The Prisoner (2009)

by Parsley on Thu, 2010/07/08 - 3:15pm Post to Twitter

PARSLEY’S COMMLOCK
TV Review: The Prisoner (2009)
Caught up with the 3 starting episodes of this courtesy of my friend Tony Reeve. God knows the world needs more opportunity for paranoid self-reflection and this is actually surprisingly good. Yes, I’m ready to see any attempts at re-inventing The Prisoner cult 1967 TV franchise as the most horrible opportunism, but then again I could have seen it as an insult if it was left out of the process.

Since many (including David Lynch and Tim Burton, and shows like Buffy and films like the Stepford Wives) have helped continue the freaky-visual-images-things-not-quite-what-they-seem genre, there is probably now a bigger body of material for the show to be seen against, unlike its ground breaking predecessor. In that context it seems an admirably rich effort.

Ian McKellan is always good for a giggle, and the rows of triangular homes in the show do genuinely bring the holiday village gone mad idea back up to date. Watching 3 episodes made the not-telling-us-things-straight-away ploy a bit more obvious, but they also helped fulfil the unfolding story ideas that the original had trouble realising because of the production line ‘self contained’ approach to episodic shows in the sixties.

The biggest success of the series for me was waking up with rather unsettling memories of images of the show the next morning. Six, played by James Caviezel, is not as massively credible for me as McGoohan, being rather heavy on the ‘eye candy’ side of male looks, although it’s a reminder that McGoohan was regarded as attractive at the time, as the attempt to get him to play James Bond illustrated. Nevertheless he made a reasonable stab at it.

The unobserved life is said to be not worth living. Both series of The Prisoner suggest the observed life (everyone under constant surveillance) is not without its problems either. Unsettling touches, such as people laughing at gruesome death, were reasonably done. They had also got a nice line in old meets new, as high tech surveillance (summarised in the ‘TV reception wobble’ when the advert break link came up) rubbed shoulders with the old : Morris Minors and charabanc coaches.

The episodes have single word titles - ‘Arrival’ ‘Harmony’ and ‘Anvil’, that are echoes of Prisoner episode titles, but the story lines were much more ‘disoriented’. Six is regularly getting flashbacks. Sometimes these are relatively normal ones of his last day in New York. Sometimes they echo what is currently happening to him. In the original episode ‘Schizoid Man’ they hypnotise him into thinking he’s left handed and change his taste in food and cigarettes. Here there is a constant to-ing and fro-ing that seems more ‘druggy’.

There is an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where Captain Picard is tortured, and it’s sadly unconvincing despite sterling work by Patrick Stewart. I almost had the same feeling here as Six starts to believe some of the lies he is being fed, till one of the liars breaks down and confesses it’s a lie. It was good, but there was so little time to establish a vague semblance of truth before it was being ripped up.

The biggest hole that greeted my initial viewing is that at the start six finds himself in the desert and meets a runaway, but whilst he’s obviously been kidnapped and brought to the village, it never occurs to him that ‘they’ would have to have known that they brought him here, and where he was going to wake up. Instead he guards his ‘secret knowledge’ of the runaway ‘93’ with conspiratorial loyalty. He’s also very ready to make alliances with other villagers, despite the inherently suspicious nature of everyone’s behaviour.

The premise of the original Prisoner (that they want ‘information’ that he won’t give them) here becomes simply that they want him to accept his new reality. He seems remarkably relaxed about the possibility that he is being watched, despite him turning out to have been some kind of expert in CCTV. The third episode ‘Anvil’ quite nicely explores the idea of him becoming part of the Village apparatus - spying on suspected ‘dreamers’ - people that think there is an outside world.

In the original Prisoner there were rarely any children, and the difficulty of separating the self-contained Village from the outside realities of the world only got occasional hints because you weren’t allowed to ask. Here the alternative reality is complete as children are taught at school the numbers of people from history, and the versions of number two as if he were King of a royal family line. And the children learn surveillance as if it were a subject at school and can tell you why there is no number one. This suggestion that the Village has existed for all time is a cool one although it gets rather a short time to be established.

‘Rover’, the white balloon that made for such horrifying scenes in the original show, gets a suitable macabre updating, with all of the fun that computers can visually achieve over the trouble the early version had making the original meteorological balloons behave themselves.

Rather like the remake of Randall&Hopkirk, where Marty now played games with his ghost teacher Wyvern (not in the original show), Number 2 has a few sides to him that aren’t in the original. With all the irony of his famous homosexuality, McKellan kisses his wife, inexplicably in a coma, feeds her mysterious coloured tablets, and takes his son out from their lavish stately home to show him his ‘work’ - mostly shouting at six or commenting on what he regards as strange behaviour. His son is a rather ‘beautiful’ boy, and creates a real atmosphere of perversity hanging out with his Dad, who most villagers are terrified of. I do wonder what someone that hadn’t seen the original series would make of it. At the end of each show ITV helpfully keep offering up their website to explain how the series was made (er? in the same way any series is made perhaps?).

Writing up my review in Stockholm, a city full of ‘beautiful’ people wearing designer clothes and living an idyllic lifestyle, I’m struck by the way that some parts of the world are more suitable for the Prisoner message. The thing that the Village doesn’t seem to have is poverty with its leanings towards criminality. Is that what stops us becoming regimented villagers?

All in all it’s a rather compelling show, and I look forward to seeing the remaining 3 episodes.

parsley.L at virgin.net [http://freespace.virgin.net/alpha.moonbase/garden.records]