"It's very cosmopolitan. You never know who you'll meet next!"
But that's not exactly true, is it.
Welcome to the Village. Here, there's a smile on every face, a handshake in every grip; and if it ever rains, it never rains for long. There are committees to join for the political, a newspaper to keep you informed on local events, and a boat that never leaves the beach, so you never have to worry about getting seasick. Contribute, get involved, love your neighbor and your neighbor will love you in return; and get ready to spend the rest of your life in the best place of all possible places. Everything that matters, matters here. You can even go for a walk in the woods without fear of getting lost. We have ways of making sure you never get lost again.
The thing is, though, you always know who you'll meet next. The faces change, but the numbers don't, and while the accents vary, the philosophy is always the same. Don't rock the boat. Keep in line. Don't lose your step. And don't get angry, okay? Just don't. Nobody likes a sourpuss. There's no reason to be angry here! We have everything you ever wanted. There are just a few small issues we'd like you to clear up first. We'd like to ask you a few questions. If you don't want to answer them, that's fine. We have the rest of your life to find what we're looking for.
The Prisoner, starring Patrick McGoohan, aired from September 29, 1967, through to February 1968. It ran 17 episodes. Its mixture of paranoia, surreality, and satire is both hugely influential and unique—it's been imitated and referenced countless times, but never truly repeated. And it'll haunt your dreams.
McGoohan stars as a never-named (which is like being a never-nude, except instead of wearing cut-offs, you just don't have ID) secret agent who, at the start of the first episode, "Arrival," resigns his position. Get used to this opening segment; we'll be seeing the shortened version a lot in the weeks to come. But long version or short, we never get to hear the angry rant McGoohan delivers to his presumed boss. He hits the table hard enough to break china, so we know he's pissed—but we don't know why. And (spoilers!) we never will. McGoohan comes close to confessing his reasons for quitting only a couple of times in the show, and while it's easy enough to come up with a theories, the plain fact is, it's his secret and only his. That's appropriate. The Prisoner is about personal identity, and as much as we like to identify with McGoohan's unnamed hero, in the end, he remains a mystery because that's part of his right as a human being.
"Arrival" sets the stage for what's to come; we get the ground rules here, what there are of them. (The most basic being the old saw that the X-Files would make famous years later: Trust no one.) Upset at his abrupt withdrawal from the workforce, someone (or someones) has McGoohan kidnapped from his home and brought to the Village, a lovely spot in the middle of who knows where. The indoctrination is slow but certain—McGoohan wakes up in an apartment much like his own, goes for a walk in place he doesn't recognize, and has his every attempt to find out what's going on met with cheery ignorance. The friendly cart driver (source of the above quote) responds to questions with statements so blandly formulaic you can't help but wonder if she's working off a script. McGoohan tries to buy a map of the area, but the first one the shop-keeper pulls out is too small; and when he asks for a larger one, he just gets the same map, only magnified and in color.
It's a system with seemingly no loopholes, no points of egress. McGoohan doesn't realize that right off; in fact, much of the series is about him learning how thoroughly caught he is, and how far up the conspiracy to keep him in place goes. We'll get to that when it becomes relevant, but for now, it's enough to accept that McGoohan is an ex-government agent, a brilliant tactician, and a more than capable fighter—and that none of that is going to be enough. The stakes become clear when McGoohan—who is now named Number Six, because here in the Village, answers are a burden to one's self, and personal names are the anchors that hold us down—gets a call from Number Two, the second in command and the face of ever-changing authority. Two would like Six to come up for breakfast, top of the hill, can't miss it. The food is chosen specifically to suit Six's tastes, but what's even more disturbing are the photos of him from his previous life; candid snapshots that capture him at his most vulnerable, captioned by Two's narration of Six's interior monologue in the scenes depicted.
How awful would that feel? Not only have they been watching you for years, not only have they been taking pictures when you thought you were alone, you are apparently so obvious, so blatantly legible, that they can read you perfectly. The first Two, Guy Doleman, sets the tone for the role, a pleasant, chummy condescension that's so British it hurts your teeth. Six isn't dealing with glowering evil here. He's dealing with the perfect next door neighbor who just likes to read your mail to make sure everything's going all right. One of the Village's most insidious weapons (and one that we'll see get worn down over time) is its pretense of moral authority. They aren't trying to hurt anyone, they tell you over and over. This is for your own good. Why fight it? And even worse, even harder to deny—if you insist on fighting it, doesn't that say something about you? When Two can just look at a photo and know you're planning a vacation, when you try and resist that, what fundamental flaw in your character is stopping you from being one with the whole?