In PRESTIGE PREHISTORY, Pop Heist critic Sean T. Collins takes a look at classic TV shows that paved the way for the New Golden Age of Television — challenging, self-contained stories from writers and filmmakers determined to push the medium forward by telling stories their own way.
The Prisoner Episode 6 (airdate order) / Episode 7 (AVC order)*
"The General"
Original Airdate: Nov. 3, 1967
Writer: Joshua Adam
Director: Peter Graham Scott
Cast: Patrick McGoohan, Colin Gordon, John Castle, Peter Howell, Betty McDowall, Conrad Philips, Al Mancini
*NOTE: The Prisoner's proper running order is a matter of dispute; Pop Heist is using the AV Club order for the show
In order to reach the Village's boardroom and broadcast center, you have to put a tiny disc in a little slot. Once you do this, a tiny blue plastic hand emerges from a little box and grabs the disc, snatching it away and disappearing back into the box. After this point, you — and I should mention here that you're dressed in a top hat and black coat with black sunglasses indoors — can pass unimpeded through the forcefield-protected entrance.
Is there a reason that a tiny little blue plastic hand has to emerge from a little box to grab a disc before you can get in there? Considering that virtually every inch of the Village is monitored by video and patrolled by guards both human and spherical in nature, no, not really. You could just have some guy wave you in after you show an ID card. You could have Rover the floating orb (who does not appear in this episode) act as bouncer. You could do pretty much anything. But The Prisoner chooses to have a tiny little blue plastic hand emerge from a little box to grab the disc and let you in.
Why? Well, the Village is very impressed with its technological prowess and, simultaneously, possessed by the aesthetic sensibility of an outsider artist — the better, perhaps, to bewilder the straightlaced cop types who become intelligence officials. This is a facility that seemingly spares no expense in creating elaborate, even baroque machines and procedures that Occam's razor, if applied, would slice to ribbons. In that sense, the little blue plastic hand is exactly the kind of shit these weirdos would set up.
However, I think a different explanation gets to the heart of it. The Prisoner is based on a simple concept: What if you made a TV show that was interesting instead of uninteresting whenever a choice between the two was available?
I mean, yes, absolutely, you could have a guard stand in front of that hallway, letting people in based on an approved list of Numbers allowed to attend the board meeting or work in the broadcast center. Indeed, there's a whole new cadre of guards invented in this episode for just this sort of work — grey-jumpsuited, helmeted, shades-indoors goons with white batons who'll gladly beat the shit out of you if ordered. They're literally standing around waiting to do a job like letting people in to a top-secret area.
But the little blue plastic hand that picks a disc up out of a slot and yoinks it back into its tiny black box? That's something better than plausible: It's bitchin'. It's mint. It's just some of the weirdest, coolest shit you're gonna see on your screen this week, I guarantee. Would Patrick McGoohan and his Prisoner collaborators put it in quite these terms? No, probably not. But we're free to call a spade a spade, you and I, and this show is cool as hell. It feels like it's trying, really going for it, at all times and in all ways, and that is vanishingly rare.
In this episode, Number Six suddenly finds the Village in the grips of a sort of educational mania. Beckoned by an unfamiliar American announcer (Al Mancini, replacing the usual Englishwoman's voice provided by Fenella Fielding), the Villagers flock to their televisions to watch a numberless Professor (Peter Howell) somehow deliver months of education in mere seconds. Developed by a mysterious and unseen figure called the General, this "Speed Learn" technique subliminally implants information directly into the viewer's brain as they stare into the eyes of the Professor. "Students" can recall a virtually encyclopedic suite of knowledge on, say, late 19th century European history — but they're only reciting information transmitted verbatim. Ask them a more complicated question and they draw a blank.
Teaming up with the new Number 12 (a frankly smoldering John Castle), a fellow genuine dissident, Number Six briefly abandons his relentless attempts to escape for a grander purpose: thwarting what is very obviously a test program for mass hypnosis and indoctrination. This pits them against 12's direct report, the new Number Two (a dandyish and mustachioed Colin Gordon), a true believer in the program's potential. Given what we learned about the Village's designs for the wider world from the Number Two played by Leo McKern a few episodes ago, why wouldn't he be?
When Six looks deeper into the Professor and his program, what he finds is bizarre. The man himself has been driven insane and virtually mute (when not on screen) by his intense efforts to write each new lesson; he's rooted to reality only by, as Number Two puts it, "an adoring wife (Betty McDowall) and an even more attentive doctor (Conrad Philips)." The former, who really does love her husband — enough to talk him into taking the gig rather than allowing the authorities to kill him — offsets his book-learning with art, sculpture, and a much more free-flowing approach to learning. The latter just drugs the hell out of the dude so that the program's brains and friendly public face can keep working.
With 12's help, Six goes undercover, uses that little disc/hand doohickey, and infiltrates the broadcast facility, where lessons imprinted in metal needles are inserted into a sphere bristling with spokes to transmit the information. But his fight with the technician leaves him bloodied, which gives him away to the observers on the approval board.
Knocked out and dragged off for interrogation, Six learns the identity of the General: a computer that formulates the lessons based on the Professor's input, now capable of answering any question you ask it. (Sound familiar?) But Six fries its circuits with a question he claims neither man nor machine can answer: "WHY?" The Professor is electrocuted as the machine melts down, and Twelve dies in an attempt to save the older man. The episode ends with a wide, wordless, distant shot of Six breaking the awful news to the Professor's devastated wife. It's a powerfully bleak ending even by Prisoner standards.
Notably, Six never even bothered trying to escape this time, which is bleak in its own right.
But a mere plot summary cannot do justice to "The General." Director Peter Graham Scott goes all out in this one, creating a Willy Wonka nightmare tunnel of an episode that feels like an endless careening from one striking, troubling image to the next. The propaganda posters for the Professor and the General are one of the show's most Orwellian touches yet, powerful here where in lesser hands they might feel played out. The Professor's implacable stare in the black-and-white headshot used to transmit the images is very Big Brother as well, and visually disorienting relative to the colorful cacophony of the rest of the episode. It's the kind of image that gives precocious kids who stumble across this show nightmares, and makes them determined to keep watching.
There's tons of that. When Six breaks into the Professor's home, he encounters a sculpture gallery full of busts covered by cloths, pulled off one by one to reveal portraits of everyone from the aforementioned Leo McKern Number Two to Number Six himself, created by Madame Professor. Her masterpiece, though, is a wax sculpture of her husband, which Six suddenly smashes with a wooden rod. That smashed-in face, out of nowhere like that? More surreal dream fuel.
The strange-for-the-sake-of-it entrance mechanism and broadcasting device are among the show's best fake technologies yet. Six's needle wound is gnarly and bloody. Everyone on the board, including Two and 12 and Six himself when he goes undercover, wear upper-class top hats and black coats and ZZ Top sunglasses. The warning about both the fascist potential and the essential stupidity of so-called artificial intelligence is so prophetic I'm not even going to belabor it beyond this sentence.
The episode has one of the largest casts so far and every character is vivid and unique. And I'm sorry, but there's sexual tension between Six and 12 so thick you could book it as a men's pro wrestling feud.
Number Two vibes with both guys too. It's fascinating, and again, it's something they haven't done before.
Which is standard operating procedure for The Prisoner, isn't it? That's the point I was trying to make at the start. It's like at every step, McGoohan and the other filmmakers thought three to four times harder than necessary, and the results speak for themselves. You'd have to wait nearly 25 years for David Lynch and Mark Frost to come along and top it.
