After he resigns, a secret agent is abducted and taken to what looks like an idyllic village, but is actually a bizarre prison. He refuses to give his warders information while attempting to... Read allAfter he resigns, a secret agent is abducted and taken to what looks like an idyllic village, but is actually a bizarre prison. He refuses to give his warders information while attempting to escape.After he resigns, a secret agent is abducted and taken to what looks like an idyllic village, but is actually a bizarre prison. He refuses to give his warders information while attempting to escape.
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- 1 win & 1 nomination
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Did you know
- TriviaThe Prisoner was filmed in the North Wales resort village of Portmeirion over the course of a year. Patrick McGoohan was inspired to film his series there after filming a couple of Danger Man (1960) episodes in the village.
- GoofsIn the opening sequence, the letter X is typed across the prisoner's photograph, but the typewriter typebar for the letter H is moving. The typebar for the letter X is at the far right of the frame.
- Crazy creditsPatrick McGoohan does not receive on-screen acting credit on the final episode "Fall Out." His on-screen credit simply reads "Prisoner."
- Alternate versionsIn the recent re-run of the series on the Horror channel in the U.K. whenever anyone is attacked by Rover, the screen simply changes to a swirling vortex. When shown originally, the victim's face was pressed into Rover's 'skin'
- ConnectionsEdited into Derrick contre Superman (1992)
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Montage: a secret agent (Patrick McGoohan) storms into his superior's office and angrily resigns his post, for reasons unknown. A machine files away his Xed-out photo; he speeds away to his home. He enters his house and begins packing for a journey. Outside, a hearse pulls up to the curb. A pallbearer strides to the door. Knockout gas comes pouring in through the keyhole. When our hero awakes the room is the same... but the world outside is not.
We are in the Village, a picturesque nightmare co-fashioned by Orwell, Kafka, and Carroll. The unnamed agent has become Number Six in a population of equally nameless, creepily cheerful residents, headed by a shifting, and shifty, Number Two. Who is Number One? Well, that's the question, isn't it... In one direction are impassable mountains, in the other the sea -- and on patrol is a bizarre, lethal white balloon that hunts down those unwise enough to dare them.
Viewed today, "The Prisoner" seems so strikingly ahead of its time that one can only regard it as either a visionary masterpiece or a dazzling failure. Either way it is compulsive viewing. Co-creators McGoohan and George Markstein were seemingly at odds about what to make of it all, with McGoohan eschewing conventional James Bondisms for a more surreal, allegorical approach. (He himself wrote and directed some of the series' best and most bewildering episodes.) And truly "The Prisoner" works best when at its least explanatory and most hallucinatory. Not until "Twin Peaks" would another television show dabble this heavily in the logic of dreams.
McGoohan also believed the premise would only hold up over a limited run, and his concern seems justified. A few of the later of the seventeen episodes show desperation: low points include the feebly whimsical "The Girl Who Was Death," the plodding "It's Your Funeral," and "The General," which might as well be -- and nearly is -- an episode of Star Trek.
Yet at its best, in episodes like "Arrival," "Free For All," "Dance of Death," "Many Happy Returns," and the finale (one of the most astonishing hours ever programmed for television), the series achieves something extraordinary. Its influence reaches beyond such obvious successors as "Lost" and "The League of Gentlemen" -- and could you imagine "Brazil" or "The Matrix" without it? "The Prisoner" catches at a thread in our subconscious and pulls it loose; it tells us that something is genuinely wrong somewhere with the Great Big Picture. Its true antecedents are Chesterton's "The Man Who Was Thursday" and O'Brien's "The Third Policeman": nonsense that bleeds into spiritual unease.
It's not hard to understand why the series has a cult following, or why, love it or hate it, it still packs a punch. We are in the Village. Be seeing you...
We are in the Village, a picturesque nightmare co-fashioned by Orwell, Kafka, and Carroll. The unnamed agent has become Number Six in a population of equally nameless, creepily cheerful residents, headed by a shifting, and shifty, Number Two. Who is Number One? Well, that's the question, isn't it... In one direction are impassable mountains, in the other the sea -- and on patrol is a bizarre, lethal white balloon that hunts down those unwise enough to dare them.
Viewed today, "The Prisoner" seems so strikingly ahead of its time that one can only regard it as either a visionary masterpiece or a dazzling failure. Either way it is compulsive viewing. Co-creators McGoohan and George Markstein were seemingly at odds about what to make of it all, with McGoohan eschewing conventional James Bondisms for a more surreal, allegorical approach. (He himself wrote and directed some of the series' best and most bewildering episodes.) And truly "The Prisoner" works best when at its least explanatory and most hallucinatory. Not until "Twin Peaks" would another television show dabble this heavily in the logic of dreams.
McGoohan also believed the premise would only hold up over a limited run, and his concern seems justified. A few of the later of the seventeen episodes show desperation: low points include the feebly whimsical "The Girl Who Was Death," the plodding "It's Your Funeral," and "The General," which might as well be -- and nearly is -- an episode of Star Trek.
Yet at its best, in episodes like "Arrival," "Free For All," "Dance of Death," "Many Happy Returns," and the finale (one of the most astonishing hours ever programmed for television), the series achieves something extraordinary. Its influence reaches beyond such obvious successors as "Lost" and "The League of Gentlemen" -- and could you imagine "Brazil" or "The Matrix" without it? "The Prisoner" catches at a thread in our subconscious and pulls it loose; it tells us that something is genuinely wrong somewhere with the Great Big Picture. Its true antecedents are Chesterton's "The Man Who Was Thursday" and O'Brien's "The Third Policeman": nonsense that bleeds into spiritual unease.
It's not hard to understand why the series has a cult following, or why, love it or hate it, it still packs a punch. We are in the Village. Be seeing you...
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- miloc
- Aug 16, 2008
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