The Prisoner
Who was #6, the former secret agent now held captive in the surreal environs of The Village? Most fans of the series The Prisoner assume that he was none other than spy John Drake from the earlier series Danger Man. After all, both men were played by actor Patrick McGoohan, and the opening credits of The Prisoner showed a Drake-ish character being gassed and abducted by a mysterious undertaker. Even series script editor George Markstein thought The Prisoner to be a somewhat offbeat sequel series.But according to star (and creator) McGoohan nothing could be further from the truth. In McGoohan's eyes #6, as the reluctant agent was known in the villages numbers as names scheme, was not John Drake but was Everyman, the individual set against sinister Authority which the Village's twisted leadership stood in for it in this modern allegory put to film and shown weekly on your telly.
It was this vision of McGoohan's that made the series the critical success it was and also proved to be its downfall. As a TV series The Prisoner was fascinating and maddening. Each episode had thee same basic plot, the Authority figures, represented usually by one of a number of # 2's , attempts to pry retired agent #6's secrets from him using an increasingly bizarre and ingenious series of tricks, mind games and pure torture until # 6 finally gains the upper hand and exposes his captors for who they really are...sort of. Nothing was ever what it seemed in the Village just as nothing was ever what it seemed in The Prisoner.
The look of The Prisoner is eye catching and easily identifiable. Nothing had ever looked like it before and nothing has come close to it since, due in great part to an inspired choice of location. Filmed in the frankly balmy (as in crazy, not the weather) Welsh town of Portmeirion, a grand folly composed by architect Sir Clough Williams-Ellis, The Prisoner took its visual cues from the surrealistic setting and expanded it to touch every aspect of the series down to the sinister floating orbs known a the Rovers that policed The Village preventing escape. It is the look of The Prisoner, along with the creative scripts and fine, focused performance of the intense McGoohan that has gained it the small but faithful following it has.
In the series final episode # 6 unmasks his tormentor only to discover that he has been his own worst enemy. That's right, in a plot contrivance / cop out that enraged viewers at the time, and is still a topic of debate to this day, the Prisoner sees his own face
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