Echoes of The Prisoner!

RESIGNED

   McGill, formerly of American Intelligence, accused of treason, but who was forced to resign. He then turned his hand to bounty hunting, operating as a private detective but without a license. His price $300 a week plus expenses.

    McGill, like The Prisoner, one day goes running back to his former colleagues because of a newspaper bulletin of a dead man seen walking in a London street. That together with a newspaper front page article about Harry Thyssen, seen to be alive, and the only man who can clear McGill of suspected treason!

   So forgetting for the moment those final few frames of the opening sequence at the end of Fall Out, is this what happened to the former Number 6 after he finally escaped the village, and returned to London? He is not a man to let the grass grow under his feet. Instead of going into his house he drives off to park in that same old underground car park then on to a familiar office somewhere in a building on Whitehall, no doubt demanding answers to so many questions. But if those answers were not forthcoming he’d simply have to live with it and get on with the rest of his life, just as McGill had to do. So, is this how the former ZM73 was to have ended up, working as a cheap private detective? If so then the green-yellow nosed Lotus 7 would have to go in exchange for a car which doesn’t stand out so much, Perhaps a Austin Mini, or Triumph Herald, or maybe a Hillman Imp!
   There are a number of Prisonerisms in the first episode Man From The Dead, when McGill is seen wearing a black polo shirt, he wears the shirt when he goes to report an incident to his former boss, who incidentally was John Drake’s one time boss in Danger Man.

   The next Prisonerism is the fact that when McGill goes into Coughlin’s office, he’s sat at a desk with a map of the World on the wall behind him. But before that McGill is confronted by a receptionist, no, not a bald-headed man filling in the crossword puzzle, but a woman.

   She is recognizable at the old lady sitting in a rocking chair by the Prisoner’s hospital bed in Arrival. So it appears that having left the village and returned to London she went to work for American Intelligence. She is described as a receptionist, and yet she seems to be head of the typing pool seeing as there are a number of young women sat at typewriters, a department which requested the transference of Danvers. Perhaps she replaced Danvers!

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