and the fact that this hasn’t been borrowed by wider sci-fi tropes when so much else from the show has is simply a shame. We could’ve been torturing Fox Mulder like this.
I think you should watch this. If you like seeing beautiful men suffer? Watch this. If you have a Thing for hypnosis? Watch this. If you love weird old sci fi? Watch this? Love spy shit? Watch this. It’s 17 50 minute episodes, you can knock it out in a week if you do a couple a day like I did. It’s one of the most tightly written shows I’ve ever seen, is very clever, and still manages to be shocking 57 years later. Report back if you do. I’d love to hear everybody’s thoughts!
Be seeing you,
Marlowe
Marlowe Writes 