The Prisoner

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

Patrick McGoohan storms into his superior's office, literally accompanied by thunderclaps on the soundtrack. He brings his letter of resignation down to the desk like a sledgehammer and blue eyes blazing pounds the desk again, terribly upsetting a nearby teacup. His growls of contempt and indignation are inaudible over the brazen, trumpeting theme music, but everything we need to know is there in the curl of his lip.

Watch the opening titles (Yes, this three minute sequence accompanies every episode) and be initiated into the cult of The Prisoner, the best British postmodern dystopian countercultural sci-fi-espionage-fantasy-horror-mystery-western single-season series of 1967-1968, and now among my favorite television programs ever. By comparison, Twin Peaks is conventional.

It is McGoohan's anger and unbending defiance that draw me so tightly to the spooling delirium of the Village. Like the masterworks of Terry Gilliam — Brazil, Baron Munchausen, 12 Monkeys — McGoohan depicts the world as a clockwork of implacable logic grinding away at his humanity. But whereas Gilliam's mournful heroes ultimately find escape only through fantasy, madness or death, McGoohan fights to win, with a sneer. The lightning in his belly is a fierce instinct for liberty, a love that demands furious reproach to the slightest oppression. I admire it, and hope to share it.