A Blog Post About That One Popular Show
This is a blog about RPGs, but I want to talk about something else and I have no other platform for long-form content. If you’re looking for an RPG article, skip this post. Check out the root ring, it has a vast bounty of great RPG blog posts. This is going to be a blog post about a piece of visual media. It might be more entertaining in the form of a long-form video essay, but to my surprise nobody has made that essay, so I’ll try to talk it about it in my way.
This is a blog post about that one very relevant show. The one everyone is talking about. The one where the protagonist mysteriously awakens in a dreamlike, brightly-colored world seemingly designed for leisure and entertainment, and tries desperately to escape from it. The one where the exit leads right back to the center. The one with the insane and concerning fans. That’s right, I’m talking about The Prisoner, a TV series that aired from 1967 to 1968. Don’t worry, I won’t be including any major spoilers. And I’m definitely not talking about anything else.
The Prisoner was created by Patrick McGoohan, who also played the main character. Due to the experimental nature of British television at the time and the trust of his manager, McGoohan was given almost complete control over the show, with a single exception: instead of the tight seven-episode story he wanted to make, he was required to make 17 episodes, the minimum his manager thought he could sell to a network.
The Prisoner used trappings that would be very familiar and popular with an audience of its time – the spy adventure. This was an era when Bond was in theaters, kids played with spy toys, and if you turned on a TV you wouldn’t be surprised to see a story about secret agents. The show departs that setting for a single episode, when it becomes a gunslinging Western instead – the other popular and toyetic media of the time.
McGoohan himself had built his career playing Secret Agent John Drake in the TV show Danger Man. In The Prisoner he plays a spy with similar mannerisms, and his character never gives a real name, allowing him to be a living reference to other media that his audience would find familiar.
The Prisoner is an existential mystery. In the first few minutes of the first episode, our unnamed protagonist wakes up in an exuberantly artificial holiday resort called the Village. He is given the new name of “Number 6”, a name he loudly rejects (though he doesn’t share his previous name). The villagers wear clothing in bright primary colors. They spend their days playing games and engaging in other leisure activities, such as human chess. Upbeat marching band music plays constantly, often from parades, but sometimes from nowhere. By the standards of the 1960s, the Village is wonderfully automated, with doors that seem to open by themselves whenever someone wishes to use them.
The origins of the Village are hidden. We see workers, guards, and an ever-changing “Number 2” in charge of daily operations at the Village, but we don’t know who they all work for, and we don’t see or know the identity of “Number 1”, presumably the person in charge of everything.
In many episodes, Number 6 tries his best to escape the Village. Sometimes he is stopped by the large white sphere known as Rover, some sort of creature or machine that answers to Number 2. At other times, his escapes are revealed to be elaborate fakes orchestrated by Number 2 in order to demoralize Number 6. Although Number 2 is humanly fallible, the powers of the Village are shown to be seemingly omnipotent, able to change reality and time itself.
In the very first episode, we’re introduced to Villagers who have lived there long enough to lose their senses of reality and individuality; this is the fate that Number 6 fights continually. When not trying to escape, he usually ends up in a battle of will and wit against Number 2, who deploys all sorts of mind-altering technologies and convoluted schemes to make Number 6 accept his status as a Villager and open up about himself. The Village would particularly like to know why Number 6 recently resigned from his job as a secret agent; Number 6 refuses to share even the smallest amounts of personal information. Throughout the series, Number 6 is asked to take part in seemingly meaningless Village rituals – dances, human chess games, elections. The Village takes on the aspect of one giant game, in which he is a toy. A couple notable episodes, for no particular reason: In “The General”, an advanced AI is the one in charge of manipulating Number 6. In “Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling”, Number 6 finds his mind swapped into another person’s body. In “A. B. and C.” the Village uses a machine that can see people’s dreams. In “Once Upon A Time”, the penultimate episode, Number 6 enters an “embryo room”, where he is subjected to regression therapy and forced to relive his life up to that point in an attempt to understand what drives him; how he responds ultimately leads to the finale of the series.
On one level, The Prisoner is technically a family-friendly genre adventure; it contains no profanity, no explicit scenes, and a few fights with the bloodless martial arts of 1960s television. From the first episode though, its tone is dark and weird, and it touches on both some timeless and some specifically topical themes.
It’s easy enough to see the fear of the surveillance state in The Prisoner, a theme that’s only become more poignant with time. The Village is a technological panopticon; cameras are everywhere, and Number 2’s assistants are always tracking the movements of Number 7. Of course, that surveillance masquerades as convenience and security: the self-opening doors, the friendly but watchful people everywhere.
There’s also the fear of the intelligence apparatus run amok. The Village is clearly a product of the Cold War intelligence world and the psyop programs of the CIA and KGB, but Number 6 is laughed at when he questions if his captors are Soviet or Western, just as he is laughed at when he claims he can expose the Village to the world. Spies from both sides can be found trapped within the Village. One of the simplest explanations for the Village is that it is the product of intelligence organizations who no longer serve the organizations that created them, but instead conspire towards clandestine and technological power over the world. It is a conspiracy accountable to no laws, that uses games and mass psychology to keep populations complacent. But enough about outdated Cold War fears; what are the more timeless themes?
At its heart, The Prisoner is about a person desperate to maintain his identity, his values, and his secrets in a world designed to strip all of them away. No matter how many people betray him, he is always kind, caring, and shows a joyful creativity. It’s also about a person who, with no resources save empathy, stubbornness, and cunning, resists a seemingly all-powerful authority. Finally, like many existential mysteries, it’s about the struggle to discern reality in a world of simulacra.
Fan reactions to The Prisoner are interesting in their own right. The show developed a devoted cult following. When the final episode aired, fans were so upset at its lack of answers that McGoohan had to go into hiding for months. It’s a good thing we don’t treat creators that badly anymore! (Don’t worry, he had a long career afterwards and lived to the age of 80.) There are several organized fan clubs for the show, including one that still meets annually at the village of Portmeirion where much of the show was filmed. I’ve never been a part of the organized fan community, but I understand that they’ve had some quite dramatic episodes in their long history.
While some fans may have gone overboard, the final episode of The Prisoner is one of the more surreal and confusing television episodes ever filmed. There are endless interpretations. It implies that true escape for Number 6 requires a confrontation with the self, and the outcome of that confrontation is unclear. Does he need to confront his own complicity in the intelligence apparatus and the surveillance state? Does he himself know why he resigned? Did he always have some share of the Village’s reality-altering power? Will we ever see Rover the orb again?
The question I’m concerned with answering is, “Why does this feel like the kind of thing that could be, say, an independent animated show in 2026?” Let’s start with two unsatisfying answers. First, as the old quote goes, “everything changes but the avant-garde.” The visual language of the weird existential mystery always returns to certain tropes: white columns, kaleidoscopes, mirrors, masks, artistic tools, orbs, seemingly mundane items placed in positions that signify importance, tonally discordant music playing over scenes. Second, many of the counterculture anxieties of the 1960s never got resolved and still plague us today: our relationships to machines and technology, fear of losing privacy and control in an automated world, the power of experts and technocrats to subvert democracy, the struggle to find meaning in the modern world.
An answer I prefer is that The Prisoner feels so modern because it is an inherently ludic dystopia. Our protagonist isn’t tortured with beatings and starvation. He’s tortured with games, with the continual promise and removal of escape, and with the seeming trust of friends who turn out to be only more agents of the Village. His struggle for meaning and reality in a world of games built to manipulate him is the daily struggle of modern life.
Of course, a lot has changed since 1967. Our understanding of psychology has probably improved somewhat. We got cyberpunk, transhumanism, Baudrillard, Harroway. Our relationships with machines became more emotionally complicated. We started to worry about the lack of third spaces as much as we worry about mutually-assured nuclear destruction. Spy fiction faded in prominence. If a show like The Prisoner were made today, it probably wouldn’t star a spy. It also probably couldn’t get away with a single, lone-wolf lead and rotating guest talent. For media of today, long-burning relationships and distinctive established characters are key to building online fan followings. Instead of purely rejecting the cybernetic world as a tool of cruel authority, it would have to accept and come to a reconciliation with it, find a way to survive within it. I think it could be a pretty good show, especially if the creator were to be allowed to stick to their vision of a limited number of episodes telling a fast-moving story, instead of stretching out the premise into multiple seasons.
You can stop reading here if you really hate spoilers, but think twice before you do: a 2011 study by Leavitt and Christenfeld found that being spoilered actually increases enjoyment of a story instead of decreases it (link). We might all be a bit happier if we cared less about spoilers. Specifically, I’m going to get into more detail about the finale of The Prisoner. Even if you don’t believe that study, it’s a 60-year-old episodic surreal TV show with an ending most fans found unsatisfying. You can probably handle the spoilers, or just go watch the show now and come back.
In the finale of The Prisoner, Number 1 is revealed to be a green-eyed machine capable of meddling with human minds but able to be resisted with willpower. Our hero enters the machine and finds it to be controlled by – himself. After he flees from himself (no, the other way around), he dons a black-and-white mask, one that looks like a comedy mask on one side and a tragedy mask on the other. While wearing the mask, he picks up a Tommy gun (incidentally, is there anything more hyperreal than the Thompson submachine gun?) and blazes away merrily at his enemies (don’t worry, the tragicomedy mask falls off soon). In order to finally escape the Village, he finds common cause with three other characters: an older, blustering authoritarian, a lanky young man, and the silent, very short butler who has appeared in every episode. Their escape includes a number of nonsensical details, and in the end it’s implied that true escape may be impossible.
About that lanky young man: he’s described by another character as symbolizing the rebellion of youth. Even when threatened with death, he refuses to take anything seriously, but bounces around the room with cartoonish energy, mocking everyone and everything. In his final scene, he’s scene trying to hitchhike and failing to get a ride. It’s oddly reminiscent of the scene in It Happened One Night (1937), where Clark Gable fails to hitchhike while chomping on carrots – his mannerisms in that scene would go on to inspire the cartoon character Bugs Bunny.
In the final credits, McGoohan isn’t credited by name. His character is simply credited as “The Prisoner”, - a bit of a fourth wall break, and also confirmation that the story is intended to be autobiographical.
McGoohan has stated the show is autobiographical, and also referred to it as allegorical. Like any allegory, there are multiple interpretations of The Prisoner. For the fun of it, I’ll throw in mine: the Prisoner can never escape the Village, because the entire world is the Village. In order to be free, he must confront and know himself, so that he can act freely and liberate others. It’s a little bit of a platitude, but it makes sense.
One more fun thought. Number 6 never does say why he resigned. I think it’s probably some mundane reason: he doesn’t withhold the information because it’s valuable, but for the sake of denying it to the Village, and as leverage. As long the Village wants to know and holds out hope that he’ll tell them, they have a reason to keep Number 6 alive. It would be a very different show if he had a genuine secret to keep.
And one more serious thought. Number 6 is a storyteller like McGoohan, especially as seen in the episode “The Girl Who Was Death”. He’s also quite competent at using games to manipulate others, something he does in several episodes to best the current Number 2. Maybe it’s not that anyone would see themselves as the secret mastermind at the controls of the Village. Maybe it’s specifically someone like Number 6 who sees the mastermind as his reflection and could be granted narrative control by that encounter. Maybe a different sort of Prisoner would see something else, or would need to find a different avenue of escape or resolution.
If you enjoyed this blog post, you can check out the games I've written here or follow me on Bluesky here. Most of my work has nothing to do with the themes of this blog post! If you're feeling really nice, I'm about launch a Backerkit for my GMless worldbuilding game Dawn of the Orcs. It's a good game; this is a second round of crowdfunding that Backerkit invited me to do in celebration of the Ennie nominations last year.