Patrick McGoohan Is Dead

Patrick McGoohan was "The Prisoner." He played the title role on that show, a 60s BBC spy-fi head-trip allegory that's half swinging-London, half bargain-Bunuel. He wrote and directed some of the show's finest episodes; one was practically without dialogue, one featured two men locked alone in a room driving each other insane, and one was the ambiguous finale to the whole series, which answers few questions and suggests that eternal loneliness and frustration and mystery are the only rewards granted to the Great. McGoohan created the show out of spite: he'd played the lead role on a show called "Danger Man," a James Bond rip-off, and he was tired of the unrewarding work. Or maybe he was morally opposed to the ethics of a spy thriller; McGoohan was a devout Catholic (who almost became a Priest). Or maybe he was a narcissist, and wanted to be his own boss; one of the co-creators of the show, George Markstein, would depart "The Prisoner" midway through production, and spent the rest of his life decrying McGoohan the egomaniac, McGoohan the Emperor with No Clothes, McGoohan the prisoner.

Whatever the reason, McGoohan told his bosses that he'd had enough of "Danger Man," and the result was "The Prisoner." Coincidentally, the character he plays on "The Prisoner," whose name is never revealed, begins the series loudly, obnoxiously, and forcefully quitting his job (lightning strikes several times on the soundtrack during the resignation - the scene is replayed in the credits sequence every episode.) He goes home, followed by a hearse. While McGoohan is packing things into a suitcase, a man gets out of the hearse and sprays knockout gas into his apartment. McGoohan falls over, fast asleep.

When he wakes up, he's in The Village, where everyone has a number (We'll know him as Number Six, a name he refuses) and where everyone he meets is after the same thing: Information. Why did he quit? Why does it matter? Why does anything matter?

Patrick McGoohan was the Prisoner, and his prison was "The Prisoner." He worked constantly for the rest of his life, but never found anything that remotely hinted at the mad depths of the final hours of "The Prisoner," which resemble nothing else in television, film, or narrative history (except perhaps the Satyricon and parts of the Socratic Dialogues - but they didn't have machine guns.) He was in two "Columbo" films, and "Escape from Alcatraz," and the father of the Phantom in "The Phantom," and he was the wily old King in "Braveheart." Anyone who knew who he was knew him because of "The Prisoner."

The precise themes of the series are difficult to pin down, and change radically from episode to episode. Maybe "The Prisoner" is about the triumph of the individual over the system, of morality over amorality, of humanity over the onrushing reign of technology, of privacy against a world of surveillance (in The Village, they can watch you everywhere; in modern-day London, there are cameras watching you on every block.) It is often ridiculous and occasionally sublime. McGoohan may have been a mad genius; he certainly was a fine actor; he never got a better chance than the one he got on British TV in the late 1960s; he was 80 years old when he died today.