The Therapy Zone

 Allegorically Speaking

    I never have like that word allegorical. Using it means one can get away with a multitude of things which can mean absolutely anything at all, which means that no positive conclusion can be gained.

    However in this instance I find that I have to swallow the pill, bite the bullet, and whilst taking courage actually use the word allegorical. This in the way No.1 runs the village, having got the better of his alter ego No.6 who rejects the village. Rejects the offer of ultimate power. Rejects his future as a Prisoner, as seen in the crystal ball handed to him by his alter ego, the No.1.

    So there is a violent and bloody revolution, and the Prisoner escapes with three confederates, eventually to arrive back in London. But is seems that the Prisoner cannot help himself, because as he slips behind the wheel of his Lotus Seven, he drives off and it all begins all over again PRISONER is the single word seen on the screen. It seems that you may change your name, Number Six could be considered to be a name, you can change your past, but what you cannot change is what goes on inside your head! And in that lies the Prisoner’s problem. What goes on inside your head is what helps make you what you are today, and there's no getting away from it, as the Prisoner discovered!

 The Prisoner - 17 or 26 Episodes?

    The good thing about Danger man was the quality of both its scripts and scriptwriters, the story lines and production quality. But all of that is difficult to maintain if the quality of the story lines begins to deteriorate, which it in fact was the case towards the end, and that is why Patrick McGoohan resigned! Feeling that the story quality was no longer as it had once been. Well the quality had been maintained over three seasons and some 86 episodes, both 25 and 50 minutes in length. And after such a time, a determination in script material was only to be expected sooner or later.

    And so it was with ‘the Prisoner,’ 17 episodes which began, the majority filmed as though each individual episode was a film, so much went into the first 7 or 8 episodes. With strong scripts, but which began to suffer and tail off with some of the latter episodes, with the likes of ‘A Change of Mind,’ ‘Its Your Funeral,’ and ‘The Girl Who Was Death.’ So I cannot see how the original figure of 26 episodes could have been achieved, and neither could those working on the series themselves see this, not as well as having to maintain the quality of the storylines and scripts. These were already suffering at the figure of 17.

   Yet there was a couple of Prisoner scripts which remained unused, one written by Moris Farhi entitled ‘The Outsider’ and ‘Don't Get Yourself Killed’ written by Gerald Kelsey, neither of which were thought quite good enough to make it as episodes of The Prisoner. Both these scripts we shall take a closer look at another time, for there was also two synopsis written for two further episodes both written by Eric Mival Ticket To Eternity and Friend Or Foe?

   Ticket To Eternity involved religion, and No.6 being tricked into thinking he's travelled in time with No.2, but it proved ultimately too far fetched.

    Friend Or Foe featured the adventures of "a Negro called Mike "X", a passionate militant, it's in astonishingly poor taste considering that Malcom X  had been assassinated just two years earlier. The storyline actually involves Mike "X" faking his death along with No.6. In the event it turned out that Mike X really did die, and the man trying to get secrets out of No.6 when they've both escaped is a villager. No.6 realises he's been tricked by noticing some white skin under "Mike's" rubber mask. As bizarre as such escapades seem today, one notable element is that the escapees were able to get on the main road to London from the village, which could indicate that the concept behind ‘Fall Out’ may have been planned earlier than expected.

   Also too, that to actually ask members of the production crew to put forward their own synopsis and ideas for storylines, demonstrated the level of desperation which was creeping into the production at that stage. Eric Mivel was the music editor on the Prisoner.

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