The Prisoner

"The commercials were good. The PalmPre girl. The Geico gecko. I don’t know what that other stuff was all about. Something about a man running round aimlessly."

- Anonymous fan review of AMC's "The Prisoner".


I've been looking forward to AMC's remake of "The Prisoner" for a long time, and my assessment is "there's 47 minutes of my life I'm never going to get back." I should just be happy with man's infinite capacity for distraction.

In order to explain AMC's "The Prisoner" you almost have to explain the earlier - and much better - version which aired on British Television in the late 1960s. The basic story: a man (who is never named) played by Patrick McGoohan - who might have been a spy of some sort - resigns from his agency, is kidnapped and taken to a weird ass place called "The Village" which looks like a small town but is actually a prison. The Village is some sort of high-technology confinement disguised as a small town with a jarring pseudo-reality of its own. What makes it all the more weird is that no one has a name in the Village - merely a number. The man wakes up to find himself designated as "Number Six".

Six tries to escape, but finds it impossible - the prison, however, is quite comfortable and believe it or not, has a small-town government headed by Number Two. Number Two wants to know why Number Six resigned. Number Six doesn't care to tell him, and furthermore, doesn't care to be addressed as Number Six either (but we have to call him something). For whatever reason, they just can't waterboard Number Six, so Number Two tries some scheme based in either superscience or elementary psychology to discombobulate Six and get him to give up the goodies.

Number Two fails. The next week, Number Two is replaced by a new warden (also called Number Two) with a new approach to cracking Number Six. And so on, through a whole sequence of Number Twos. Will Number Six finally figure a way out, or will (the new) Number Two crack him?

One of the strengths of the old British series is that all the "I'm a spy, I resigned, and now I'm in the Village as a prisoner" was wrapped up very neatly in the minute-long opening titles. Instead, the new AMC series drop their new Number Six (played by Jim Caviezel) right in the middle of the action and just seem to follow him around with a camera.

The biggest problem is that the Patrick McGoohan Number Six was an "individual", in the best sense of the word. He was prickly, and annoying, and didn't have much trust for authority, but also had a heart of gold like a hooker's. The minute the McGoohan Number Six was dropped in The Village, it was like a cat being dropped in a bucket of water. If Number Two wanted to be oblique, the McGoohan Number Six would throw it right back in his face. "Try any bullshit you like. I'm not telling you anything," was the McGoohan Number Six's approach to life.

The Caviezel Number Six, on the other hand, is sort of a non-communciative log. All of the Caviezel Number Six is internal, all of the McGoohan Number Six was external. There's simply no way to identify with Caviezel's mopy non-character, who is about as dynamic as a Swiss Colony Beef Log. His job seems to be:

a) be perplexed,
b) ask stupid questions.

Which means that all the heavy lifting in the series is preformed by Number Two - in this case, Ian McKellen. AMC dropped the idea of having a rotating Number Two, which means that McKellen becomes the de facto star of the series, because he's more interesting - both as an actor and as a character - than Jim Caviezel. And, as the review I read implied, the series should have been called "The Warden". Which means that AMC got something horribly, horribly wrong.

Perhaps its not so much a commentary on the worths of each series as a commentary on society. Caviezel's Number Six wants answers - but McGoohan's Number Six demands answers. If McGoohan had been dropped into the remake, he would have simply stolen from the Village larders and built a tent out there somewhere in The Badlands, where he could have been left alone. Caviezel, like the Character That Made Him Famous, is sort of a passive observer to his own drama, moving forward only when the plot demands that something happen. Maybe the other five episodes handled things better; the reviews that I've read suggested that they didn't.

By extension, the message appears to be that the men and women of McGoohan's era were active heroes. The men and women of our era are passive ones. We just let shit happen to us; our capacity for distraction is almost infinite. At the end of the original "The Prisoner", the series succombs to self-seriousness and incoherence (*); at the end of AMC's "The Prisoner" we get a fifth-rate version of "The Matrix". (Oops! I gave it away! Now AMC will be after me!)

You want to watch "The Prisoner". Go to Barnes and Noble or wherever and pick up the series on DVD. Avoid the AMC remake. Don't be a number, be a free (person)!


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(*) Sort of like this blog.