Everything they say about this episode is true. It's absolutely as mad as a badger in a snowstorm, definitely written in a ridiculous hurry by Patrick McGoohan himself, who also directed the episode, and is a good basis for any interpretation you care to lay upon it. As an episode of television it's incoherent, nonsensical and at times borderline unwatchable. It might also be good, which is worrying.
So, 'The Prisoner', an odd duck of a television show that was an implied follow-on to star Patrick McGoohan's previous ITV series 'Danger Man' (known as 'Secret Agent' in the US), which featured a secret agent imprisoned in a scenic 'Village' incarceration centre and being toyed with and interrogated by a succession of chiefs known only as Number 2, in comparison to his own imposed label of Number 6. No-one had a name, and everyone had a number. The Prisoner's secret was the reason for his resignation from the Secret Service, and his identity, for those of us watching at home.
'The Prisoner' swiftly spiralled out of control, beginning as a series of shows about various novel and fantastical methods for breaking the Prisoner's will and extracting the truth, and ending as a sequence of experimental concept plays of varying success and occasional blatant insanity. From week to week in its 17 episode run, you weren't quite sure what you were going to get, and the idea of a final resolution was hard to grasp. It seems to have been hard to grasp for the makers of the show as well, as this finale decides to evade the issue and engage in experimental theatre of the most zany kind, a self-indulgence of McGoohan's creative mind under extreme time pressure. Thus, a bizarre inauguration ceremony as the Prisoner is declared the new ruler of the Village (scenic Portmeirion in Wales) is enacted, with surrealness pushed to its very maximum as he ultimately seems to reveal an insane version of himself as Number 1, and then destroys the prison by launching a nuclear missile apparently stored underneath it all. Did any of it really happen though, or was it just a massive metaphor, or did the Prisoner actually crack and lose his mind under the Degree Absolute interrogation of the previous episode? Was Kenneth Griffith a symptom of a total mental breakdown? We will never know.
'Fallout' will forever remain a frustrating mystery, a psychedelic mess of surrealism masquerading as an episode of dramatic television. Was there a plan for the finale originally? Yes, but script editor George Markstein fell out with the notoriously difficult McGoohan, resigning and taking the ending with him for McGoohan would surely not swallow his pride to use it. What it is is what it is, an indescribably weird episode of television, and the culmination of the era as a whole.
Reflecting, it's fitting that this post of little sense is made to describe such an experiment. Well done, 'The Prisoner', you went out in pure unsatisfying confusion, and made a place in history with it. Mutter mutter 'what does it all MEAN?' grumble grumble.
O.
No comments:
Post a Comment