The 7 Ages of the Prisoner (pt. 2)

Part Two--Arrival--In Utero

A blueprint for the structure of the Prisoner's initiation drama is offered in the penultimate episode, Once Upon A Time, with Leo McKern's Number 2 referencing Shakespeare's 'seven ages of man' from the 'All the world's a stage' speech from As You Like It. Much more on which to follow, but briefly the 7 stages are

1. The infant mewling and puking in his mother's arms
2. The whining school boy with his satchel and shining morning face
3. The lover, sighing like a furnace
4. The soldier, full of strange oaths and bearded like a pard
5. The justice, full of wise saws and modern instances
6. The lean and slipper'd pantaloon
7. Second childishness and mere oblivion

With that schematic in mind the first episode, or perhaps more aptly Episode O, serves as prologue. It is pre-birth, the life before life. The soul's incarnation in the womb and the subsequent acquiring of an identity that is both genetic and, through the influence of the outside world on the mother's body, environmental. The Prisoner here is the Logos as Neophyte, the seed newly planted.

The episode begins when the Prisoner awakes in his new home in The Village. With its quaint, whimsical, candy-colored exteriors The Village resembles a seaside resort from another time. The Prisoner wanders empty streets. He interacts with an elderly woman at a cafe, "We'll be opening soon," she tells him, but he can get little more information from her.

We'll be opening soon--give it about 3 more months.

Leaving the cafe he finds a phone and speaks with an operator. The operator has the same singsong tone as the pleasant, disembodied female voice we will hear cooing pleasantries over a communal loudspeaker throughout the episode. It is the voice of the mother, the soothing and all-knowing and unknowable force which provides The Prisoner with his environment and support, but also sets the confines from which he must escape in order to be.

The operator asks him for his number, but, still gestating, his identity has not yet been set and he is unable to get through. "No number, no call," she says.

The Taxi Driver (Promotional Still)

Eventually he is able, by accident, to hail a taxi. The driver is a young woman who speaks every language and asks him about his nationality. As is his wont in this stage in his development, The Prisoner simply barks questions at her. Which is as good a place as any, I suppose, to mention how incredible Patrick McGoohan's performance is throughout the Prisoner. He uses his voice as an instrument, often intoning his words with a beauty and solemnity usually reserved for Shakespeare or religious rites (same difference, some might say.) There's a majesty to almost every line he delivers throughout the course of the show, and he conveys a great deal of information with just the slightest change of inflection.

It's a very stagey, non-Method way of acting that can be a little off-putting at first. As the Prisoner is allegory, this evokative, Old Vic sort of way of performing is very appropriate, and McGoohan expertly adapts himself to whichever of the 7 stages his character is currently displaying. A naturalistic, 'I must become my character' style of acting would be discordant and jarring. For the Prisoner is a messenger and the message he delivers is sealed.

In addition to his vocal skills (not to mention his sense of humor) McGoohan's physicality further prevents him from venturing into Shatnerian bathos or Adam West-style woodenness. As a young man McGoohan excelled in boxing and it shows in his performance. Not in the show's copious phony fight scenes, mind you, but rather in the still moments, when walking or standing. His body awareness provides great presence. He moves deliberately and without wasted energy, so that his performance has what mere verisimilitude always lacks: authenticity.

The rest of the first half of the episode is of the Prisoner kicking at the walls, as it were, exploring the boundries of his new world. Halfway through the episode the Prisoner makes his first escape attempt. Running toward the sea he is overtaken by Rover, the insidious globular drone that polices the village and which subdues him.

Since it's not necessarily pertinent to our overall theme, I'm going to gloss over the machinations of Arrival's plot, with its various chess games, fake funerals, and brainwashings. Suffice it to say the episode closes with the Prisoner's second escape attempt, this time riding over the Village in the bulbous pregnant belly of the Village's helicopter. It's all a feint, of course--meant, as always, "to teach him a lesson," and the Prisoner returns to ground. He marches sullenly back to his cottage with Rover nipping at his heels like the dog following the fool to the cliff on the first card of the Tarot.

to be continued--be seeing you