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Basic Facts:

Episodes: 17
Runtime: 50 min.
Aspect Ratio: 4:3
Premiered: 1967

Format:

Series

Genres:

Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi

Created By:

George Markstein, Patrick McGoohan

Actors:

Angelo Muscat, George Markstein, Patrick McGoohan, Peter Swanwick

Made In:

UK

Premiered at:

ITV

This is a truly a clas­sic TV series that was way ahead of it’s time when aired for the first time way back in 1967. It’s a mix of sci-​fi, spy fic­tion and psy­cho­log­i­cal thriller, but it’s much more than just a genre series. Starts as a con­tin­u­a­tion of the pre­vi­ous Dan­ger Man series star­ing also Patrick McGoohan, but it has very lit­tle in com­mon with this pre­vi­ous works. Patrick McGoohan co-​authored the series with George Markstein.

Story and characters

Series start with Patrick’s char­ac­ter resigns from his job as the British secret agent. But right after that, he wakes up in the mys­te­ri­ous place called the Vil­lage, and is given the des­ig­na­tion Num­ber Six, much like all the cit­i­zens of the Vil­lage hav­ing num­bers instead of names. Vil­lage is fully mon­i­tored, with no way to escape, and is con­trolled by the Num­ber Two, who is high­est rank­ing ‘num­ber’. His main goal is to break Num­ber Six and find out why he resigned his job. And they use wide range of meth­ods to break him. Still, he refuses to set­tle, and tries to escape in almost every episode.

Patrick is sim­ply amaz­ing as Num­ber Six and his per­for­mance unfor­get­table. All the other cast mem­bers were excep­tional, even though not many of them appeared in more than one or two episodes. Num­ber Two was replaced in every episode.

Writ­ing and influence

In the cen­ter of the story is the fight between the indi­vid­u­al­ism and soci­ety, a strug­gle against the over­whelm­ing progress (hence the bicy­cle as the sym­bol) that changes what makes a human. And after all these years the idea behind is still fresh, and still actual. No won­der that there were many later movies and TV series that bor­rowed things from The Prisoner.

Num­ber Six

Metal band Iron Maiden has two songs inspired by the series (The Pris­oner and Back to the Vil­lage). Cult graphic novel Watch­men uses some of the dia­log, ani­mated movie Shrek has used it for some ele­ments. Recently, in Bat­tlestar Galac­tica char­ac­ter Six (Tri­cia Helfer) was named as a homage to the series. And most impor­tantly, you will rec­og­nize some ideas used in two J.J. Abrams series: Alias and Lost.

Pro­duc­tion

Visu­ally, The Pris­oner is also ahead of it’s time, with many tech­no­log­i­cal gad­gets, sur­real visual effects and over­all very high pro­duc­tion val­ues. Music is great and very mem­o­rable, used many times after that. It’s shot on film, and because of that a qual­ity restora­tion was pos­si­ble, deliv­er­ing the Blu-​Ray release with all 17 episode, that looks sim­ple stun­ning for a series more than 40 years old.

Con­clu­sion

This is a series that you sim­ply must watch. It’s dif­fer­ent from any­thing air­ing today, it’s very orig­i­nal and very enter­tain­ing and in the same time, it will make you think. Grab DVD’s or Blu-​Ray, and start watching.