(upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) Welcome to The Prisoner's Dilemma, the show where we watch and talk about the 1960s TV show, The Prisoner, I'm Brendan, and with me is my enigmatic captor, Matthew. That's me, the enigmatic captor, Matthew Goes Dial. Why do you have me trapped inside this podcast with you? Well, for years now, I've been trying to get you to get on a recording with me and talk about the prisoner. I think the real answer here is that we both heard a prisoner podcast and said that it was bad, said that we're not going to say which one there have been a lot of them. Believe it or not, other people have tried to talk critically about the prisoner before. Some good, some that are difficult to get access to, some that are no longer available because of the way that time works, but there was a particular one, and I'm not going to call them out, but they know who they are. And we know they're listening. And we know that they are listening and they're crying, they're crying so loud. But, you know, you and I are, we're similar in many ways, but one of the ways in which we are similar is that we are often motivated by spite. That's absolutely true, we are, what a way to start a show. I appreciate, we're both interested in strange objects. One hundred percent. We both like things that are maybe difficult to get your head around, things that are artifacts of their time in a lot of ways. And I think, I'm right in saying that you had seen the prisoner long before I had. Oh yeah, for sure. But after I recommended it to you. Yeah, that's almost certainly the case. A lot of people in our cohort, I think, have talked about the prisoner in ways that make it seem very, very fascinating. And sure enough, once I had finally seen it a few years ago, I couldn't stop thinking about it. And so, when the opportunity presented itself for me to take on even more projects and do even more work, I thought, why not do a show about the prisoner? There it is. That's it, that's the show. That's the whole show, this is the show. We've gestured at, okay, this is a thing that is interesting and that is worth talking about. Matthew, what is the prisoner? Mmm, yeah. So the prisoner is the 1960s serial or series about the titular prisoner played by Patrick McGowan. I don't know how in depth we want to go with this initial thing, but I think the thing that's worth saying at minimum is that Patrick McGowan was previously very famous in sort of British TV airwaves for playing Drake in Danger Man. Sort of a Bond-like figure. This was a long-running show about where each episode we followed Drake on some other cool spy assignment. And Patrick McGowan basically decided he was done and what he wanted to make was this show, the show in which a potentially media spy, we'll get to it, retires and then is immediately captured by the enigmatic forces of the village. And then he spends, you know, some small number of episodes attempting to escape this weird, surreal place with all this sort of weird, surreal, mad science happening. And in so doing, we get all these really interesting themes about the individual versus society and what it means to be a person and so on and so forth. Yeah, there's, I think we're going to talk a lot about Patrick McGowan as a person and as a creator, as the show goes on. You cannot. I mean, in many ways, that is what the podcast is about because this is very much his creation, right? He is the leading man. He writes some of the scripts. He directs a few of the episodes, sometimes under pseudonyms. But it is impossible to have the show without him. It is the thing that he made because he went to head of ITC productions at the time, Luke Grade, now Lord, Luke Grade actually might be dead now. Let me double check that. Is Luke Grade dead? I think so. I think everybody is dead. Who is living on this show? It's true. I mean, that's not because of the show, but they are dead. They are dead is the thing. Patrick had them all swear a blood oath to kill himself. I don't think that's okay. Went to the head of ITC productions, Luke Grade, who was, he's listed in a way on Wikipedia that I aspire to, which is as an impresario. If only I were an impresario, I sure hope that whatever database persists after my death takes the care to describe me as an impresario. It was a money man in the business of a TV producer, a TV producer who had his eye on things that could make a lot of money. This is in the tail end of the British invasion. There are lots and lots of shows being made in Britain and sold in America. And Luke Grade was really, really good at keeping a hold of stars that he knew were going to pull in audiences. And he did that by basically letting them indulge in their own projects if they so demanded. It was very, very willing to basically let people do what they wanted if it meant that they would continue making content for him. Yeah, and in particular, though, this is not like a no strings attached kind of relationship, right? He did have some demands on the creation of the prisoner, which shaped what it was. For one thing, McGoon only wanted to make seven episodes of the thing to begin with, which is not, even in those days, a full television series. They eventually made 17. There are 17 episodes all totaled. We'll be watching them in an order that is not the order that they were produced in. But to go back to McGoon really quick, he, as you had said, had been on TV as a spy for a long time and had been very accustomed to doing a lot of these shows and what was called the Kiss Kiss Bang Bang genre. A lot of, just like James Bond, Globe trotting stuff, where you go on missions, you're fighting, you know, this is in the midst of Cold War, so you're usually fighting Eastern Block adversaries and their allies. And then increasingly towards the end, like random little stints in supposedly Asia or India, in which they'd have like a bunch of British actors go in yellow face or brown face for it. Yeah, yeah, great stuff, just terrific, terrific material. Not dated at all. But all that is to say, the prisoner is really interesting in that you're right away. I think, you know, if you came to this show not knowing what the prisoner was at all, the people that were tuning into the prisoner were like, oh, okay, it's another Patrick McGoon show. That means it's going to be a spy procedural of some kind. And every episode of the show more or less takes place in this one location, this village where the action of the show is set. Already, like that pitch of like playing with audience expectations is already so fun. If the show did nothing but that of like, okay, we're going to do one twist right at the beginning where you think it's going to be this one thing, we're going to do this other thing. It would still be a great show, it still be a classic, but it just keeps doing things like this as the show goes on. Absolutely. And I think that leads us really, really well into the next point, which is why talk about it apart from our love for the show. The idea of putting your protagonist in a weird location, and then inviting your audience to come back a week after a week to figure out like, huh, I wonder what they're doing here. I wonder what's up with this particular place is in many ways the dominant mode of television in 2024. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm going to go and got Asakide. Yeah, I mean, you get that. What's a good live action, Isakide? The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. That's not a TV show. I'm sure it's been a TV show at some point. It's been a TV movie at some point, certainly. Yeah, you don't get, what's the lady goes back in time to Scottish Wars? Oh, yeah, I know you're talking about that. Yeah, that sounds right. Yeah, you don't, I don't know if you could draw a line from the prisoner to Outlander, is that the thing? I think you probably can. But maybe you can, right? But you could certainly draw a line from it to lost or to totally speaks or something like that. Totally. Of the puzzle box becoming the mode of weekly engagement with a television program. And this is a show that did it decades in advance. Yeah. One of the other things that I really want to think about with McGowan is he's so central to the thing and it is explicitly a thing about individual versus collective. It is a show, as we will discuss, is very much about my will is my own. I can do whatever I want. And any attempt to hamper my freedom is intolerable. Totally. And it is impossible to separate the character in the show saying that from the man creating the show when we have on record a lot of interesting reports of what he was like to work with as a creator with a vision, right? As someone very clearly had a very specific idea of how things ought to be and if he didn't get his way or if something wasn't precisely the way that it ought to be. Or he had a different idea than what someone else was bringing to the table could be difficult to work with in sometimes explosive ways. Right. So I'll talk about that, I'm sure. Totally. I do think though, you know, earlier we're talking about like, well, why should we talk about this? And you're totally right that it's like individual versus society. But the show is also really about like privacy, right? Yes, absolutely. In an era like just at the cusp of, you know, in the information age where like privacy was not really a thing anymore. And it's really interesting coming from Patrick McGowan, right, who had been, you know, acting as a spy for years at this point. And a spy is all about breaking somebody else's privacy, right, stealing their secrets. And this real sort of reaction to that in the prisoner of like, even in the first episode, we'll get to it, of like, I'm not even going to answer a questionnaire, right? About like, what's my political beliefs? I'm just not going to tell you that, that's not your business. And the idea of like, that perspective. In our age, when we all kind of expect that we're being, you know, this conversation might be being listened to by some foreign government. Barack Obama is tuning in live to us recording this. Yeah, as he always does. Hi, Barack, big fans. Hello. Well, I mean, I don't really like the word crimes. But I think, I think that that's like a really alluring outlook, right? Of saying like, no, despite everything, despite the world around us, privacy is important. That your thoughts should be your own. That people shouldn't be able to listen in on you, shouldn't be able to watch you, right? It's a vision of the world, you know, maybe even a vision that's already at the time too late. But it's like an enticing vision for what the world could be like. Yeah, absolutely. Why else should we talk about the person? Oh, man. I would say that there's a bunch of other reasons though. First of all, despite all his flaws that we'll get to, Patrick McGowan is just such an incredibly charismatic actor. The way he can like chew up scenery, the way he can like get really loud and really quiet, right? He's just incredible to watch. He's like a caged beast most of the time. Yeah, routinely described as a panther-like in his attitude on camera. Yeah, for sure. So he's just a joy to watch. The individual episodes, while there's some highs and some lows, they're genuinely fun adventure stories. Like each one is like a fairly fun self-contained adventure story. And you know, they're not all of them fantastic, but there's fun twists and things like that. It's just a fun show to watch still, right? It's not. It doesn't feel dated in that way. Yeah. You know, having just watched a bunch of the prisoner, it still holds up as a thing that you can put on. Like it has a quality to it that maybe Star Trek, the original series has, but totally. Very few other shows of this era. Here's some other shows that were on the year that this came out, which is 19. Yeah, please. Yeah. Nice. Oh, yeah. Sure. The Adam West Batman. Oh, incredibly. Yeah. The Monkeys. Mm. Sure. Yeah. The Avengers, which is probably the other big, big, BBC spycraft show. Yeah. Not marbles the Avengers. No, no, no, no, no. This is Emma Peel and Jude Law's character. Right. Ed Sullivan was still on the air. Mm. Sure. The joke was in its 12th season. Oh, my God. And it was the year of the first ever color broadcast of F1 racing. Incredible. Yeah. Yeah, it's really interesting considering all of those and in this show. I mean, there's like, you know, Avengers and Danger Man have similar kinds of taking themselves seriously plotting. But of those shows, I would say maybe only, you know, Star Trek tried, and not even really Star Trek, trying to do like full season storytelling the way that this show does. Mm-hmm. Like every episode is self-contained, but like we're working towards a thing. There's progress happening. Not, you know, we'll get to it. He doesn't escape in this series. Whoa, whoa. You can't, you can't say that the first episode. Okay. Okay. Well, not maybe not, you know, who knows what happens by the end? Ooh. Ooh. But like there's change within the character of number six, right, of the prisoner. Right. Which is like not a thing these other shows are really doing. No, absolutely not. I'm not discovering what Bruce Wayne's character arc is across the arc of a season of Batman, right? Mm-hmm. Not that season of Batman anyway. Just to name some other stuff that was in the air, just to really frame us, because I think that's important for both what the show is talking about, the things that are on screen. And a lot of the aesthetic that is being used. Mm-hmm. Cast your mind. Cast your mind way back. You remember? Imagine Matthew is back in 1967, like he was that one time. Yeah, yeah. I was 20 years old. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I was 40 years old. I was driving by Chum to the Gotham Library. Vietnam War, obviously, is in full swing. The Six Day War takes place in 1967. Sure. Che gets captured and killed. Rip. Uh, Jimmy Hoffa goes to jail? Oh, sure. It's the year of the summer of love. Elvis gets married. Oh, that was awesome. UFOs are in the news in a big way. There's a lot of people spotting what could be spy planes or early, very early astronaut and cosmonaut activity. Soyuz 1 launches in 1967. Yeah, there's a big focus on space, which will impact the prisoner later. Yeah, there's a big current of science fiction through this. Right. And it's the year Magical Mystery Tour comes out. Oh, sure, yeah. Which, if you were just to look at any given screenshot of or screen cap of the prisoner, you'd be forgiven for thinking that it's from a Beatles movie or something like that. Yeah. Totally. Yeah. It's got that same color palette for sure. Absolutely. Absolutely. It's working in very deliberate kind of contrasts. Yeah. And Angela Muscat is there. So that makes sense. Right. Yeah. Yeah. The fifth Beatle. He was the butler and also was uncredited on Magical Mystery Tour and a bunch of other stuff. I believe it. So we're going to be watching episode by episode. We might watch some other stuff along the way. We'll get to that as we get to it. But we're going to be spending an episode per episode of the original series. You might want to watch the series along with us. Yeah. It is entirely available on YouTube as of right now. Dang. From a couple of different upload sources. So I'm not sure if either of those are official, but there's more than one of them. So you can check those out there. I have the collected series, Blue Rays, which also has so jealous, which has a bunch of background material, which I'll probably talk about as it becomes pertinent. You can also stream the entire thing on Amazon Prime. Mm hmm. And it might be available on other streaming services. I'm not sure. But there are a number of different ways to see it. It's about an hour per episode. Well worth a watch. Yeah. And believe it or not, Matthew and I both think it's worth watching. Yeah. It's so weird that we think that that would be crazy if we made an entire podcast. Every episode was like, you can skip this one. Our watch list for the prisoner is like the very first one. The very last episode. Every episode is just exed out as the episodes have resigned. Oh man. Well, with that joke, we should probably get to the summary of what happens in the first episode of the prisoner. Arrival. Yeah. All right. So I'll be handling the summaries. We see London at the height of the Cold War. Arrival introduces our main character, unnamed outside the later given moniker, number six, as he violently resigns his job, presumably as a spy, presumably for MI6. Notably, we hear no words, with number six's dialogue replaced with thunder. While packing for a vacation just after, he is drugged and brought to the series primary setting, a surreal beachside town known only as The Village. The first sequence here will repeat as the intro/title theme for every future episode. Number six makes an initial series of fruitless escape attempts, a phone call, a taxi cab, and buying a map. He's then summoned by the leader of The Village. Number two. Two sets the stakes for the series. He and the rest of The Village want to know why six really resigned. Even though six remains adamant, it was, quote, "on principle." Two gives him a tour to try to convince him he's trapped, in which he revealed a core aspect of village security, a white balloon-like creature unnamed here but later called Rover, which suffocates a man dressed as Waldo after he disobeys an order to stand still. Afterwards during an invasive questionnaire, six storms off and later goes on a tear, breaking his room's radio, threatening his assigned maid, and engaging in a chase sequence on the beach. This ends with him knocked unconscious by Rover. Six awakens in the hospital, and the episode's third act. Here he meets another presumed spy from his prior life named Cobb, who claims to have been kept in The Village for weeks. When six returns from some routine tests, he is told Cobb is dead, having jumped from the window. At Cobb's funeral, he meets number nine, a woman who has been assigned Cobb as a target to learn his secrets, but had fallen in love with him with plans to escape. She shares those plans with six, who uses them to seemingly escape via helicopter only for the first of many replacement number twos to bring him back via remote control. In a final scene, Cobb is revealed to be alive and to have been working for The Village the whole time. The episode ends with bars slamming shut over number six's face. Cinematic bars closing over. Cinematic bars. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's an image of his face. Sure. But I mean, you know, not punished for having tried to escape. No, not at all. Yeah. You know what Baldo is called, is called in Jolly Old England? I do not. What is Baldo called? Wally. Wally. Now everything makes sense. Actually, I think maybe he's originally British. So it might be that his name is really Wally and we call him Waldo over here. That's so weird. But that is the key to understanding the whole series. So it's important that we set it. Yeah, it's. It's essential. Wall E walls, walls like a village trapping you. Wow. That's it. That's the key. Makes you think. Yeah. So I figure at this point, we should probably just go from the jump and sort of talk about the things as they stood out to us. Let's talk about what will become the intro because this is as you gestured, this whole thing at the beginning will happen in montage, the beginning of every episode more or less the same. We'll call it the differences as they happen because of course that's part of the puzzle. But this whole sequence of driving in a sporty car to his destination, angrily resigning, going home, being a guest and somehow transported to the village will happen each and every time that we start a new episode. By a man in like a big black top hat, very cartoonish looking. Yeah. Very villainous. Like, okay, okay, let's back up. What is this guy work? Yeah. I mean, great question. We will never fully know. So they say later in the show, I believe, resigned from a security agency of some kind. Right. Right. Could be MI5, could be MI6, could be something different. I believe the photo that is exed out is a official still of John Drake from the Danger Man show. Yeah. That's his headshot. I didn't include that in the summary, but as part of like after he resigns, we get this incredible shot of like a typewriter being used to ex out Patrick McGoo in AKA number six's photo as Brendan just mentioned. And then it's like being deposited in this automated system into like this long, like hallway full of file cabinets, seemingly of other people. Yeah. That's what I'm depositing his like punch card, basically into an old fashioned filing cabinet is the very first of many, many sci-fi sort of vision of the future type things that I really wanted to call out because here we see this is the most wrote of tasks. This is putting a file in its place and it's not even a file you expect to interact with again, right? So literally going in the resigned folder is probably going to stay there, right? Yeah. And yet there is like this automated robot arm moving down a completely empty room lined with filing cabinets and it is taking this card and it is dropping it right in and it is closing automatically. This is technology that presumably belongs to the place that he used to work, right? So this is an agency that has access to this future technology advanced technology, but an end that is presumably useful in time saving, but is also like in a way kind of certainly in 2024 reads as, what's the word for it? Not wasteful, but like the juice ain't worth a squeeze, right? Like you invented a robot in order to do this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, which I think is, it gestures it a couple of things, right? Yeah. One is this idea of the robots coming for our jobs, right? Yeah. It's 1967 and the robots are coming for our jobs and again, it's ahead of its time. It's so ahead of its time. It's very, very like, look at what they're doing. Look at what they're spending your tax dollars doing and it's making our robot do the most ridiculous of tasks. And yeah, I'll simply leave it at that is that it's like this idea of technology moving too fast, being used for what's ostensibly a very wasteful kind of purpose. Right. There's two other like phrases that we get in this little first part of the insurance sequence, which is that on, I believe, his like headshot, we get the words private personal and by hand, which I think we're supposed to read as like the reason for his resignation, private personal and by hand, meaning that like he came in in person to resign, right? The next I think really fun bit is when he's packing to go on vacation, he just packs pictures of beaches. There's so much that this sequence is doing that I really, really find artful in a way that I don't always find in the prisoner. The prisoner has a lot of beautiful shots. It uses a, at least in this episode, a very frenetic kind of camera work that had just started becoming really fashionable with a hard day's night and does a lot to convey like a sense of motion and action, but the pacing and the timing here in this intro, which again does not have any voiceover or anything until it gets basically wrapped up, is very like, it's using thunder instead of him explaining himself, it's using the punches of the typewriter. And yes, it's very silly that he has like little pictures of the island's destination that he's going, but that does tell us he has an idea of where he's going. And I think that works in a really nice way. No, it totally, it's communicative, right, it works, and it's in like this whole thing, right, is high drama, gestural, almost operatic, right? Absolutely. He's being followed by an intimidating black car. Exactly. And we know that he's being followed even though he doesn't realize it. Yep. And when it goes unconscious because like the guy has some sort of weird, again, like sci-fi, nonsense tool, to like have a cane that also shoots gas out of it that will gas him in his room. Through a keel, it rules, like the way he goes unconscious, we get this like beautiful close up his face as he's sort of like, you know, mimes slowly going unconscious and falls back on like a couch. The next bit, when he wakes up, right, we get this sort of like almost dreamy view of the village at first, and then immediately it snaps into like that same frenetic pace as we're sort of in the head of number six, and he's like, "Oh God, where is this place? What am I doing?" Dashing all around the place, quick shots of all these surreal scenery, it's fantastic. Let's talk a little bit about the scenery because this is in the immoral words of Sex and the City, the location is really the fifth character. Or the second character as it would be. Well, that's number two. Yeah, true. Well, we'll get to that one over to that. This is Port Marion. Yep. It is not called that in the show, they kept the filming location very, very secret as they were putting everything together, but it is a seaside village in the north of Wales that's a resort town that I have his name here, you don't have his name, do you? I don't know who you're talking about, are you maybe talking about like the guy who made it? Yes. Sir Clow, William Ellis. That's how you did that? Sir Clow, William Ellis. Yes. Who had the money and the location in the north of Wales, I guess, to make his own quasi-mediterranean seaside destination, based on the Italian seaside villages like Portofino that he really liked, I guess. So made his own, because that's what they could spend money on if you're that kind of guy. Uh-huh. Yeah. But what it leads to is this wild look of the place, right? Right. They're trying to appear Mediterranean, but they're using all like local building materials to do it. Right. So it ends up looking like nothing else. It's like if Dr. Seuss invented a resort town, yeah, like you can't escape from the fact that this is the coast in the north of Wales, which is not what the coast of Italy looks like. And so you have all these weird Baroque buildings, these Greek statues, these strange colors, these interesting little paths, you know what it reminds me of, it reminds me of the island and mist. Oh, sure. Yeah. Where just all the buildings don't make any sense and they're all crammed next to each other. Totally. And what you get in the show is this really bizarre place that you can't look at and identify, oh, I'm in Scotland or, oh, I'm sure something like that, instead, you're just in a location and you have this dizzying sensation like our main character has. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's that sort of parallel between the character and the audience that works so well with this setting because the audience also can't place it, right? Like this was filmed in Italy in a Mediterranean resort town. Everyone would go, okay. Yeah. Yeah. I know where that is. Right. But like this doesn't look like it's from anywhere and that is difficult for us as an audience to place it, but it also means that for the character, it becomes really difficult to place. He has no idea where he is, and this is a guy who, presumably, has been all over the world. Right. And again, this is in the midst of the Cold War. So where you are in Europe at any given point in time is very, very important if you're in that kind of industry, right? Yeah. So I think we managed to make it out of the intro. I think so. I have the first of several fan readings, none of which I'm going to endorse, that I wanted to bring up here. And this is a fan reading that can just be read from the information we have in this first episode. But I think it's fun to talk about here because then we can come back to it. Just just to be explicit by fan reading, you mean like, people, yeah, people looking at the show the same way that we are trying to figure out what it's all about. Exactly. Because believe it or not, people have been trying to figure out what the show is about ever since it came out. Yep. It's been a long time. Yeah. And we're going to introduce many of these as we go through. Both of us spent the time to sort of dig through some related material to the prisoner. And I've been following it along for decades at this point. So this first reading is an interesting one, which is that number six resigned from his job because he had originally come up with the concept of the village and he found out it was real. Same arm. So you know, we are not going to get any reason in this episode why he resigned. He repeatedly will say that it's on principle, right? But if this is number six and he is, you know, this really intelligent spy craft dude, you could imagine that he could come up with sort of as a thought exercise, hey, what if there was a place where we could take people who were like really dangerous, who had really dangerous knowledge, right? Not a prison, but some pleasant place where we could keep them and maybe learn more from them, right? Captured spies, spies when they retire, these sorts of things, right? Right. So the fan theory, the reading is that part of number six is desperation to escape and part of his distaste and disgust for the village is because it came about from like some idle thought of his. I have a quote. Sure. So this was after the first run of Danger Man had wrapped up. Sure. Danger Man ran the early '60s and then it came back in the later '60s for more shows. And then so after the first run was done, Patrick was speaking with someone at a party or something like that with someone from her Majesty's government. And this person asked, well, what are you going to do after Danger Man? What does a secret agent do after he retires? And McGowan said, well, you tell me and the government employee. I wish I had who that was, but said, we take care of them. We give them a house and some pocket money. Look after them, which you can read as, all right, well, you get to have a cozy retirement of some kind, but it also means that your employer knows where you are and has control over where it is that you get to spend the rest of your life. Yep. And out to be clear, from this first episode, I don't think this reading, I think this reading is pretty weak, right? We see number six being flabbergasted more, more confused than anything else at first than alarmed, right? Yeah. There's a lot that he does that doesn't make sense if you think that he might have some idea of how the thing operates, even if he didn't participate directly in his creation. Right. Although I do like the idea of a version of the show that's more like prison break or something like that. It's like someone is trapped within their own creation and has to rely on their understanding of its intricacies to make the escape. But then again, for that, you could just go watch prison break. Yeah, exactly. Which is what I think- We'll get our prison break. Our show about prison break. The prison break. Oh my God. What if we watched prison break after watching the prisoner? Well, only watch show that have prison in the name. There's got to be. All right. What do we got? Orange is the new black does not count. No, definitely not. TV series with prison in- People love this. They're going to get some typing fully there, but that's fine. I've actually been adding typing fully to the entire episode. In the background. Okay. Prison break, obviously. Porridge is not what I wanted. I don't know why you thought that was an answer. IMDB. Prisoner known in the U.K. and in the U.S. as prisoner cell block H and Canada's Caged Women is an Australian television soap opera ran from February to February 1979 to December 1986 running eight seasons and 692 episodes. No, we're not doing that. The first Australian series to feature a primarily female dominated cast. Let's go, fine. Carried the slogan, "If you think prison is hell for a man, imagine what it would be like for a woman." I'm not touching that. Sammy Davis Jr. was a major fan and visited the set. Oh my God. We could watch the terrible prisoner remake that they did. We've already got that on our slate. Yeah, as a potential. As a potential. We're not going to agree to anything at this point. Talk to our lawyer. Okay. Anything else we want to say about the place of Port Marion? No, no, I'm happy with that. I'll say this. It's a resort town. It continued to be a resort town while they were filming the prisoner. That's awesome. I didn't know that. Locals got to be extras. Hotels and Airbnbs. You remember the Airbnbs back in the 1960s? Yeah, yeah. I was 22 at the time. I remember. I remember that you were 22. And as a matter of fact, for the very first episode, there's home video recording. Someone had a home video recorder and video the show was being created. I would love to see that. I've got it. You're available. Oh, my God, so that's the village. That's the village. That's everything about the village. Yeah. The village has a bunch of interesting landmarks. We'll talk about them as number six discovers them. Uh huh. Yeah, we're going to learn about them with number six. He's like our, I don't know, some sort of perspective character or something. That's right. So then I think the next major bit is, at least that I would like to talk about. I don't know if there's something else for you is like this initial sort of trio of escape attempts where we get this like attempt at a phone call. There's a quick taxi ride. This is actually, so actually there's, he briefly sees someone at distance. I don't know who that is. I don't think we ever learned who that is. Yeah. He's very alone right here at the very beginning, there's some really astonishing wide shots where he's basically in this village and he might be here completely by himself from the establishing shots, but he's racing around, he's trying to figure out where he is, he's desperately looking for other people. Right. And on a rewatch, we know that like this is a fully populated village. Right. And so it demonstrates the control of the people who control the village have, right? Over its population to be like, okay, we've got a new buddy, a new person coming, really important person. We want everybody to just like basically hide. Yeah, stay home until you get the all clear. Basically yeah, which is wild and it's got to be some, you know, like many, the first of many, many attempts at like psychologically, you know, playing with number six, of putting them into the kind of mental state they need or they think they need to get the information that they want out of them. Yeah. There's a lot that the village does in terms of schedules and orchestrating people's behaviors according to schedules that is interesting and worth observing. Right. So he's wandering around the first person then we really see after he sort of sees a person in a distance, chases them up a clock tower and they're not there. Ooh, spooky. Yes. Yes. This sort of waitress setting up to like open up a restaurant in the morning. Right. Right. This is normal. She's played, yeah, very normal. She's played by Patsy Smart. She was Miss Roberts in upstairs downstairs. And she was also one of many, many people who were in either the Avengers or Dangerman or in her case, both, right? There was a lot of overlap. Yeah. A lot of people getting work from these types of shows in that era. Right. And we should maybe, you know, we're sort of past the village discussion, right? But Patrick McGowan even like learned about this shooting location in another shooting. That's right. Yeah. So featured in an episode of Dangerman, which is why they knew about it in the first place. Right. And you can imagine that when he's wanting to make this show, that he's basically the showrunner for, even though that wasn't really a term right at the time. He was like, okay, well, who do I know? Who do I think would be good? I mean, to contact people from like these prior, you know, spy shows that he'd been on. Yeah. A lot of folks carry over from Dangerman. This was written by, so this particular episode, there's a lot of writers and a lot of directors on each of these things. This is written by David Tomblin, who is maybe the most prolific first assistant director of all time. Worked on Return of the Jedi, worked on Superman, worked on a ton of different stuff. But he and George Markstein collaborated on the script for this episode. George Markstein was a story editor on Dangerman, I was a script editor for the first 13 episodes of The Prisoner. Right. And she, yes, points him to the phone. She's wearing a pen. She is number 104, according to this pen. Notably, Patrick McGowan's character will later have a pen that says number six on it. Does not have it yet. Right. She's just wearing this like all black suit, right? So he's very sort of representational, almost like a caricature of a person. He's like a silhouette of a person and every man. So okay. So he gets pointed to the phones, he goes to the phones. This is when we get this voice over. So he comes to make this phone call, you know, we hear somebody over the line. Talk about this phone. The phone is incredible. We've got an image. Yeah. Please you. Cordless. Cordless. Yeah. That's new. When did cordless phones get invented? I don't know. I'm gonna fail this dust. All right. When or cordless phones invented. 1956. Okay. But not popularized. Not commercially available until 1980. Mm hmm. This is 1967. Right. He picks this thing up and he looks at it and he's like, what the hell? But he still real. He still recognizes it as a phone, right? Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, because it's shaped mostly like a fore-own. It's sort of like a weird curved L. Right. And this is hand in hand with all the weird spy stuff that has been going on, right? Totally. By going on, I mean also in Danger Man, also in the other shows of its ilk, weird phones, weird ways of like demonstrating technology by changing everyday objects. Right. And we are, we hear our first voice, which is Phinella Fielding. She will voice, will not see her on screen, but she will voice basically all the technology in the village. And he calls for a taxi. Right. Right. We get Barbara Yuleng, who is the taxi driver, aka number 18. She gets up there and then she immediately speaks to him in English. He doesn't respond because he's sort of again, so out of depth here. But then she tries French, right? Right. He gets in, they try to like go as far as, you know, take me as far as you can basically even though she says she's only local, she keeps on saying. And she says, oh, you know, we get all sorts here. I thought you might be Polish or a Czech, right? Right. Which is fascinating because at the time this is the other side of like the iron curtain, right? Exactly. Yeah. As you know, you might have inferred from her name, this is a Singapore Chinese born actress. Yep. You know, a driving a taxi in, in a show made in, in Britain. Yes. But again, in universe, who knows where it's supposed to be. Right. Right. But like that particular casting her gesturing it like, oh, you might be one of these sorts of things. And I wasn't sure which gestures that like this weird, like where on earth am I atmosphere that this thing has. Yeah. And it would be nice if the, the casting remained it so, you know, multi ethnic, multinational, it will not. Yeah. It's going to be an extremely white show. Yeah. Um, they, I think they wisely do that here at the very beginning of, you know, the first episode. Right. Um, definitely not as consistent as it might otherwise have been. Yeah. It would have been nice. Um, so it's sort of this gestural notion of like, yeah, we have people from all over. Even if in practice, basically everybody is from the UK, uh, um, so then, you know, gets out, only gets to the edge of the village. She asked for some credits. He doesn't have any credits. She says, okay, pay me next time. And then she says be seeing you. Mm hmm. This is our first be seeing you, Brendan. It's true. Um, if you know anything about the prisoner, you've probably heard the expression be seeing you. Um, it's, um, it is ubiquitous. It is something that, it is something that Maguen's character picks up on as like a particular mannerism, not just of this taxi driver, but of practically everyone else that he comes across as he continues throughout the village. Yep. And there's a gesture with it, right? Yeah. So you sort of like you have your, your hand and basically like an okay symbol and then you sort of like move it downwards, right? Right. Um, and you know, you can read that in lots of ways. It's sort of evocative of an eye, obviously, but it's also evocative of a six. Oh, yes it is, yes it is. And that's really interesting. We'll talk about this more as we go on, but I just wanted to call it out here. Yeah. I had definitely thought of it as almost like a microscope or maybe a telescope kind of. Totally. Um, embodiment of, you know, not merely, I will see you later, but I will continue seeing you. Yeah. Yeah. I have this lens on you. Yeah. I will, I will surveil you at all times. Yeah. It's fantastic. It's just a clever little cultural thing they invented for this space. Yeah. So he ends up in this shop, uh, where the shopkeep, uh, who is being played by, blah, blah, blah, blah, I have this down, uh, Dennis Shaw, uh, who mostly played villains, uh, who again danger man Avengers, that's going to be a classic through line. Uh, he's number 19, uh, this is our first recurring character, uh, besides the voice on the phone. Right. And when we first get into the shop, uh, before number 19 sees number six, he's speaking in Italian, I think. I think so. It's Italian or it's Maltese. Maybe I'm not entirely sure. Um, but as soon as he sees number six, he drops it. Uh, and I think that's really interesting given earlier, the taxi driver trying to speak to him in French. Right. Yeah. I think, um, people don't necessarily all know about number six, but everyone does seem to be aware that there's someone new that is here, perhaps gesturing again to that staying in your homes until you get the all clear kind of bulletin. Well, there's, there's this other thing too, um, we'll get back to this. So maybe I, we won't touch on it too much, um, but it's unclear at this point how many people are staff and how many people are also prisoners in the village. Yes. But the prisoner number six is not the only one for sure. That's textual in the show. We'll, we'll meet some more later. Yeah. There's a real quality to all of this that feels a little like being at Disney world before they opened the gate, the gates where, oh, these are the people who are employees of this place, um, and who need to address me in character, because that's the kind of gig that they have signed up for. Right. Right. Um, and just like Disney, some of those people are being held against their will, right? But it's, it's this really interesting bit where it's unclear if number 19, the shopkeeper, if he knows that number six is another prisoner, because number six doesn't come in with a pin. He doesn't have a number. That's true. And the only other people we see without numbers are staff. Mmm. Very good. Very good. So there's this moment of being like unsure, like, Oh, I'm speaking Italian. I need to be speaking English and for the people who run this place because like that's the thing that they want to be able to hear and understand. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, you just read it a little bit before, but he's wearing, um, all black. At this point, he will change to an outfit that becomes basically his iconic outfit for most of the show, which is an outfit that is shared by his nemesis that is shared by the people that are working against him, as opposed to the much more colorful, um, parasol. Yeah. Yeah. The stuff that everyone else is wearing. The wall. Yeah. The wallies of the village. Yeah. So there's this, even in this moment, even in like what now? Like the third scene or something, um, past the intro, uh, there's this interesting alignment of the people who own this place and operate this place with this guy, right, uh, which again, like it feeds into this earlier reading I brought up. Yeah. There's definitely this feeling of wanting to bring McGowan's character on board or at least treat him as if he is already on board. Totally. Uh, so I think there's not much, uh, with this sort of early escape attempts at this point, right? There is, uh, he's tries to get a map. It doesn't work. He asked for a bigger map. It doesn't work. It's kind of a gag. Right. It is. It's very mischievous. There's a lot of mischief in this show. Um, there's some very, very good signage, um, see, he's looking at the, um, map, um, which seems to be like a prototype touchscreen kind of thing, uh, earlier, um, it has a couple of very good labels on it. First of all, it has free information up at the top, uh, which, you know, you could read into that a couple of different ways, but it also has a very good thing for the button prompts, which is push and find out. Yeah. That's good. Uh, and then the map that he gets of the village is very literally just, uh, labeled your village with things like the fountain, the, the mountains, the shore, that nothing has a proper name of any kind. Yeah. It's incredible. It's such a good map. So okay. So he basically gives up at this point, and he goes back to the place that he woke up in. Um, and it's here that he gets a phone call from number two, our first number two. Oh, what do you mean our first number two? Well, even in this episode, the adjuster that in the, uh, the summary, uh, the numbers who's get swapped out very regularly will have a view number two that will show up in more than one episode. But generally speaking, this is a one in one out. Each episode has its own sort of, you know, villain for number six to contest with or attempt to defeat. This is a really, really smart, really, really innovative way, I think, to both keep this, this idea that this is a show that has one location that has an ongoing story about this guy's attempt to get out of here. Sure. You could try and make a show like that. But again, this is 1967 and there are certain expectations of what the show was going to be like in order to, what the show needed to be in order to get it on television, right? This is your gesturing before Lou grades, um, exertions on the show. I don't know how much of this, uh, came for production or how much of it was McGooin's idea. It was not something that I could really pin down quite as well. But whoever came up with it, it's ingenious. You have what amounts to a villain of the week show, but the villain is effectively the same person, same where it is, yeah, it is the role of the prison award, right? Yeah. And you have, um, number six's struggles against that particular character. And again, you know, you gestured before we're going to be here for the whole show. It is not a show where McGooin gets out and then hunts down wherever the real control place is, right? It happens in the village the whole way through. And so you need something in order to give the hero some wins along the way, right? Otherwise you just have this building action and you might be able to get away with something like that nowadays, but certainly in the more, um, episodic stuff that 1960s audiences were used to, um, you needed to have a beginning and middle and an end that the hero could triumph against in these sorts of things. And this gives you this avenue to get a win against the bad guy. Even if your overall pro, uh, progress is still stymied. Right. And, and we'll, you know, Bren's already gesturing at it, but in later episodes, we'll get really explicitly like, uh, this number two got deposed because of number six, right? Uh, this is a clear, a clear win. Other times you'll be more like, Oh, this number two is looking to actually get a promotion of some sort, right, or be moved on to some sort of other project that's only gestured at. This number two has a particular experiment that he thinks this will be the way to crack number six. I've got the big idea. Uh huh. Or, or sometimes they don't even really care about number six. Like there's number two is that have completely other focuses, which is awesome. Um, anyway, so, uh, speaking of number two, uh, we, we, you know, number six gets summoned to this, uh, central location, uh, this green dome, uh, that will become a common place that we go to throughout this series. Uh, before we even meet, uh, our number two, is this the first time we get the butler around? Yes, it is. So, yeah. Control room is basically in number two's quarters and the butler, right, let's number six in. Yeah. That's almost, that's almost true. The door opens automatically. Right. The door is in the village open automatically. That'll be important later. Again, technology, um, uh, being used at the time. Uh, technology, they, they did not have at the time, but it is being used for what is arguably, you know, a very vain, um, purpose. Right. Um, so we see Angela Muscat, aka the butler, um, as I just heard at earlier, uh, he's one of the few people who don't have a number. So he's just called the butler in the scripts. Um, Angela Muscat, uh, was an oomba lumba, uncredited. Uh, he won't come and talk with factory was in magical history tour. Well, to clarify, to clarify, he was an actor. Yes. He was an actor. He was an actor. He was an actor. He was. Yes. Yes. That's right. Um, and, and so like, uh, he's been in all these things, uh, and he doesn't speak at all, uh, through basically, I think the whole run, uh, but he has such an incredible, like dower expression, um, and even as the number two's change, he'll remain. So he's actually really integral to like give a consistent iconography or a consistent, like visual representation of like the forces of the village. Well, one of the very few recurring characters, one of the few, um, um, characters in the village that don't seem to be necessarily on one side or the other. Right. He's a functionary. He's a functionary, but is not antagonistic to number six in the way that, uh, the cloying number, number two's happened to be, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a great point. He feels almost like a referee. Like he's going to play by the rules of the game. Right? Exactly. Um, and now we meet our first number two. We heard his voice earlier. Uh, this is Guy Dolman. Uh, he was probably best known as count. I don't know how to say this name Lippy, uh, in thunderball, the bottom of Lippy. I guess. I don't know. L-I-P-P-E. Uh, yeah. So he's like, he's not like the main villain. He's like one of some of the writers of, yeah, um, no Hugo tracks, I think, is no. Is that? Hang on. And an important part of the show where Brennan attempts to Google inside his own mind, been my mind palace. Mm hmm. It's inside of volcano. Uh huh. Yeah, obviously. Nope. Largo. Amelia Largo is the bad guy. There we go. Here we go. Here we go. Here we go. There we go. There we go. There we go. He go tracks is the bad guy in moonbreaker. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, from here we get this really exciting scene. Um, what a joy this scene must have been of just like number two and number six, doing sort of a battle of wills are first of many that we're going to see. And number two has this, this phenomenal little ploy where he has the butler bring out number six is breakfast. Mm hmm. There's again, this mischievous thing you mentioned of like, he asks number two, like, oh, how do you take your tea? How do you take your breakfast, et cetera? But he already knows the answer and he's unveiling these things as number two or number six is giving the answer. This is little like, we already know all the answers to these things. Yeah. Deeply, deeply, um, uh, insidious form of questioning. Yes. Uh, and then there's this fun little ploy where he like brings out, you know, these files, right, uh, which have like number six is birth date and these other things on them. Mm hmm. Actual childhood pictures of Patrick McGowan pictures from his past career. And then he has this very insidious thing where he reveals that they were already watching him. They had a spy camera, like in the apartment or in the, the home or whatever that we see number six in at the beginning in the intro. Just yours, uh, at moments in his career, uh, moments of sickness, moments of uncertainty that for all intents and purposes, no one should have had any kind of access to. Right. Uh, but then there's the pitch, like the thing that this whole show is about. Mm hmm. Number two wants to know why did he really resign? Right. Right. And how does never sex is fun to that, Brendan? Yeah. He does not like the idea one bit, uh, says it is none of your business. I resigned, uh, and in doing so, um, I've, I, I have forsaken any kind of obligation to own up to anything that I do ever. Right. Basically. I'll not be stamped, filed, numbered, et cetera here. What's the actual full thing? I want a good quote, um, I will not make any deals with you. I've resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own. Yeah. And of course he's already been given number six by this point. He has. He hasn't realized it yet, but we've seen it on the door to his place. As far as they are concerned, he is already a part of the system. He's also been filed, right? We literally see his, you know, resignation being filed at the beginning. Mm hmm. He has been all of these things already and yet he refuses. Right. Um, he makes no attempts to defend his actions whatsoever. He, um, simply says that it is a thing that he did and he has no need to defend, uh, the manner in which he did it, the abruptness of it, he said that he is on, um, our side, I believe he says, uh, you know, he is not a traitor of any sort. He is right, um, fulfilled the, the, the needs of his office, uh, which again, we learned as in security of some sort, um, yeah, number two mentions, you had such an illustrious career. Yeah. Like why throw it away? Like that's where the suspicion is coming from to resign out of the blue, right? And it's, and from the pro, their perspective, the villagers perspective, who is like, had him being watched, like clearly for years, exactly. This is, this was surprising in a way that was alarming, right? And that meant that they had to bring it in, uh, number two says it is my job to check your motives. Um, and in making the pitch says you may even be given a position of authority, uh, which suggests that he is not going to get to leave when he turns over this information is that his situation is going to become more comfortable. Right. Yeah. And there's a very like, oh, old boy, like, let's all just be chums from this first number two. Let's don't make this hard. I, I, I can get what I want from you. It'll take a long time. It'll be very painful. Let's just, and maybe actually I take that back a, I don't think he is making over threats just yet. No, no, he makes it clear that there's a process and if he forces him to go through with the process, then he will and he could save himself a lot of trouble by just saying what it is right now. Right. Uh, but of course he refuses and number two, he basically takes the refusal in stride. Yeah. He says, okay, well, let me give you a tour. Right? Let me show you around the place. Oh, please. Let's, uh, a couple of things before we get to the tour. Um, one in going to, uh, number two's place, we hear, um, uh, the music, the music is terrifically rendered. So it takes, uh, done of the original theme song, if nothing else, please go, if you're not watching along with the show and I get it, I get it, but if you're not watching along with the show, please go look up the intro to the show because the opening theme is just terrific. Um, and there's a bunch of really, really good incidental music, uh, as things go on. Most notably, uh, in this particular instance, there is a, uh, version of pop goes the weasel that plays, this will be a thing that comes back over and over again. So I wanted to make sure we call it out, um, I'm not sure it means yet, but it definitely means something. Well, it's, I think it's part of the general sort of like, um, the, the sort of playful vibe that the village tries to give itself. Yeah. Right. Um, it's, it's a very sort of like you've been brought to this storybook place. It's almost childish place. Right. Again, very Disney world, right? Every Disney world, everything's colorful, everything's bright, everything's just sort of nice. You can do it. Whatever you like. Yeah. You don't have to even have to really pay for your taxi ride. Don't worry about it. Yeah. Um, we've heard the announcement horn at least, uh, once by now, um, the lady has gotten on the horn. Um, this actually ties in with what I was, uh, talking about earlier with schedule and with, uh, routine, this is animal crossing, this is more, this is Isabelle getting on the horn when you first log into Animal Crossing and saying, thank you for coming back to the island. Today is a holiday. There will be fireworks at three o'clock. It's true. There's strawberry ice cream available. This is logging in and getting to see what there is to do with the day. How to spend your time in a nice, pleasant, cozy way. If Vanilla Fielding had like lived long enough for it, she would be an incredible Isabelle. Great. Yeah. I'm willing to listen to the world. Uh, if only. I'm using the phone. No, like, uh, I'm, I'm creating a 3D model of her, like Tarkin and, um, Leia in a, uh, Rogue one. Oh, good. Yeah. A reference everyone can get behind everyone hated that a couple of other things before the tour. Yeah, please. Let's talk about this control room. Oh, it's beautiful. It's the most sci-fi Bond villain set. There's so much going on in this village. There's this weird, Baroque, Italian seaside stuff around town. And then when you go inside, you have the first, you have the entrance way, which is like this nice London apartment kind of thing. And then past that, past the sliding door, um, not a, not like a, um, uh, left and right sliding door, but like an automatic, like, yeah, opening door. Yeah. You have this round spherical room, uh, with these round chairs with these panels in the floor that can slide open and let chairs and tables zoom in. There are these enormous projection screens on the sides. Yep. It's deeply, deeply like it reminds me, um, uh, a lot of a, uh, thunder ball, uh, moon raker to total cultural touchstones that it was important that I look up just a moment ago. Uh huh. It's, it's very Bond villain, right? It's like the weird is technological, uh, center from which this weird mastermind orchestrates their plans. Yeah. But it's also very, again, like toy, like, very like playful, like number two clearly has fun pressing the buttons and like, oh, he explicitly says like, I'm sorry, I can never resist doing that. Yeah, exactly. Um, we'll get more of the sort of toy addictness in these spaces a little bit later on. Uh, there's also something sort of inexplicable in here. Oh, yeah. Uh, what is it? I don't know which, which part you're referring to cause there's, I think there's several things you could be mentioning. Sure. Uh, I was thinking of the penny farthing. Oh, sure. Yeah. The penny farthing. Right. The penny farthing. Matthew. Well, it's a big old bicycle, as they say in UK. Come on down to big bills, penny farthings where we got the biggest bicycles in town. Yeah. So it's, it's in here like a prop, like a statue, um, and it's, it's like, uh, sealed to the floor. Yeah. It's like an apartment. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, it's, it's a bizarre thing. But it is a, uh, a visual that we will see multiple times in terms of like the penny farthing held in place like this. Oh, yeah. We've seen it before on the number of badges that people are wearing. Yep. And we'll see it in the end credits, right? Yep. Um, the, we haven't mentioned it yet, but, um, as part of the like publicity for the beginning of the prisoner, they like had a, had a showing of it for the press, uh, in which afterwards McGowan did like, um, an interview where he was in like a prison cage with a penny farthing. Huh. Uh, and like a bizarre outfit and the press could like ask him questions that he just would respond with surreal nonsense. Great. Good. Legendary. What a guy. I know. What a guy. Uh, what a guy. Uh, I have another quote here, uh, this is on the subject of the penny farthing. Uh, uh, this is McGowan in an interview from 83, it brought images to my mind of a very elegant period. If you remember those old etchings with the penny farthing and the gentleman beautifully dressed, seated atop the big one of the two, the penny, wearing a top hat mustache, all that sort of thing, the fine patent leather shoes on those wheels. It was an era of elegance and the penny farthing was used to symbolize progress, which is an ironic comment, I hope, on the fact that progress perhaps goes too fast for us sometimes, and we're not able to catch up with it. Yep. Now, this is a quote taken, um, you know, 20 years after the fact, after the show had been released and had become even, you know, in those 20 years, an object of much consideration. Yeah. Cool. Classic, basically instantly. Right. And, uh, I think of much discussion, is this what McGowan was thinking when he put the penny farthing in, in the first place, impossible to say, but this is what he said about it later. Yeah. Yeah. And it's in keeping with this sort of like, um, the perspective we already have in the show of like the people with this advanced technology are evil. Right. Uh, like even his old bosses, right, like there's a reason why he resigned, uh, even if they are not aligned as sort of his maybe suggested, uh, by the people of the village, with the people of the village, uh, any, any sort of advanced technology is in the hands of people that Patrick does not want us to align herself with. I think one of the things that really, really comes, it, I think one of the things that is really clear in the use of the penny farthing as this model for technology is that it is a symbol of technological progress that is also whimsical. Right. Totally. It matches this idea of, oh, technology is this interesting thing that can be used to help make our lives easier and more pleasant and is sort of silly looking, right? It's got the big one. Totally. It's kind of silly. Right. But in that playfulness is itself insidious in some way, right? Yeah. Yeah. And then for it to be locked down, right? Like he is here. Exactly. On move. It's great. You want to talk about the tour? You want to talk about the tour? Uh, I kind of don't want to talk about the tour. Uh, I kind of want to jump past the tour, but there is a couple of things that we might want to just mention about the tour. There's a couple of interesting things about the tour. One, it's in a helicopter. It is an helicopter and it's a really cool helicopter. It looks so cool. It's like clear all around. It's got these like these really wide, uh, this really wide base so that it can like land on the beach, right? Uh, it's a, it's a really fascinating vehicle. I did not look up what type of helicopter this is. Me neither. I'm not a helicopter guy. I see a helicopter. I'm like, wow. Cool helicopter. Yeah. Um, okay. This is on the prisoner wiki. Thank you, prisoner wiki. Thank you, prisoner wiki. We salute you. This is from France. Thanks France. Actually take it back. Sude aviation SE, maybe special edition, 31, 30 Alouette two or do as they would say. As they would say in that funny old French. We love the French. Mm. I'm so sad. All right. Oh, that's right. You live in Canada. I do. I always forget this. Yeah. It's famously forgettable. I'll edit this out. This is nothing. Who's who's, uh, so two things, two things to note about the, the tour. Yeah. It's a cool helicopter. Great helicopter. Butler's flying the helicopter. Uh huh. He does it all. He does it all. He's so good. I love Angela. He brings in the eggs and the toast and he flies the helicopter. Uh, and the, I think the other cool thing. I don't know what other thing you were thinking about here. It was the, it was the, it was the butler. I'm sure. I was just going to point out that they talk about in the tour that they like have their own city council basically. They're okay. So yeah, they talk about a lot of, um, stuff here that really sets up the tone of the thing in a way that we've sort of already described in the, yeah, the thing is a functioning village. It has stores, shops, they have a very funny line here where it says, uh, uh, number two says we have our own newspaper. We have everything. Water, electricity. Mm. The two things that you absolutely have to have. Yeah. Of course. But then he does keep talking. Yes. He has a new, they have a newspaper. They have a council that is elected. They have a social club. They have their own graveyard, which is very obvious. Yeah. And number six famously says of the newspaper, oh, you must send me a copy. Right? Absolutely. Uh, it's, it's really fun because it, in this scene, this is the first scene that we're seeing number six in a mode that we're going to see him in a lot as the series progresses, which is he's sort of bemused, right? He's playing the game, he's playing the social game. Um, he's not taking it all that seriously, as opposed to earlier where he was like desperate to get out and then like a fronted and terrified almost, but in a sort of angry response way at the amount of information they already had on him. Right. And almost as if discovering that this is a place that is under someone's control. He doesn't know under who's control, whether it's the west, the east, something else. But in understanding that he is, he has been trapped by some sort of organization, has given him the comfort to go back into spy mode to be like, all right, I'm, I'm going to be the, the coy rogue who needs to talk to the villain, but is not going to play the game. Yeah. Yeah. So we're doing information, right? He's, he can see his, at this point, he can see our route to escape because he's like, if there's a structure involved, I can manipulate this structure. Right. Uh, so then we land, we land the, the tour ends, uh, and we get this phenomenal scene. This is the scene with the most villagers in it. A lot of folks, a lot of folks. They're all in, again, as we gestured at, these sort of like rainbow parasols and stripes and scarfs and hats all with little numbers. In contrast to earlier, everyone is going about their day, right? There are people, um, there, there is a very, there's a, a hum of industry here that, that wasn't there prior. And one thing that really struck me about this is that this is not a communist utopia. Right. This is a place where you need credit in order to buy things. Yep. Um, and there are tiers of social status, right? Yep. There are workers. There are people that are clearly like, um, gentry. There are nobles. Right. There are people that are clearly more important and better off than others. Yep. Um, and everyone gets along as one big, happy family, but it is not because the, because social status has been flattened. Is because people have places and they have been, um, situated in those places. Yeah. It's interesting because later on in the series, it'll be gestured at that like number six does not have a job. Yeah. Um, in the village, but number six will not want for anything. No, absolutely not. And we're going to meet other prisoners who that is not true for. Exactly. Who do have to work for things, um, so there's this great bit in this scene where it just sort of just basically to show off his ability or his control over this place. Number two just tells everybody to stop, right. And there had been like a band playing people have been walking around a fountain, right? There's basically a parade going on and immediately everybody stops and it goes silent. Uh, it goes silent. It's so good. Um, except poor old Wollie, poor old Waldo, poor Waldo, uh, this guy is uncredited. I have no idea who this actor is. And it's not even necessarily clear what he's doing. No, it's not. I, I kind of almost thought, again, you know, thinking about these people as like master manipulators, we've like planned out this whole thing already that he might have even been a plant. Sure. Like we want you to run after I say stop because what he wants to demonstrate is Rover. Hey, Brendan, what's Rover? God. So. Yeah. All right. I shared at the technology in the show how there's things that are represented there. Pretty realistically so far. Pretty realistically. There's moving doors. There's robot arms that can drop off files for you. There's cordless phones. There's touch screens. One of the things that they decided that they wanted in this show was some sort of high tech security system. Right. They wanted a robot that can go anywhere over water through the air up walls. It can go anywhere and it can neutralize anyone. Yep. And they even originally built like a really complex prop for this, right? They sure did. I think, you know, we talked before about UFOs being in the zeitgeist at the time. I think a UFO like drone basically is what would go very, very early drone. Yeah. And it immediately broke. Well, it not only immediately broke, it looked like garbage. Yeah. It was basically like a go cart with like a parade float draped over top of it. Yeah. With weird flashing lights that looked like a go cart with a thing draped over it. You couldn't see out of it. My understanding is they might have broken it deliberately so that they couldn't use it. Mm. That's interesting. Yeah. And so they were stuck with this problem of we need to have this autonomous security thing that needs to look otherworldly. Right. And through an interesting sort of quirk, they saw some weather balloons and realized that under the right circumstances, you could have this strange white sphere and attach a nylon thread to it such that you could move it exactly where you need it to move. And because if you pumped the exact right combination of hydrogen and oxygen into it, so that it was buoyant, but it wouldn't just fly away into the air, that you would have this bizarre looking thing, this strange like sphere that you could drag along and they could hit things that was to be clear, like a balloon bigger than a man. Oh, yeah, yeah. But they also have lots of different rovers, right? This like white, weather balloon, weird white orb. And so rover will also be different in size as they need it to be. So not clear in the show if every time we see a rover, if it's a distinct entity, right? Right. It's not even like named, really? Not until much later, certainly not in this episode. And so it's not clear is this is like a class of things or if this is just an individual thing. But in this scene, all we see is that the fountain, there's been a fountain in the middle of the scene the whole time sort of starts up again. And we see this like white balloon balanced on top of the fountain, which increases in size and then sort of bounds over to this running Waldo man and crushes him. We get this incredible shot where like the camera is filmed through the like nylon or latex or whatever it is that makes up this balloon surface as it like suffocates him. Yeah, it's it has this monastic choir and a drony scream attached to it. It looks yeah, it is bizarre to witness. Yeah, it's it's almost like the like the T Rex, like Roars in Jurassic Park. Yeah, yeah. I don't know if it holds up in 2024. I don't even know if it really held up in 1967, but it is definitely strange and people play it pretty straight in the show as oh, totally straight. This ball is a thing that you have to watch out for. I think that really works. I'm a big fan of any time you have a villainous thing or a scary thing adding something that's a little bit silly to it. Sure. Certainly it fits with the mischievous nature of the whole thing. Exactly. Like if this was themed like a like a little creature with sharp things, like it just doesn't work. That's not what the vibe here is or like a like a humanoid robot perhaps. No, totally. That would not work at all. Yeah. And it's the fact that and like the fact that everybody is silent, like nobody reacts to it. Nobody even acknowledged that this has happened. Yeah. The fact that the guy dies, everyone just goes back to what they were doing. It's incredible. It definitely has this feeling of like unreality, this like moment of like magical realism poked its head through the show. Number six asks, what was that? And number two says that would be telling. Oh, I love it. Yeah. Well, I think at this point, right, we get six heading on back to to his his his a boat. I don't know what you want to call it, his apartment. Yeah. And this is where I think we get the third architectural style that is worth calling out. This is a really stylish apartment for the time. This is like very like big spacious interior sort of minimalist Danish or Swedish furniture style, sunken sitting space. Yep. Really, really minimalist in a way that was very chic for the time. Yeah. This is again, in contrast to the sci-fi interior control room, but also this weird like old fashioned style of the exteriors of the village. This is like what at the time would have read as very, very posh, right? This is a very, very stylish place for someone like number six to be imprisoned. Yeah. There's a real sense that like they picked this place for him designed for so he would be comfortable. Right. And likewise, like it is up to date as of 1967, right? It is not the sort of place that they built and have just kept for the past five or six years. It is a place that is with the times. Right. But there's an interesting incongruity with us like reading this is like a very pleasant place, which is that they're piping in music. Yes, they are. This is like the third kind of music that we're going to get here. This is like classical music. I don't know what piece it is. Do you know what piece it is? I do not. Yeah. Who knows? Free to use thing that the BBC had like records of or something. Yeah. And, and this pisses him off so much. Right. Because we can hear the music, but so can he because this is like diegetic music that is happening here. Again, this is Disney World, right? This is you turn the corner in Adventureland and there's music playing out of a rock or something like that. Right. And he gets so angry that he smashes up the speaker that he thinks it's coming out of. And the music is still playing. Uh-huh. And so he does all this ridiculous things like the cans in his kitchen, like he's just desperate to make the music stop. Yeah. He's shaking them. We get a shot of the control room, of course, monitoring his activities as he's listening to each of the cans. The cans have generic labels on them in the font that the village uses of spaghetti and beans and peas. With the penny-farthing on them, right? Of course, of course. And I think it's this point that we first see number 28, the supervisor. This is in the control room. Not the-- Oh, not that control room. Not the headquarters, but the observation center. Got it. Yeah, yeah. This is the place with the big, um, uh, uh, seesaw. Right. So this is the point where we meet the supervisor then. Uh, this like, fun-looking, bold character, um, he is played, ball night, boop, boop, boop, uh, Peter Swanwick, uh, he was also also in the Avengers and Danger Man. He is number 28, uh, so he's one of these numbered, numbered staff members. Another recurring character. Another recurring character. So between, uh, the supervisor and the butler are two, like, antagonists who will keep showing up. Right. Um, do we want to go back to the aptitude test, which we skipped over? Oh, yeah. The aptitude test is important. Yeah. Um, yeah. Oh, and the aptitude test is important for several reasons. Yeah. Do you want to set up the scene here? Sure. Um, so after Rover, the tour that number two has been taking number six on sort of ends in this examination room, um, right, there's, uh, seats and there's, uh, administrator of some kind and there's some sort of weird, um, spokes and gears, uh, apparatus, like Tinker Toys. It's like Tinker Toys. Yeah. Uh, what does this person ask? He asks, um, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, he basically asks, uh, number six, or attempts to ask at least questions about who he is, the, about his past, what sort of things he likes. What he doesn't like, like, yeah, um, he asks what his aspirations are and he's playing political beliefs. Well, he finally, he asks his political beliefs and never six just trashes, whatever this thing is, right? His Tinker Toys said it's so sad. He hits it so hard on it, uh, he hits it and knocks it off the thing and stomps out of the room. He's not going to submit for any kind of questioning no matter how innocuous it might seem. Right. You're right. And that's how we get back to his room. But, uh, we should stay here for a second. So this is, uh, Christopher Benjamin, uh, the labor exchange manager, um, and what's really interesting about this actor is that he'll actually be, uh, cast multiple times in the prisoner. Oh. Yeah. So he's going to keep coming back. Um, there's a big notable case, uh, but we can, at this point, I think, introduce reading number two, uh, which was a reading very, very popular even at the time, which is that number six is Drake from Danger Man that they are exactly the same character. Right. That this was, you know, the main character of Danger Man resigning, just as Patrick McGowan resigned from that show, right, said he would no longer make, uh, Danger Man and going on to make the prisoner just as the character in the fiction is pulled into the village. Now, of course, in the lead up to the prisoner, lots and lots of people speaking, interviewing McGowan said, so this is John Drake, right? And McGowan would say over and over again, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's not necessarily. I am the leading man and I am playing a sort of spy character in sort of an episodic sort of thing. But, oh, it's not John Drake. This is something new. Um, and of course, everyone else, um, was sort of taking their cues from McGowan along the way. Right. And sort of repeating that, that script, um, including, you know, behind closed doors to the media, that sort of thing. So a famously rebuffed kind of theory, at least before the show came out. Right. Um, we also went past it, uh, but the waiting room has these great posters in it. Yes, it does. Uh, questions are a burden to others, answers a prison for oneself. A still tongue makes a happy life. Mm hmm. Incredible. There's also a sign, um, outside before Rover, uh, saying walk on the grass. Yeah. That's true. That's like a sign that Joker would put up that is you think about the village is kind of twisted. Oh, man. It's kind of a Joker fight. Yeah. Um, okay. So let's, let's jump forward a bit. So he, he runs away, runs off. Um, he questions, uh, uh, uh, gets back. There's a, a maid who's this like, you know, uh, pretty blonde lady, Stephanie Randall. Uh, she's best known as playing. So what do you name? Uh, breaded jorgons and the newcomers, the sitcom on the BBC that lasted a long time. Um, number 66, uh, which is interesting, right? Sure. Uh, cause he's number six. Um, and she like sorts of tries to come on to him and he's like your services are not needed here. She like runs off in a huff. Um, he finds a calendar, which has already been filled out for him. Uh, no, it doesn't have a date, it just says today. And it says, uh, uh, you know, or just arrived, made to feel very welcome. And don't forget to send thank you note for flowers at earnest. Uh, uh, they filled it up for him. It's just this beautiful little bit of control. Right. Yeah. So of course they are observing, um, uh, the whole interaction as it goes down after she runs out, um, I believe, uh, what's the number of the, um, observation supervisor? Yeah. Uh, number 28, number 28, number 28, I believe says, um, oh, I thought her performance is like quite well. She almost got him to talk, uh, right, which I think is particularly funny, uh, reviewing it now is that I think her performances would probably the weakest in the entire of the episode. It is. It's a very theatrical in the way that old sixties TV was, um, yeah, notably the bit he's responding to is actually when she comes back, right? Right. And she is like, um, please won't you tell me anything? They said they'll let me go if you tell me something. Yeah. Right. So it's almost as if she's coming clean. Right. Uh, after sort of like pretending to be this sort of, you know, come hither made at first. Right. Um, she claims would've been born in the village. Yeah. It's just fascinating. Weird. Weird idea. Weird idea. We have not seen any children in the village. No. Zero children. Yeah. And, you know, number six, this is not working on him at all, but he's sort of playing along saying, like, you really think they'll let you go and she goes, Oh, you know, I don't know. They might. Yeah. This bit that doesn't work. Right. Um, it's worth maybe just like gesturing here that McGowan was very different sort of, um, kiss, kiss, bang, bang kind of star for the time. Right. Um, you know, that he would not kiss, kiss or bang. And that is to say he did not use guns with very, very rare exceptions, either on this show or as John Drake, and he was John Drake for a very, very long time. He was always insistent that he had very, very particular ideas about what was appropriate family TV entertainment. Yeah. What a hero is, uh, sorry, I thought you meant, uh, yeah, that's what a hero would say. Like Patrick Magoo, no, no, no, it's his notion of what a hero is. Right. Very chivalric. Right. Right. Exactly. Much of like a night. Yeah. And as part of that would not play hanky, hanky with the women who were signed up to be the mistress of the week for John Drake, right, um, we didn't kiss on camera and wouldn't seduce women in order to get ahead as part of the job. Um, yeah, this, this gets a little bit complicated because there are cases where like in danger man, he would sort of seduce someone, but he'd seduce them in even like a very chaste way. Yes. As if he was like, I'm angling for marriage. Um, yeah. We'll come back to that, uh, in maybe one of the more, uh, more, one of the more obviously romantic, uh, episodes of the prisoner, which they do exist. They do exist. It's true. Um, so, ah, yeah, go ahead. Then comes to fix his radio and as soon as he breaks the radio, uh, uh, Isabelle gets on the phone and says electrician's number six, please electrician to number six, uh, vanilla fielding. Yeah. Um, yeah. And we get the electrician who will also be a gardener in the same episode, which is funny. I don't know if it's actually supposed to be the same guy who just has to like do double duty. Don't wait over six reacts. It almost feels like it's the same guy. It's like, yeah, it does. Um, but, but I think that's also part of the ambiguity. So the, the guy who plays this gardener, um, is named, I have it down here, um, Oliver McRavy. Um, so he has this incredible look. He has like no hair on his head, no eyebrows, shaved head. Um, he would usually play like villains and various, again, spy flicks, right? That's the connection here, um, and they have him in this like full body jumpsuit. Uh, and so it also notably, uh, no number on this guy. Yeah. Drives up in a tractor. Um, almost again, uh, keep coming back to Disney World. The way that like maintenance crew would drive up, uh, in, in the back of, uh, one of those lots or something like that. Um, right. Number six asks, uh, uh, I think I'll go for a walk. Well, he, uh, asks about the tractor and points out how slow it is. Right. And the maintenance guy says, uh, in an emergency, we, we walk. Yeah. It's so good. What a good line. Yeah. Um, so then number six decides to at first go for a walk, um, and then he just sort of books it. Yeah. It's, it kind of rules. Um, he runs through this forest. Uh, this forest will show up a lot actually. Uh, it's a common setting for things. He goes by all of these like, um, statue head bus. Uh, there's like a, there's a Buddha. There's like some, like, uh, I think they're supposed to be like famous philosophers or, or authors. Looks lovely. Yeah. Uh, it's not really clear who they're supposed to be. Uh, he, you know, meets Rover in the woods. Uh, importantly, statues have, uh, cameras in their eyes. So. Oh yeah. And they can turn and follow him. Yeah. So immediately headquarters knows that number six is trying to escape. Yeah. And this is when we first get a lot of that observation room. Yeah. Um, uh, this observation room rules, uh, as you mentioned earlier, there's two guys on like a seesaw. Both of them looking into cameras. Yeah. Who knows why it's constantly rotating as well. So just going up and down and rotating and looking into cameras. Yeah. Um, we have, uh, number 28, again, the, the supervisor from before on the phone who's like making an announcement about yellow alert and things like that. Uh, we see him right in projection from the cameras up on screen. Um, it's incredible issues and alert specifically to post 14 by which I think we can derive that there are at least 14 security outposts that have what are basically goons situated at them. Right. Like people, people who are whose job it is is to make sure people don't get away. Right. And at first they are, you know, they're human goons in again, this sort of like tractor or Jeep or almost like, um, like a golf cart. Right. Right. Um, and they come with striped outfits that you'd expect mooks to be wearing. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they're dressed almost identically to like the Wally Waldo guy. Right. Um, it's really funny. Like a whole bunch of people are not credited in this show and that will continue being a thing. Uh, but these two characters are referred to as guardians. Yeah. So we have first and second guardian Peter brace and Keith peacock. Um, I had to work hard to get peak, peak peacocks named by the way, it's like not on IMDB. Hey, I don't know if it was worth it, but I did it. Uh, yeah. So there's this, there's this, there's this little fight. It's a very danger man fight. If you've seen danger man, um, number six is not like, uh, in Patrick McGowan himself. It's not like a trained martial artist. Um, he's more just like a brawler. Yeah. Right. He fights like a boxer sort of, um, but he, he gets the better of these two guys. He gets their tractor. He drives down the beach with it, uh, and then Rover comes and Rover basically knocks him out. Yeah. Basically just hurdles itself at him, um, smothers him alternately, like bouncing on him, like as if it was just like pummeling him over and over again into the sand until he's unconscious. And then a different one of these little jeeps or tractors, whatever comes up, these two guys and all white in this lady who's dressed like a nurse. Yeah. We'll come up, bring him inside. And the next thing we know, we're at the hospital. All of these little cars make the worst noises like they make this terrible, terrible sounds. I think the phone earlier has like the single worst phone ring noise you've ever heard in your life. It's as if they hadn't invented good sounds yet. It is just a reaction. There are good sounds in the show, right? And so I'm sure part of this is production constraints for sure. I know. I think it's just what it was like to be in Britain back then. Okay. Yeah. They just couldn't afford to import all the good sounds. Oh, man, that's not what food probably sucked to. I don't know about that. So the way that we transition, the camera work in general, we've gestured at it a little bit, but the camera work is really good in this little transition. We sort of go from number six's face, he's sort of barely trying to retain consciousness. He goes unconscious and immediately we see a shadow on the wall of this woman in a rocking chair going back and forth. And we pan down. We see a little bit of like a hospital spread and the number six burst out of the bottom of this, the frame, right as he's just come awake. This is characters referred to in the script as the welfare worker. What I find really interesting in this whole hospital sequence is basically nobody has numbers on. Oh, interesting. Yeah. And yet she's very clearly there to watch him. Like that is her job. Oh, for sure. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So she's referred to as the welfare worker, right? Her job is just to like let the doctors know when she wakes up. She's like working on submitting. She has a very villainous vibe. She's a very like Miss. What's the word that I'm looking for? I don't trust her. Yeah. She's not a trustworthy lady. No. This is played by she's put by Fabia Drake big, big trust no energy in energy from this lady. Definitely. And which she leaves the room is when we and number six catch sight of the guy in the bed right next to him. What a coincidence. What a weird coincidence. This is Cobb who number six knew from his former life. We he's originally apparently asleep, but weirdly he wakes up basically as soon as number six like reaches out to him, right? That's shared at by number six's performance as maybe some other spy or an informant or someone else that is in the system in that way, right? This was he's played by Paul Edington, who's been in tons of stuff. He was in the sitcom The Good Life for many, many years, Jim Hacker and Yes Minister and its sequels. He was in an episode of Danger Man in which he plays a Czechoslovakian military man doing a really terrible Czechoslovakian accent. Terrific. Yeah. And so number six wakes him up and Cobb puts on this big, you know, like, oh, I'm so sleepy, I must, I must sleep, I must rest. Oh, I don't have the energy. Oh, poor. What was me? He sort of gestures at losing time here of like being here for weeks of being unsure of how long he's been here for. They've been pressing him for information. Right. And notably, right, that he predates number six's arrival. Right. And supposedly, the story right now is prior to number six's even resigning, they'd already grabbed Cobb, right, and they were already like working him for weeks, right? And we'll get some confirmation later that like, yes, he had in fact been here for at least weeks and that when number six shows up, right, they just happen to be put in the same hospital together. Presumably, whatever they've done to Cobb to try to get the information out of him, having, you know, so grievously wounded him that he like, you know, he has to regain his spirits. Right. Right. If the way that we're talking about this sounds like we're not buying it, you know, just wait a few minutes. Yeah. Wait, what happens? Well, what did you know it? Number six is taken through the hospital and we get some more really fantastic surreal garbage. Yeah. There's the therapy room. Uh-huh. Which is a sort of room bathed and purplish pinkish light. Everyone's sitting around in it as if it's like a sauna or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They all have like blindfolds on and they're all like wrapped up in what looked like almost like straight jackets, basically. The doctor says it's group therapy for guilt, uh, guilt complexes or something like that. Something like that. Yeah. The delivery from the doctor, this is Jack Allen, who also made appearance in danger man, is really fantastic. He does such a good job of like, you know, seeming very reasonable. Yeah. Almost about everything. He's like, okay, I just want to give you a once over and then I'm going to let you on your way. Right? Like I'm not looking to keep you here. Yeah. Very understanding that number six is not on board for the whole village thing. He's just like a doctor and needs to do the doctor thing. That's it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And notably he's a doctor, right? He does not have a number as I mentioned. It's also extremely worth mentioning that number six has like basically a bathroom on this whole scene. Yeah. They pass a guy with diodes on his head, who seems to be very out of it. We're going to get a lot more like dreams and treatment of the mind stuff and feature episodes. Yeah. There's also a lava lamp in the exam room. We get a lot of lava lamps in the show. Well, they're futuristic. Sure. Yeah. And then of course, you know, we get back to the room to find, oh my God, Cobb just jumped out the window. Oh my God. He's dead. Oh my God. He's dead. Oh my God. Wow. We then get the, we immediately get a number two getting dis, sorry, number six getting discharged. We get the outside of the hospital, which is a castle, by the way. Yeah. Very good. It's, it rules one down of a castle, a hospital. This is also in number six is now in his iconic outfit, right when they discharge him. Of course, they've gotten rid of his old clothes. Yeah. It's like giving him his like orientation stuff. They've given him. Yes. Here's your uniform. Here's your number. Here's your pin. Now that you're a member of the village. Yes. Right. He's wearing this sort of like little straw hat sort of thing. He's got like khakis on, he's got like a blue turtleneck and like a black jacket with like some white piping on it, basically. Looks good. He looks good. It's a great outfit. Yeah. I mean, it's very similar to what number two is. Yeah. It is both what the villains wear and unlike everyone else in the village, it is dark. It is right. No longer completely black, but it is all dark as opposed to the umbrella like colors of the rest of the village. Yeah. The rainbow. Yeah. What's also really interesting right is like, assumedly the village people could have given him all of these cards and stuff as soon as he got up. Sure. Number two could have given these did he's. It's almost as if this everything so far has been an orientation. Yeah. Like deliberately getting him off a kilter. Yes. And like now they're like, okay, this is setting you up. This is, you know, from step zero, what being in the village is like. Where's he? Pretty much immediately he throws away the hat and the badge, which is awesome. Yep. Doesn't want to have any bit of it. Where does he go? He runs immediately back to number two's office. That's right. And who does he find there? A new number two. Huh. That's weird. A lava lamp being projected. Yeah. That's crucial. That's just a screensaver. They had to have screensaver. It is a screensaver. Yeah. He just a moment ago had like, you know, he was watching somebody in the village and he like hurriedly switches it to screensaver with number six comes in the room. It's like his parents got there. So this is really interesting. Given what we know of what number two is going to be, what number two's transitions are going to be like later on. Right. So the former number two actually gets a phone call and it sounds like gets told, hey, we're going to replace you with this other number two and seems the medible to it is kind of like, yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Let's do that to try and move forward. Yeah. Yeah. And so it's almost like it. Yeah. Go ahead. No, you go ahead. I was going to say it's to your point earlier, right? It's all about keeping him off kilter. Right. Right. He was so comfortable when he was like, okay, I have the bad guy in my sights. I know what this guy is all about. I'm really going to swap it out. Right. Yeah. It rules. This is Georgia Baker. The new number two. The new number two, he was notably Tiberius in I Claudius. Hey. Yeah. And expector Wexford in the Ruth Rendell Mysteries. Oh. Yeah. Who knows? I don't know what that is. Yeah. I don't know either. He, as opposed to the first number two, who had like this sort of like old boy, chums where friendly here is much more sinister, is much more directly antagonistic, is also like appears to be closer in age to number six, maybe even younger than him. Yeah. So it's a really interesting shift all of a sudden. Right. There's again some classic number six, number two back and forth here, but it's not all that important. And at this point, we're going to go back to briefly to his home and then to Cobb's funeral, which is the next big important scene. This is kind of the pivot point of the episode where it stops being sort of the setup for the whole episode, for the whole series. Yep. And where it sort of goes, okay, we need to give you with the plot of this week's episode is going to be. Yeah. And it really kind of goes into that mode. I would say that even like happens at the hospital. Yeah. I think that's right. As soon as we see Cobb, right? Like that feels like the start of act three. If this, you could really imagine, easily imagine today, you know, this could be three 20 minute episodes, right? Right. And this is like a very distinct part of the show from the hospital to the end. So at Cobb's funeral, by the way, they said they had a cemetery. They don't have a cemetery. They just bury the bodies on the beach. Yeah. I was looking at this. They have these graves and these sand dunes and there are other tombstones out there, but gosh, if it doesn't seem like that's a bad place to put your dead. It's a terrible place for it. There's a marching band as part of the funeral procession. Yeah. Everybody has umbrellas. They're all on the umbrellas are black as opposed to the rainbow umbrellas from before, but everybody's still wearing their rainbow outfit under me. It's a pretty cheery procession, all things considered. Yeah. It's almost like this is all for show. Weird. Close casket. The one part of it, close casket. Of course. Yeah. Well, after the fall, you wouldn't want to look at that. So the important bit here, the one thing that doesn't seem to be entirely a show, is number nine, who we meet. She is very much, despite showing up three-fourths of the way through the episode, she's sort of the other central character in the episode, besides number two and number six. She was, we don't learn this yet, but we learned later, she was an informant, or someone who's working for the village, who was, like the maid from earlier, assigned to Cobb to become friendly with him, quote unquote, and then to gain his secrets that way. Again, like the maid has a number that is reflective of number six. Exactly. Yeah. The exact cause. Surprise, surprise. She's about to become very close to number six. Yes. But, despite being assigned to Cobb to gain information out of him, she really falls for him. Right. Oh, beans. Oh, beans. Dang it. I dang it. I fell for the guy I was supposed to be spying on. Oh, man. This is Virginia Maskell. She was, she's credited as the woman, which I think is really interesting. She is not credited as number nine. She was in danger, man, as the target, or a target that Drake was going after, his daughter. And so Drake ends up having this sort of weird partial seduction of her. That's the daughter of his target. Yes. Okay. There's the specific of the Colonel. He's always going after Colonel's in danger, man. I don't know why. It's just like it's a good, like, ranking for Drake to target. Sure. So I think she actually does a really nice job. I think that she has a really nice job in this episode. Virginia Maskell would sadly, tragically, die young, so she wasn't in a bunch of stuff. That's too good. Yeah. But she has a really nice performance here as, like, very conflicted, right? You can read that clearly in her actions, but she wants to help. I think she also kind of suffers from sort of the theatrical staging of how line reads could happen back then. I don't think she's as bad as the maid from earlier, but she still doesn't come across as nearly as naturalistic as a lot of the other, or at least as number two and number six do. I think she does come across as very immediately sympathetic, which is pretty good given how late the episode she shows up. Yeah. She has, like, 10 minutes of screen time to get you to like her, and I think that they mostly succeed at that. Yeah. So they ended up, like, you know, number six says, "We must meet again after they have this sort of back and forth where she reveals she was close to Cobb, right?" She says, "We mustn't." Yeah. Some classic spy, like, having a furtive conversation where no one else can see you. Or hiding in behind sight. And they end up doing it with sort of an outdoors orchestra, right? Right. Meeting. And yeah, the meeting, the later meeting. Yeah. There's some sort of, like, daily orchestra before. Yeah, just a little concert, you know? It's incredible. And it's here that they give the sort of plan, right? Which is they had a plan, she and Cobb, had a plan to escape, using the helicopter. That you would need a multi-pass. An electro-pass. And sorry, an electro-pass. Oh, it's so good. An electro-pass to get you past the security. Right, of course, obviously. And she says that she does have the electro-pass. He has how she got it. She says, you know, off the previous owner, off the previous pilot, right? And number six does a classic. Number six might just hate women thing of being like, "Oh, you do that for Cobb, too." Yeah. Pretty awful, pretty icky. Number six is not sympathetic in terms of his views on women, I would say. You know, it's worth saying, one of the things that's really interesting about this show is that we are positioned as on number six's side. And number six always comes across as, like, bemused or irritated or angry with the people that are engaged in his imprisonment. But yeah, he doesn't go out of his way to necessarily, like, endear you to the audience in a lot of ways. No. He's put upon and by God, he's going to act put upon. You know, he's right, and he's amusing, and he's mischievous in his own way. But he's not necessarily, like, heroic or likable in the every-man kind of way. You know what I mean? No. I think the closest they get to that is McGowan sort of like, any time number six is like saying philosophy at the camera, right? Right. Like, he wants you to agree with him there, but like, he's a very prickly guy. Yeah. Definitely intentionally. And, you know, to, in his defense, he doesn't know who he can trust in this entire thing. There's a version of this show where he somehow still has, like, a voice in his ear back in HQ or something like that, someone he can try there. He doesn't have anything like that here. And so the only moments where you can really trust that he is being himself is when he's completely on his own. And even then he knows that he's being observed. So. Right. Yeah. It's really interesting. We get a couple of quick, but really important scenes right after it would be the meeting. Oh, by the way, the meeting ends with her saying that she'll get it to him, right? But like, later. Yep. Right. Right. She immediately goes to number two's office to get her next target. Right. Right. She's told, you know, it's a shame about what happens with Cobb, but it won't negatively reflect on you. Don't worry. Right. And then she opens the binder to reveal the headshot of number six as her next target. Of course. Right. It's so good. It's so good. It's, you could see it coming a mile away, but the execution is still fun. And he also has a different lava lamp going into the background. This number two loves lava lamps. We then get the quick shot of number six playing chess with the admiral or the ex admiral. Yeah. Sort of. He was walked past this old folks home earlier. Yes. The island or excuse me, the village does not have children, but it has plenty of elderly. Mm-hmm. He is playing chess with this man by again, very, very missed. The island, the stone boat, again, a piece of transportation technology that cannot move forward. Right. Just this ridiculous play set, basically, that is built ashore next to the resort. Yeah. The ex admiral is played by Frederick Piper, who had a number of side characters in Hitchcock films. Hitchcock really liked using him. Mm-hmm. So he's just in a bunch of them as like with like one scene. Yeah. Yeah. He's great. He's so good that in my memory, he shows up more than once in the show. I also thought that. Yeah. Right? Like he's just like so iconic immediately, right? It feels like you could have him in the background of every episode. He and number six are playing chess and number six says he's gonna take a walk and go down to the ship. Right. He's gonna do this really, really fun thing where the admiral starts whistling, what will you do with the drunken sailor to himself? Yep. Does the first two lines and then the music for the episodes, which is to the rest of the song. Yeah. It's great. Yeah. Another really interesting thing, the ex admiral here has number 66 as well. Oh. Yeah. It's our first case. This is gonna happen a lot of characters having the same number. Hmm. Um. Isn't that some sort of an attitude here? Yeah. Yeah. So I genuinely don't know what to think about it. So at one point, right, like number 66, the, the, the maid from earlier, right, was clearly a plant, right, clearly not a prisoner. And we know that staff don't always get numbers. Right. And so there's this sense of like, oh, let's, you know, let's give their, let's give her number 66. That'll be good. Right. Right. Um, uh, as part of like this bit that this lady who is hired for this job in universe was given to do, um, sort of ignoring the fact they already had a number 66. Right. Right. Um, but there's, again, this other reading where it was just a production thing like, oh, we just had this pin lying around. We use this one. Sure. Right. Um, and I don't know how to read it, but it's interesting and we'll probably keep on coming back. Yeah. Something to keep an eye on. Uh, so from here, we get the climax, right? He gets the electropass. He gets the electropass. It's in the shape of a watch. Of course. It just is a watch. It just is a watch. Yep. Um, he also confronts her and, you know, it gets her to admit that she had been assigned to watch cop, which he had not admitted to him before. Right. And that he, that she is now assigned to him. Right. Um, but he still decides to go for it. Right. Because, you know, yeah, why not? Yeah. Uh, she walks away, notably past Rover, where it was just like in the background for a bit. Um, and he walks on to the helicopter. Uh, again, we get this interesting bit where Rover's just sort of idly going by, but lets him on to the helicopter. Um, and whatever kind of a security job he had, it apparently is one where he could fly a helicopter. Yep. Cause he takes off. No problem. He, he's wearing this thing and Rover is clearly aware of him, but seems to be, um, like confused about what to do about it. Like, it's not attacking, but it's very clearly like something is wrong and I'm not authorized to do anything about it cause you're wearing that watch or some other reason that we'll discover. Yeah. Um, yeah. I think it's, you know, honestly, we talked about it being silly, but one of the other things that this sort of weather balloon form gives you is you can actually be really expressive with it. Deeply. Right. Deeply. It's frenetic, right? Mm hmm. There's this bits where Rover like bounds through. But energy or a lot of purpose, there's this bits where it's sort of like idly moving back and forth as it's fidgeting nervously. It's really good. Takes off in the helicopter. Yeah. And Eric, it's getting escapes. Right? This is the end. This is the end of the industry escapes from the village. Thanks for listening to our podcast everybody. Thank you. No. Wait, hold on. Hang on. I'm looking. I have not actually watched the prisoner before I've got it right now. I've been trying really hard to keep pace. Um, so we get all these great clips, right? These great shots back and forth of, you know, uh, Port Marion, the, the village from the sky as he gets further and further away from it and number two watching and just smiling to himself. Number nine also watching as, uh, she watches as McGowan takes off and the Admiral calls her over and says, uh, here play chess with me. She says she doesn't know how he says you ought to learn. We're all pawns, my dear. Yep. Slowly control with remote control of the helicopter so that it returns to the village once more. All of this, just another lesson that no matter what you might do or who you might think you can trust, there is no escape. Yeah. And as the helicopter touches down, we've been sort of anytime we went to the control room, we were just doing like closeups on number two or like big wide shots. Um, but we see who's standing next to number two and what do you know it? It's calm. Yeah. Weird. Yeah. Weird. Huh. And you know, they sort of talk about this for a little bit. Um, Cobb says that he's looking forward to serving his new masters. Yeah. Uh huh. He's notably wearing this sort of like, you know, suit in a black bowler hat with a black umbrella. Right. Um, he says, oh, please, you know, do be, do be kind to the, the girl, please be kind to number nine. Right. Uh, but we're sort of, the implication is number nine is not long for this world. She's taken out her role, taken, you know, her purpose fulfilled. Um, and right at the end, we get, uh, this interesting little back and forth with number two, uh, where Cobb says goodbye in French, or no, number two says goodbye in French and then Cobb replies in German. Yeah. And that's it. We close on the butler, a shot of the butler walking away from the helicopter pad passed a sign that says residence only, implying of course that the village has no visitors. Yeah. What a strong first episode. So I think it's pretty good, but I think that act three really dampens my, my impressions of it. Sure. I think the first two acts are so strong and in part, part of that is because I know where it's going, sure that this crammed in story with like Cobb and the helicopter escape and all of that is so rushed. It just like, it just does not have the juice compared to everything else. The, I think, yeah, that's fair. Um, and I understand, right? Like you've got to have like some kind of escape attempt here at the end. Right. It just feels awkward the way that it's all positioned for me, I think. So I, I think it's really interesting, um, because the way my brain works, right? Like obviously there's lots of readings of the show. We're going to talk about this a lot, right? We can read it as just like a metaphor of Maguwins, what we would now call libertarianism, right? Or individualism, um, the individual versus society, but I think it's really interesting to think about, you know, what if this was a real place, right? And there's this really interesting question that this, this twist here at the end gives of like, how long have they been plotting to try to get number six? Sure. Right. Because as you indicated, Cobb is right there. Right. Do they just have like Cobb available for this thing? Or do they arrange to have Cobb here in order to try and entrap number six? Right. And he knew Cobb previously is unclear if Cobb was already working for these people or if he was turned at some point. Or even if as a sort of alluded to, they might be on the same side, right? Right. Like number six is security agency or whatever might be the ones who control the village. The ending sort of puts that a little bit into doubt with like the choices of languages and what that sort of indicates at the time, right? West and East Berlin at the time, of course, um, but I, at minimum, right, if we just take the timeline at face value, right, years ago, Cobb and number six, we're running to each other. Sure. Weeks ago, they grab Cobb who, presumably is working for them. This one of these wasn't the first time that they, they do this and they say, okay, we need to do to go deep undercover in the village. And we're going to assign this person to you number nine, right. And we want you to like play out this whole thing such that when number six arrives, you can, you know, be part of this ploy to try to break it. But that's really interesting because they do this whole song and dance of like, Oh, you're, you resigning with such a surprise, right? Right. Totally. Was it a surprise? I don't know. You've apparently been planning for it for weeks. There's, there's also this, um, crossed up kind of dilemma of when you go to, if you agree to play ball, if you agree to work for the people that control the village, right? Does that mean that you will have a position of authority and comfort in the village, but still not be able to escape? Right. Or will you be dispatched to parts unknown in order to conduct some other operations or yeah, yeah, yeah. A third thing that the second thing is just the first thing in disguise that Cobb thinks Cobb is headed off to East Germany, but is actually going to be killed or trapped in some way. Sure. Right. Yeah. And, and we'll get a little bit, you know, the only times that we can really take this show, even if we can do it then at face value is when like the villains are talking to each other. Right. Yeah. And we're going to get a lot of them saying like, you cannot harm number six, right? You can't over and over again, they say in this episode how important it is, right, that this is a, they can't use these extreme measures that would like break somebody's mind. Right. He's too valuable to them. And so I can only read this whole thing, including the Cobb thing, which means that they've been plotting at least for weeks, if not for longer, to try to get number six. There's a world where it's a contingency, right, where it's like, sure. We don't know what number six is going to do. But in the event that we need to bring him to the village, we have this in place to execute on, right? Sure. And then, you know, you could imagine a world where like, Oh, Cobb could have been, uh, the Cobb option could have been taken for some other spy somewhere. Yeah. Right. I remember the drill tweet about the Cobb option, uh, which is maybe done in support of, um, in reading number one, that right number six is like the, the village is the brainchild of number six in some way, but rather that the people in charge of the village have been observing number six in particular for quite some time above and beyond, observing everyone else. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's really interesting. Um, so that's why I'm okay. I completely agree with you. But the acting in, you know, act three is of a lower quality overall, I think there's really good performances. Like I really, really like the doctor in the hospital. It's such a bit part, but like the way that he manages to come across as an authority figure who even number six just starts listening to is so insidious. It really, really works for me. Well, uh, that's as good as I was any to bring up our first segment. Yeah. Number one with a bullet is the doctor's performance your stand out or otherwise, uh, noteworthy. Yeah. Yeah. I think I've got a, for me, I've got to give it to the doctor. I think that to the point where like when I first watched this, even I, you know, knowing a bit about the show and knowing I shouldn't trust people, I just trusted this guy, like just, I think this guy is on the level. He's a doctor. And it's such an, it's such a good performance that like gets you to do that, that only later on, you can uncover this other layer of like, of course he was in on it. Like, of course he's in on it. Of course. It's really good. Hmm. There's a lot, there's a lot of good stuff here. There's a lot of good stuff. Yeah. I think I got to give it to Wally, the way he screams and runs. There's so much about Rover that you could look at and go. That's stupid. I'm not going to watch this show anymore. If it worked for the fact that the first time that you see him, he kills a man and that guy is terrified and he dies a sad, terrible death. Oh, yeah. It sucks to be that guy. Yeah. And that's what colors your expectation like even later where Rover's next to the helicopter bouncing on his chain, like an angry dog, when never walks up and then when number six gets off, Rover's like right there to be like, huh, I knew it, I knew it. Maybe he like chases never six away as he stomps away grumpily. Yeah. Yeah. Wally's got to be mine. It's really good. It's a good choice. I think, again, I'm very happy with this first episode. I think it's like an immediate classic. It makes sense why this would grab. If I was watching this at the time, it would grab me. Yeah. Right. Like there's no way to see it coming, right? Yeah, it rules. There's one other sort of theory or reading that I wanted to bring up really quick. You do in this episode, which is reading the whole thing as a religious metaphor. Oh. So Patrick McGowan, we haven't mentioned it yet, but he's deeply religious. Part of like the, I won't kiss other women is because of what a good Christian boy, Patrick McGowan was. Love that. Love that for him and for us. Very devoted to his wife, very devoted to his daughters, right? By all accounts, despite being like a horror to work on this, particularly for women, like really good to the women like in his family, nothing in the Bible says you can't scream at women. Well, unless they're in your family and then you shouldn't do it. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. They don't count. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks, Bible. And so there's a really interesting way we can read this show as a religious figure, sorry, as number six, as a religious figure, as sort of like a prophet or even like a Christ-like figure. Right? Sure. We're, we're, I want to bring this up now because it's going to keep on happening. But even with this first episode, right, we have this sort of like old, old testament prophet of this one guy who is like super important. People can't just kill, but like nobody likes him. And he's saying the truth that nobody wants to hear, right? Yeah. There's almost sort of a Joe breeding you could have here, right, of like, we're going to take as much as we possibly can from this person without, we can't hurt a hair on his head. Right. And see and see when his faith will break. Yeah. Totally. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is very much Joe has been given over to Satan, right? And we have no God. Right. This is an empty universe. Of course. Of course. I don't think there's a lot more on that this episode. I mean, there's stuff we could talk about like water and things like that. But I don't think it's really worth bringing up. We're going to get a lot more religious iconography as we go on. Well, I think we should save at least a little bit for the remaining 16 episodes. Yeah. Yeah. We definitely aren't going to have anything else to talk about for any of these other episodes. For sure. For sure. I think the only thing that we have left for this particular episode is to rate it. Yes. Do you want to start? Or should I? I think you should go first. Okay. As I mentioned, I am very, very high on this episode. I don't think it's a perfect episode by any means, but I think it is such a well constructed thing. And there are prisoner episodes. I am not this high on. There's some stinkers. There's some real stink that we mentioned earlier. They had to come up with like 10 extra scripts, like over a weekend. I don't think we mentioned that bit. Yeah. But the way Patrick McGowan talks about it, they did over a weekend. They were like, we got to have some like 10 other ideas for scripts. Yeah. There were a lot of anecdotes in one of the docs that I wrote of writers basically being called in on spec to throw ideas at the wall and more than a few of them being told that ideas no good and then tuning in to channel four and finding out that their idea inspired a script. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, so there's worst ones coming. I think this one's really good. I'm going to give this episode 14 out of 16 pawns. Great. Good. Are those white pawns or black? Mmm. Great question. Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy. That would be telling. Ah, he got me. Like I said, I think that this does a really, really good job of setting up the action of the rest of the series. I think that so much of the cob and the escape attempt stuff does not work for me. There's some stuff in there that I do like. I like the rendezvous with the stone ship. I like the weird admiral playing chess. I like rope bouncing on his chain. If I'm honest, I think the whole helicopter escape scene takes way too long. That's fair. This rates for me 7 out of 10 lava lamps. Excellent. Yeah. Really good. We should probably end by thinking some folks. Yeah. Thank you to Devin Nelson who made our theme music. It's rules. It's so good. It's very good. It definitely captures the 60s spy spirit that we ourselves embody. Yeah. We try to live by. Our cover art was made by Cy Sweetman. Thank you, Cy. Also rules. It's so good. There's so many little details. Take a look at it. It's excellent. Is there anyone else that we need to thank? I'd like to thank you, Brandon. Hey, thank you. Matthew, where could people find you on the internet? People can find me on the internet at x.com. I hate to say that. At Matthew Guzz, that's G-U-Z or G-U-Z if you're Canadian. And Brendan, where can we find you? You can find me at underscore sulkata on Twitter. I will not call it the other thing. Especially sulkata or underscore sulkata, pretty much everywhere else. You can also find the games that I make at sulkata.h.io. Next time, which episode were you watching? The Chimes of Big Ben. The Chimes of Big Ben. Second episode broadcast, but not. The second episode ever created. Mm. We'll talk more about that next time. I think that's about it. I think that's it. Good episode. How do we end this show? Wait, hold on. No. Let's go. Oh, wait. Be seeing you. Not if I see you first. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [ Silence ]
