That's All Folks: When The Prisoner Finale Unmasked Number One

That’s All, Folks: How the Finale of Surreal Anti-Spy Show The Prisoner Finally Unmasked Number One

Most scripted television shows end in cancellation, so there’s something special about the ones that get the chance to go out on their own terms. This year, Ken Lowe is revisiting some of the most influential TV shows that made it to an officially planned final episode. That’s All, Folks is a look back at television’s most unforgettable series finales.

Television is pretty formulaic even today, in an age where (for now at least) there are a lot of niche shows out there. In the days of broadcast when everything was ad-driven, it was even moreso: Whether you were following cops or doctors, mysteries or comedies, the status quo had to be maintained. If things went off the rails too much, who would tune in next time? How would advertisers sell all that soap and soda pop?

The Prisoner loved its status quo, reveled in returning to it, and killed it with a sharp and sardonic kindness. Every morning, Patrick McGoohan’s unnamed secret agent awakens once more in The Village, and every day he bends every fiber of his being to try and escape it. Often credited as the show’s main creator (though it’s been disputed how much influence belongs to George Markstein), McGoohan only wanted to make seven episodes, but compromised on making 17. In light of his career leading up to it, the backdrop of spy vs. spy media that defined the 1960s, and what a miracle it is to see anything so unique in the first place, those 17 episodes are among the wildest and most surreal in the history of television.

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It was always meant to be a limited series, with an ending. And like the show whose narrative it concludes, it is ponderous and postmodern, almost dadaist in its particulars. But in light of the time of upheaval it was made in—at a time when Britain and the United States counterculture was clashing against authority—it’s hard to imagine a show that better encapsulates the rage of an individual in the face of an implacable and relentless authoritarian society.

There are days when we all feel like Number Six. Even when we’re Number One.

The Show

By Season 3 of Danger Man (known to Americans as Secret Agent and to people who only know the Johnny Rivers theme song as “Secret Asian Man”) star Patrick McGoohan didn’t feel like making any more of the show after his contracted fourth season was scheduled to finish filming. The action series was one of the shows that cropped up to take advantage of Bond-mania in the ’60s, and featured McGoohan getting into sneaky hijinks in service of Her Majesty. You could tell the guy was ill at ease with it, or maybe that’s just McGoohan all the time: The Irish-American actor had a razor-sharp tongue in all his roles, but attacked the role of King Edward I of England in Braveheart—an absolute cartoon villain caricature—with evident relish. It’s not too surprising, then, that when asked what he wanted to do next, he pitched his idea for The Prisoner.

McGoohan and his collaborators have variously said that the main character in The Prisoner is or is not McGoohan’s intelligence agent from Danger Man. It doesn’t really matter, but is more fun if that’s your head-canon, as it were—we know only that he’s been a pawn of the state and doesn’t want to do it anymore. McGoohan’s unnamed protagonist speeds into work in the world’s coolest car, storms into his boss’ office, and slams his resignation down on the desk. After giving Control the what for, he returns to his home and appears to be packing for an exotic destination, presumably to sip gin in a linen suit, when he’s gassed and awakens in a strange, idyllic looking place filled with odd people dressed all mod. (Part of the final episode’s appeal was in revealing the location to eager viewers: It’s the hotel Portmeirion in Wales.)

McGoohan is told that he is Number Six—he never willingly accepts the number: “I am not a number! I am a free man!” he repeatedly retorts. It becomes clear that he’s been taken to some kind of free-range prison for former intelligence operatives, but he does not know what organization or nation holds the keys to the jail. He’s antagonized by a rotating cast of head jailers, each with the designation Number Two. And of course, none of them will ever disclose who is Number One (that would be telling).

The show is deeply surreal and cerebral, in a way that’s likely to be off-putting to viewers these days. Many episodes center around McGoohan simply fighting to keep from going entirely insane as his jailers torture him, gaslight him, hypnotize him, shoot him full of drugs, or try to lull him into a false sense of security, all so he’ll give up the one piece of information they want from him: Why did he resign? Episode after episode—through plots to make him run for office, through McCarthyist smear campaigns, through murdering other prisoners with whom he’s formed bonds, through drugging him to think he’s a sheriff in the Wild West—he won’t tell them. He will in point of fact never submit to anything, and it drives his captors up the wall. They react to their authority being challenged with all the temperance and maturity of a middle school substitute teacher.

All of the episodes focus on the kind of hopeless and impotent anger of an individualist in the face of a society that won’t let them be. The shadowy entity in charge of The Village, the complacent and compliant inmates within, would lose their universality if they were explained too thoroughly, and so they become the perfect blank canvas on which the show projects its anxieties about a world where institutions and technologies increasingly overwhelm and subjugate the individual. It’d be ripe for a modern remake if any major studio wouldn’t inevitably pull its every tooth.

I grew up a stubborn person and in many ways have never grown out of it. McGoohan’s unwilling Number Six is the most reflexively and inspiringly stubborn protagonist I’ve ever seen in a television show, right up until the very final episode. It perfectly capped a show with trippy practical effects, bizarre tone, and a pedigree that owed as much to dystopian science fiction as it did to the paranoid spy thrillers that were the dark reflection of Ian Fleming’s golden boy.

The Finale

“Once Upon a Time” and “Fall Out”

Now… what is the most evil thing on earth? Is it jealousy? Is it hate? Is it revenge? Is it the bomb? What is it? When one really searches it’s only one thing, it’s the evil part of oneself that one is constantly fighting until the moment of our demise. The Jekyll and Hyde if you like, but on a much larger scale. — Patrick McGoohan, on the final episode of The Prisoner

The story of the show’s discrepancy between its production order and its air dates is truly epic, but it is accepted that “Once Upon A Time” and “Fall Out” are the two last episodes of the show, forming a deranged two-parter. Leo McKern’s Number Two returns (he was one of only two actors to ever cross swords with Number Six more than once), determined to finally break McGoohan. Number Two forces the prisoner into a high-intensity mind-fuck session that begins with regressing Number Six’s consciousness back to that of a child’s and then locking himself and Number Six in a closed room. The “Degree Absolute” treatment will last an entire week, and will only end when one of them has either submitted or died.

If the episode seems insane and desperate, it wasn’t fun for the actors, either: McKern is reported to have suffered from some kind of acute medical episode (some claim a heart attack, others a nervous breakdown). He’s no match for Number Six, of course, and it didn’t surprise viewers that the episode ends with him dropping dead. It is, putting it plainly, completely nuts: Most of the episode is McGoohan and McKern shouting complete nonsense at each other, sweating and screaming as one bizarre scenario after another plays out between the two in the locked room.

In a departure from the series norm, “Fall Out” begins immediately after “Once Upon a Time” left off, with Number Six promised that, since he’s overcome the worst psychological torture they can throw at him, he’s officially won and can either assume the mantle of leadership over The Village or simply leave. We know he won’t though, not without satisfying his own obsessive need to know a piece of coveted information: Who is Number One?

What follows is a typically surreal setup. Number Six is given the means to escape, all while his individuality is serenaded by a man in a judge’s powdered wig standing at the head of an assemblage of council members (or something) who are all wearing black-and-white masks, white cloaks, and whose seats are not labeled with names but bizarre collective descriptors like “Anarchists,” “Activists” or other weird intangibles. When Number Six is granted the right to address his adoring followers, they all shout him down. He’s asked to stand as judge over two other dissidents from The Village: McKern’s Number Two is miraculously restored to life, reveals that he, too was an abductee and prisoner, but one who broke where Number Six did not. Alex Kanner’s modded out Number Forty-Eight stands in for the directionless rebellion of youth—the judge literally says so—and offers nothing but defiance and making everybody sing “Dem Bones.”

After putting the dissidents on ice, Number Six is finally allowed behind the curtain, into the Village’s nerve center, where he comes face to face with Number One. It is somehow completely nonsensical and also the only possible ending such a resolutely surreal show could’ve gone for.

Number One is Number Six (though he messes with us with a pig facemask first… giving McGoohan a chance to pull the world’s most frustrated and least convinced face before pulling off the SECOND mask). There’s an authoritarian prick inside all of us, someone ready to scream at service workers, yell at our kids, or have total amnesia about the last disenfranchised minority Republicans tried to legislate out of existence five minutes ago. Presumably it is spies like Number Six who made this place, and who will keep it running out of sheer institutional brutality.

The only thing left is to wreck the place, which Number Six does, enlisting the help of Numbers Two and Forty-Eight in tommygunning their captors to death to the tune of The Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love,” setting the place to blow, and then making their escape via truck. Somehow, The Village is a short hop from the A20 into London, so perhaps The Village is canonically in Dover?

The escapees go their separate ways, and Number Six gets back into his super sweet Lotus 7 car and drives off, presumably finally, totally free from the prison that is now implied to some degree to have been of his own making.

The Prisoner was a singular television event, a deeply subversive, deeply weird, deeply angry show that resists easy description and sometimes even easy explanation. In that way, it was the exact opposite of the Bond phenomenon. Younger actors are apparently too silly and stupid to play Bond, a character who drinks like a fish, smokes like a gender reveal forest fire, and has the restraint of a 9th grader when it comes to women. We should stop asking who is going to play Bond next and start asking Daniel Craig how much money would be enough to convince him to play Number Six.

Tune in next month, when That’s All, Folks! revisits the end of one of the most celebrated Black-led comedies: Living Single.

Kenneth Lowe will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. You can follow him on Twitter @IllusiveKen until it collapses and read more at his blog.

For all the latest TV news, reviews, lists and features, follow @Paste_TV.

That’s All, Folks: How the Finale of Surreal Anti-Spy Show The Prisoner Finally Unmasked Number One