Word: mcgoohan
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...entering the remake--sorry, reimagining--sweepstakes with The Prisoner (begins Nov. 15), a six-hour sprucing up of the 1967 classic that was the granddaddy of TV head trips like Lost. In the original series, creator Patrick McGoohan starred as an agent who resigns his post and is abducted and taken to the Village, a cheerfully totalitarian seaside town where everyone has a number. He becomes Six; the Village is overseen by the despotic Two. What the Village is and why it is were the (never completely resolved) questions of the fascinating 17-episode series...
...Prisoner keeps some of version 1.0's hallmarks, notably Rover, a balloon-like orb that patrols the Village and enforces discipline. But thematically, it at once changes very much and too little. For instance, in McGoohan's show--a Cold War story of totalitarianism--giving the Villagers numbers made chilling sense as a dehumanizing, de-individualizing device (and 40 years ago, played a tad more original). But for The Prisoner's new dystopia, which seeks to control minds more than imprison bodies, it doesn't quite fit. One would think the Village's happy-faced thought control would...
Emphasis on dreamlike. McGoohan's Six knew that he was a captive; he knew where he came from, and he and the Villagers remembered details of the outside world. Caviezel's Six simply materializes. His past comes to him, and us, in a series of disorienting flashbacks (or are they?) of life in Manhattan that act as a parallel plot. He faintly recognizes people he meets from elsewhere, but they don't recall it; they don't know what New York is or recognize names like Darwin and Plato. The official belief is that there is no outside world: "There...
DIED "I am not a number. I am a free man," said No. 6 on the 1960s CBS program The Prisoner. Patrick McGoohan, 80, played the former spy who had resigned his position only to be mysteriously imprisoned. McGoohan also wrote and directed some episodes...
...McGoohan, Patrick • passing...