The Prisoner

(Sarcasm is OFF for this post, except for a tiny bit at the end.)

“I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. My life is my own.”

“Unlike me, many of you have accepted the situation of your imprisonment, and will die here like rotten cabbages. Who’s standing beside you now? I intend to discover who are the prisoners, and who are the warders.”

The above are quotes from Number 6, the main character played by Patrick McGoohan in the classic British TV show from the 1960s, “The Prisoner”. Growing up then, and having started to read a fair amount of science fiction, I was fascinated by this show. Watching it now (it’s available on Kanopy, a streaming service that our library subscribes to), it seems to be ever more relevant and prescient.

“The Prisoner” depicts a beautiful, comfortable prison called The Village, where ex-intelligence dissenters and whistle-blowers are confined for life. All prisoners are known by numbers, not by names. They are watched and tracked by surveillance systems at all times and cannot escape. Their day-to-day life is a simulacrum of real life, where prisoners are encouraged to indulge in hobbies, participate in a phony “democracy”, snitch on each other, refer to each other with dehumanizing numbers, and comply with strident and often brutal demands for more and more information.

Each episode in the series started with a lengthy sequence that recaps the first part of the first episode, in which a new Number 2, the chief warden, is introduced (the identity of Number 1 is not revealed):

Number 6: Where am I?

Number 2: In The Village.

Number 6: What do you want?

Number 2: Information.

Number 6: Whose side are you on?

Number 2: That would be telling. We want information… information… information…

Number 6: You won’t get it.

Number 2: By hook or by crook, we will.

Number 6: Who are you?

Number 2: The new Number 2.

Number 6: Who is Number 1?

Number 2: You are Number 6.

Number 6: I am not a number, I am a free man!

Number 2: [Laughs maniacally]

Of course, this show is only fantasy. We would never allow ourselves to create a society where freedom is highly restricted, where all our movements are watched over by machines of loving grace, where we are pressured into group-think and compliance at all times, where all information about ourselves is gathered by our prison wardens, where we don’t even know whose side our prison wardens are on, where “democracy” is clearly fake, and where we practice dehumanizing rituals on each other. Such a thing would be inconceivable!