Thursday, January 15, 2009

Be Seeing You!

Patrick McGoohan, star of the brief and unusually cerebral television series The Prisoner, died this week at the age of 80.

From crashing a super computer by feeding it the question, "Why?" to entanglements in extraordinary mind games seldom seen on TV, Number Six never lost his resolve to escape The Village.

After experiencing the show, one never looks at a bouncing white ball quite the same way again, and the semantics of freedom and slavery dissolve into a quandary some find most intriguing.

Should the reader choose to rent a few episodes (available at Casa Video), bring the brain.

4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Of course.

I was most intrigued by Number Two.

1/16/2009 12:06 AM  
Blogger Sirocco said...

T'was a very, very odd show.

1/16/2009 6:38 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I think we're gonna take good care of this planet shortly... there's never been a weapon created yet on the face of the Earth that hadn't been used…

We're run by the Pentagon, we're run by Madison Avenue, we're run by television.

We all live in a little Village… Your village may be different from other people's villages but we are all prisoners.

1/16/2009 11:02 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The Prisoner did an excellent job of tapping into the counter culture of the sixties and its distrust of authority.

The Village was a truly brilliant construct, and I especially loved the mind game of not knowing who were inmates and who were guards, and the fact that life in the Village was so like "real life" really did blur the meaning of freedom.

I don't know this, but I'd bet money that the brains behind the show were influenced by Kafka's The Castle, a book that does an even better job of conveying that sense of helplessness and lack of access.

1/16/2009 1:54 PM  

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