January 17, 2010 | Apart from one’s self, the enemy of humanity is progress.

As usual, if you are reading this on Facebook, please go to my blog directly as this blog entry has video embeds. Thank you.

I was scouring Youtube the other night and stumbled across a rare interview that Patrick McGoohan (the titular tour de force behind The Prisoner) did in 1977. It is in four parts that run about 40 minutes and the quality is what you’d expect from a VHS recording, but it is an interesting look not only behind-the-series itself but on McGoohan’s views of society in general.

A warning for those of you who haven’t seen The Prisoner: there are spoilers here regarding the series’ finale—actually, finale isn’t the right word to use regarding The Prisoner’s last episode, so let’s just get that out of the way right now.

Anyway, for your consideration…

I do happen to agree with McGoohan’s assertion that progress, or what passes for progress, is the most dangerous issue that humanity faces. There are many valid points here that are worthy of debate, such as his observation that there has not yet been a weapon created by man that hasn’t been used. We already know about the ciphering of the citizenry—with everyone assigned with a number (or, in today’s world, countless numbers)—and we know of the horror of nuclear and, to a lesser extent, biological weapons. Ergo, we should all be very fearful of what is to come, unless we take care and control of our actions as a species.

You may not agree, but at least watch the above videos, and feel free to discuss as I intend on writing more on these topics in the future.

Be seeing you.

January 12, 2010 | Reactions to the New Prisoner

Most viewers wanted to do this after watching all six hours... Nom nom grenade nom nom—boom!

I’ve wanted to react to the perversion that was AMC’s “remake” of The Prisoner, however I didn’t want to come across as a whinging fuckard who didn’t like it.

But I said to hell with it. More to read…

July 23, 2009 | Reactions to “The Prisoner” Comic

Having downloaded the PDF for The Prisoner comic, an 8-page comic made available at the San Diego Comic Con that sets up the events of AMC’s 6-hour miniseries in November 2009 (starring Sir Ian McKellan and Jim Caviezel), I feel decidedly underwhelmed.

I will say that I recognize the comic as a piece of promotional material. A teaser meant to whet the appetite, which in itself is no better and, let’s hope, no worse than that “Last Supper” business NBC Universal and the people behind Battlestar Galactica shoved down our throats.

Without spoiling it for you, the comic denotes a completely different direction from its original source material, which… might be a severe mistake. The penultimate fait accompli of this remake, if you will.

The point of the series is this: an extremely valuable unnamed intelligence agent with a promising career suddenly, and without warning or any apparent rationale, suddenly resigns. After resigning, he is abducted and finds himself in a place called “The Village,” where he is subjected to various attempts to extract the reason for his sudden resignation, which he doesn’t care to disclose. There is also the question of which side “The Village” operates for and, while very much a prison of sorts, it is impossible to tell who are the prisoners and who are the wardens. Also, everyone The Village has a number. The unnamed prisoner, the protagonist of the story, is called Number 6. (To answer your question: Yes, this was the origin for the name of that blonde number with the glowing spine from that television show with the ship that looked like a cross between a ribbed prophylactic and an alligator on skis.) More often than not, the antagonist is a person referred to as Number Two, who apparently runs The Village. In the original 1967 series, the Number Two would often be a different person, mostly a man, and sometimes a woman.

Now, in the series, 6’s mental faculties are undamaged, despite repeated attempts to warp his mind. However, in the new mini-series, it appears that The Prisoner has experienced memory loss, which is (according to one report, anyway) deliberate.

At the risk of sounding alarmist, this changes the entire concept of The Prisoner. The fact that Number 6 knows who he is, what he did, and why he did it was vital to the show, as he actively fought to protect his sense of identity through sheer force of will power and belief in himself. To have Number 6 deprived of the knowledge of who he is, and (if I’m reading it correctly) rediscover who he is in an enemy camp, means that the entire premise of the show has been changed.

While I will admit that there are various episodes episode of the original series where Number 6 is tricked into believing that he is, in fact, someone else (or retrained with a new personality during the “Ultimate Test”), the people who ran The Village were very careful to avoid actually damaging his intellect. After all, were his brain or intellect damaged, then they may never actually find out the answer to the question of why he resigned.

So, the question remains… is this new Prisoner a mere “prison break” story with some psychological contrivances and good actors, or will it actually follow the footsteps of its original source material and provide us with an innovative television series that dares to have us question our culture and our society?

I’ll be waiting for an answer to that question, hoping that it will arrive in November.