Just finished, and...

To quote the Addams Family theme song, this show was creepy, kooky, mysterious and spooky. And that was it's greatest asset: there was nothing else like it, and to this day there still isn't. Hell, not even the remake came close.

Although I see what you're getting at, alluding to The Addams Family, an offbeat sitcom, trivializes The Prisoner. I certainly like TAF, and Morticia is my go-to Goth babe, but TAF was a slyly sweet inversion of the typical sitcom family and little more while The Prisoner was one of the most intelligent and thought-provoking TV series of all time. It's a little like saying that Alfred Harvey and Warren Kremer's cartoon of Richie Rich embodies the image of the poor little rich boy as does Gainesborough's painting of The Blue Boy.

I thought that Lost embodied a good deal of The Prisoner, along with The X Files and, speaking of sitcoms, Gilligan's Island; yes, I may now be trivializing Lost, but at least on the surface the parallel is inescapable: People stranded on an uncharted island with seemingly little chance of being rescued--and yet there are already a bunch of others there, and all manner of visitors somehow materialize regularly.

Certainly there was the premise of persons whose pasts shaped their fates being trapped and minded by an unknown power, and literally trapped as the island on which they were stranded proved very difficult to escape while it could also be very difficult to know "who are the prisoners and who are the warders." (And, yes, some seemed destined to die there like rotten cabbages.)

Lost cast its net so wide and became so sprawling that it is not accurate to compare it solely to The Prisoner, but after several episodes it seemed to me that The Prisoner was clearly an inspiration for it, at least in terms of the surveillance, repression, and paranoia being manifested on the island. Meanwhile, Ben Linus (Michael Emerson), one of the greatest TV villains I've seen, functioned as the de facto Number Two for the Dharma Initiative.

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Trump is Putin's bitch.

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When I first saw The Prisoner back in the 80s as a teenager, I was rather obsessed with it for two main reasons. One, it was intelligent and compelling, and TV/Film tends to shoot for mediocrity as they try to appeal to everyone; The Prisoner wasn't trying to appeal to everyone. It wasn't even trying to appeal to the more intelligent portion of the audience. It was just trying to make a point.

Two, Patrick McGoohan had repeatedly stated, in interviews, that all he had in the beginning, right up to the week before shooting, was just a sparse outline of what the show was about. As a writer, I'm obsessed with details in my own work and sometimes I'm afraid to put a word down on paper until I know where specifically I'm going, because I want to do the best work I can. And this always leads me to writer's block. So I end up reminding myself about McGoohan saying that a lot of the time they, both he and his colleagues who were writing the show, really didn't have much to go on, and indeed, his other writers didn't know who Number 1 was until they saw McGoohan's script for that, which he wrote over the course of an evening before filming, by his account. They suspected and they liked the outcome, but they didn't know prior.

When you first watch the show, there are so many little things that happen but you would casually miss, even with repeated viewings. Some of it your brain caught, even if you weren't too conscious of it. Take, for instance, Many Happy Returns, where Number 6 wakes up to find the entire Village is deserted. Everyone just up and vanished. Then, 6 gathers some supplies, makes a raft, and returns home, only to end up right back in the Village again. This is important because we all know HE knows that the Village is capable of anything.

That the Village, and all its inhabitants, would be willing to un-ass at the word of Number 2 (or Number 1, more accurately), literally overnight, is a clue as to what the Village really is. So you kind of wonder why Number 6 even bothers to attempt to leave, when he's left already once, and his own people betrayed him and plopped him right back in the Village? He knows this place is downright diabolical in its plans to get 6 to reveal why he resigned. But, we know he has to try. This, of course, is meant to break him a bit further, to let him know that he can never escape, in a way that lets him go and live his life on his terms. It's stuff like this that endeared me to this show, the obvious but subtle things, clues, and oddities that speak to you in ways words can never do.

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