(November 17, 1967; director: Don Chaffey)
This episode confused me the first time I saw it, to be honest. There’s a character who shows up at the very beginning who becomes pivotal later, but I somehow forgot him and ended up scratching my head over a few twists here.
I blame my public school education.
In my defense though, this IS a particularly odd installment. It begins with a scene that feels like it’s from the middle of an episode, as a mad scientist (Duncan MacCrae) gets stopped in the midst of an experiment on Patrick McGoohan’s Number Six that pushes the limits of The Village’s strict rule to get information from him without hurting him. From there, the plot walks us into a trap door every five minutes or so until we’re not quite sure where we are. Everything that happens is strange and so many details feel like non-sequiturs that the whole thing can feel like a non-sequitur.
Until the bleakness of it sticks to your ribs.
It’s not the tightest plotted hour of British televison of 1967, but it did come together for me on a second viewing and emerge as another nicely creepy psychological attack on McGoohan’s stoic former secret agent and his seemingly unbreakable resolve to not reveal a word of his secrets.
The Village’s method here is ostracism, but of a subtle kind.
This episode’s Number 2 is a demonic older woman (Mary Morris) who refers to McGoohan’s Number Six as “an individual”, but she uses the word like it’s a mental illness that must be patiently dealt with.
So she lets him be an individual. McGoohan is the only one in The Village who has someone watching him (young blonde actress Norma West, who hates her job, but is steadfastly loyal to The Village even as she winces).
There’s a black cat roaming around who only likes him.
When McGoohan meets a fellow agent, that other guy is a much weaker man who gave up his secrets only to have The Village not believe him. He’s now a shell of a person marked for “termination”. McGoohan might feel bad for him, but he can’t trust him. That guy is a sell-out and not his friend–and the other guy is soberly aware of that, too. He doesn’t even try to ask for help.
When The Village throws a costume party (a “carnival” they call it), McGoohan is the only one who isn’t given an exotic outfit to wear. Instead, they present him with his own tuxedo, a memento from his old life in London. He’s himself surrounded by people pretending to be other things.
Then there’s the matter of a corpse that McGoohan finds washed up on the beach, presumably from a boating accident. McGoohan goes through the man’s things. Finds a wallet and a working radio that only broadcasts strange, coded messages that mean nothing to McGooham.
The wallet and the body are more valuable. McGoohan plants information onto the man and then sends the body back out to the sea on a stolen life preserver. It’s McGoohan’s “message in a bottle”, a clue to the outside world that he’s still alive and trapped on a mysterious island.
McGoohan’s only friend is a dead man. What’s lonelier than that?
This is the episode that climaxes with a costume party that turns into a kangaroo court after McGoohan gets caught sneaking around in places where he isn’t supposed to go (though his main crime cited is possessing a radio). Arguing for his defense is Number 2 dressed as Peter Pan. Arguing for his prosecution is his “watcher” dressed as Little Bo Peep. The jury is a group of three dressed as Queen Elizabeth 1, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon.
This jury of people dressed as famous dead people sentences McGoohan to death, but of course he doesn’t die. The dead man from the beach (found by The Village) will stand in for his corpse, not just to the “court”, but to the outside world as well.
The theme of this installment is death and the mockery of it.
Fake dead people sentence a man to a fake death.
A man (the sell-out secret agent) walks around knowing that he’ll be dead soon and acts like it already.
That same man also stands as a warning to McGoohan that he will also be “dead” if he gives up his secrets. The Village only gets what they want if they “kill” his spirit.
Meanwhile, in this world, an actual corpse isn’t so much a lost life to be mourned as it is a simple physical object to be used in different ways by opposing sides.
Like all Prisoner episodes, this one ends in a stalemate. McGoohan doesn’t escape, but The Village also doesn’t get the information that they want. Everyone wins AND loses. Their conflict looks like it’s going to go on forever.
I write this in May 2022 and all of that feels scorchingly relevant right now.
Modern politics is a game with no ending. One side has their victory every now and then and the other side sees defeat. But it’s all temporary. Everything flips in time. Nobody ever gets exactly what they want. There are battles that we seem doomed to fight over and over again for a long time.
In it, people will pretend to be something that they’re not. People will sell out. Corpses will be props and pawns. Trials will be farces. It’s normal to feel alone and confused sometimes.
Maybe staying true to yourself is all that can get you through it. That and a little paranoia that might be more healthy than anyone will ever say.
We just finished watching this episode. My husband thought he was really losing it until I found and read your blog. You captured the show perfectly and he totally appreciated your synopsis. We enjoyed reading your blog. Glad to see another Texan out there!