(October 6, 1967: director: Don Chaffey)
It’s episode numero dos and we’re still laying back and eating acid-laced bon-bons in a plush bed of mystery. We don’t know much of anything. Nobody knows much of anything. The keepers of The Village are still asking former secret agent Patrick McGoohan the same question over and over again: Why did you resign?
Patrick McGoohan is still asking the same questions over and over again: Where Am I? and Who’s in charge here?
We in the audience have a lot of questions, too. For starters, What’s with all the lava lamps?
Yep, Kafka has collided with Syd Barrett somewhere in The Garden of Earthly Delights and it’s all pretty, pretty colors everywhere. The results will take time to sort through.
We don’t even know Patrick McGoohan’s name. He’s just “Number Six”. And the highest ranking person in The Village he can reach is “Number Two”.
“Number One” is a complete mystery. No one talks about him or her–and no one has seen them, including us, as far as we know.
Meanwhile, “Number Two”, the chairman of The Village who spies on McGoohan from a fancy revolving chair in the purple psychedelic room, is played by different actors every time, with two actors sometimes playing the role in the same episode. “Arrival” had two different ones, Guy Doleman and George Baker, both stern and proper school headmaster-types. Guys born to give orders and chastise you for doing wrong.
In this episode though, we get a very different “Number Two”. Character-actor Leo McKern, He’s goateed and long-haired with a scarf. He looks like your regular aged bohemian. He laughs heartily and throws his whole body into the role. McKern looks like he finishes his whiskey a little faster than the previous drips who had his job. Watch him monitor McGoohan from a hidden camera that’s rudely pointed at his bed and deliver great lines such as “He can make even the act of putting on his dressing gown appear as a gesture of defiance”.
McKern’s “Number Two” is an aesthete. He loves to talk, but he also watches. He notices.
He’s a lot of fun. It’s no wonder the series brought him back a few more times later.
McKern can also volley well with McGoohan, whose response to everything at this point is to be a complete smartass. He’s still puzzling out in his head ways to break out of his pastoral prison while he makes up for his indignity with barbed wisecracks.
SO, this episode is the one in which McGoohan becomes neighbors with a new “inmate” in The Village. She’s a seasoned red-headed lady (Nadia Gray) who seems to be genuinely clueless about why she’s there. She even gives up her real name, has suicidal tendencies and claims to know that The Village is located in Lithuania and that she has an outside-world contact not very far away.
McGoohan seems healthily suspicious of her (he smirks at many of the things she says), but goes along with it. What else is there to do?
Besides compete in the big Village arts and crafts competition, I mean?
McGoohan goes for it, making an abstract wood sculpture that looks like a complete piece of shit at the show, but later we see (actually, we can kinda tell already) that its parts form a sailboat perfect for escape.
I won’t spoil how that goes except to say that:
a) McGoohan’s not the only one who has a clever plan
and
b) we still have fifteen more episodes of Village shenanigans to go.
It’s a terrific, bitter episode with a great psychedelic sequence featuring our old friend, Bill the deadly weather balloon.
The show doesn’t call him Bill. I call him Bill.
I’m stupid.