Fall out.

I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered.

My life is my own.

I am not a number.

I am a free man.

So in honor of Patrick McGoohan’s passing, I watched the series finale of the Prisoner, Fall Out. It was written and directed by MacGoohan, and I think it’s probably his definitive statement. A lot of people don’t know this but McGoohan’s John Drake is the reason that James Bond came to film, and he turned down the role in Dr. No. He also turned down the role of the Saint, citing that that both characters relied too much on killing and sex. McGoohan’s show Danger Man/Secret Agent was revived due to the popularity of Bond in  No. And McGoohan quit Danger Man and to work on the The Prisoner. To me, McGoohan is as important a figure to the spy boom as everyone who worked on the 60s Bond films. And that’s why The Prisoner is such a profound work of art.

Everything ripped off James Bond, everything was a reaction to the success of Dr. No – I Spy and Man from U.N.C.L.E. were Americanized, the Avengers amped up the sexual fetish aspects and gender issues, Mel Brooks and Buck Henry saw how ridiculous it all was, Stan Lee thought it was a great idea to reframe their war hero as a superspy, and it found a brilliant visual stylist in Jim Steranko, it goes on and on. Even Enter the Dragon has a James Bond plot to kick it off and as an excuse to end it.

John Drake was the anti-Bond. McGoohan saying when he started the job that Drake would never kill someone unless it was the only way, always using his head instead of fucking everything that moves – these were stipulations in his contract. And he still hated it, hated it’s formulaic nature and simplicity. So he and George Markstein created The Prisoner, sold as a story about spies forced into retirement. Which it isn’t, in any way other than it’s surface.

No, The Prisoner wasn’t a story about spies. McGoohan didn’t just use the popularity of the Bond films as a launching point like all the others did, he engaged a dialectic with them. All of The Prisoner, but specifically Fall Out, is one of the finest example of using the tools of the genres to critique it And rather than feel comfortable just commenting, it quickly became clear that The Prisoner was something more. Rather than a parody,or a critique, McGoohan was crafting a statement on identity and rebellion. The series took the trope of all spy stories – interrogation -  and drilled it. Every episode, every moment is an attempt to get inside Number 6′s head. Every character, every situation, no matter how genuine , was an attempt to find out why he resigned.

“Why did you resign” is asked over and over again, and he never answers. The show as it goes on relies less and less on the spy genre, and seems less intent on cracking Number Six for information and more and more on erasing his identity. And every episode he fails to escape, fails to answer his own questions – who is holding him captive, which side is he fighting, who can he trust, how powerful are they, who is Number One? Both sides end every episode at a stalemate – Six might thwart whatever plot the Village is pulling this time, but he never gets out. Six survives with his mind intact not because he’s smarter than his captors, or because he’s the good guy (which is never nailed down – for all we know he’s a defector), it’s simply because he won’t be broken. Number Six is a hero because he fails to conform, no matter what is done to him. The closest thing he ever gets to a victory is surviving the personality combat of Once Upon a Time, where McGoohan literally kills his opponent by being impenetrable.

And it ends with Fall Out.

Watch it. It’s the whole episode.

What’s the missing link between Kafka’s The Trial and You Only Live Twice?

Fall Out.

“We thought you would feel… happier… as yourself”

The thing kicks off with a scarylooking model of Number Six wearing his clothes and half a dozen jukeboxes playing the hippy anthem “All You Need Is Love” – the lyrics recasts as a desciption of failures (One of the themes hammered home from the beginning is that the counterculture is just as dark and aimless as the culture in power. Here’s your greatest acheivement – the Beatles – and their most positive statement, and here’s how it can be used to say the opposite). And Six walks into a room that’s best described as a Lewis Carrol kangaroo court held in Blofeld’s headquarters. People speak in oblique, nonspecific ways, an all-encompassing authority concerned with how it looks to the people it stamps out. That is easily swayed by nonsense. That seems impotent and idiotic until Six is allowed to speak.

Over and over again, Six is congratulated for defeating his oppressors. But they know exactly what they’re doing. Six is praised for having a special kind of rebellion, one o being an individual. He is different from Numbers Two and Forty-Eight, who fight authority out of knowing resentment and youthful rebellion. But how is he really? How is he any better than they are. If anything he is shown through these menhow he could have ended up – Two is who he becomes if he gives in and tells them everything, lets them put him to work. Forty Eight is who he might have been if he gave in to his antiauthoritarian impulses earlier. He’s urge without thought. He’s what happens if Six stops outgaming his captors and just gives in to his urges. They are no better than him, they’re just different variations.

And variations, that’s what it’s all about. Every one who appears in Fall Out was in an earlier episode, as different characters. While done for budgetary reasons, it only amplifies what’s happening in the story – the only character is remains the same in Two, who is resurrected from the dead, shouting joyously “I FEEL A NEW MAN”. Two is the only holdover that remains the same person, everyone else’s personality remains fluid. Hints that what is happening can’t simply be viewed as a events being reported. Not that the series was ever without it’s subtext, but here there were visible contradictions. Here was something that cannot be taken literally.

None of the Village’s questions are answered in Fall Out. We never find out six’s name, why he resigned, who runs the village.

But we do find out who Number One is.

Number One is Six.

McGoohan talked about Number One as the evil inside himself. The malignance in himself.

The point of The Prisoner is that you are the only one who imprisons yourself. Not society, not the outward forces of the universe. Finding out the identity of Number One is no victory, and Six hardly treats it like one. His moment, the final moment at the head of this false court, where he has the chance to lay into his captors is pointless. McGoohan was nothing if not full of rage, and his ultimate release is drowned out by a chanting chorus of fools chanting “I, I, I” ad infinitum. This is the world, and what it cares for your grand statements.

Their defeat is empty. Just like the reveal of Number One, which has been built up forever and blows by in seconds – too jarring to accept so quickly. Six’s face is the face of evil, a laughing doppelganger. And then he’s gone. Six frees his fellow dissenters, sets off a previously unseen atom bomb, guns down the court, and destroys the village and escapes off to London in a model kitchen on the back of a truck.

The final sequence, after the meeting with Number One is a dead-on impression of the final sequence in a Bond film – the one in our heads when we think of Bond. There’s a bomb about to go off, and our heroes must escape and kill everything in sight. Escape is key here, as is the nuclear weapon and the machine guns. This is what the audience expects, and McGoohan is going to give it to them.

But it’s just empty.

Sure, Two and Forty-Eight and Six dancing around in victory is the most purely joyful moment in the entire series, but there’s something nagging. Something’s wrong. Two wanders off, back to work, the only thing he knows. The kid jumps off the truck and wanders the streets. Six rants to a cop but we never hear him. It’s too far in the distance. He returns home, grabs his car and drives away. The butler, always silent, walks into his house – and automated door opens and closes for him. Six drives off and we see the opening shots of the series theme sequence, kicking off an endless cycle.

No one speaks from the moment Number One is revealed on.

Because they don’t have to really, the bond finale is so perfunctory. It has to happen this way, this is what has to happen. None of it matters, because the series has been torn to shreds.

You are the one that’s keeping you prisoner. You are the one that holds yourself back. You are the hands around your throat.

Patrick McGoohan was a fiercely intelligent human being. He demanded a lot from people, but most of all he demanded from himself. You can see it in everything he did – from Columbo and Scanners to bit parts in The Phantom and Braveheart. But he never put as much of himself into anything as he did Fall Out. And that’s really what Fall Out is saying – that the only way above the fray is by confronting yourself, not society, not the evil in the world. You are the evil in the world. And you are the only one who can do anything about it.

Six fights everything and everyone, but we are left unsure at how he confronts himself. The episode and series is a reflection of Six himself, clearly articulate on it’s problems with them, but silent once it sees who is really at fault. The Prisoner is about life, and it is an honest portrait. If McGoohan left any legacy, it’s that. I’ll miss him.