The Prisoner: I Am Not a Number, I’m Just Very, Very Confused (spy-fy TV retrospective).

Here’s the first episode of The Prisoner for you. Imagine James Bond quits MI6, goes on holiday to clear his head, and wakes up in a pastel-coloured nightmare where everyone wears piped blazers, rides penny-farthings, and answers questions with more questions. That, dear reader, is The Prisoner—a spy-fi fever dream of Orwellian paranoia, psychedelic mind games, and British bureaucracy gone completely bananas.

Broadcast in 1967 and starring (and largely masterminded by) the magnificently brooding Patrick McGoohan, The Prisoner is what happens when someone takes the swinging sixties, stirs in Cold War anxieties, stirs again with existential philosophy, and then accidentally drops the whole concoction into a lava lamp.

The premise is disarmingly simple. A man—known only as Number Six—resigns from a top-secret intelligence agency for reasons unknown. Before he can say “pension plan,” he’s gassed, kidnapped, and wakes up in The Village: a picturesque coastal resort where the tea is hot, the surveillance is constant, and escape is utterly impossible.

The Village is run by a series of rotating officials all referred to as Number Two (not to be confused with the loo, although metaphorically…), and all of them are obsessed with one thing: why did Number Six resign? What follows is a Kafkaesque war of attrition, with Number Six refusing to give an inch, while his captors throw everything from mind-control drugs and dream manipulation to full-blown body-swapping into the mix.

McGoohan struts through each episode like a man who knows he’s the smartest person in the room and is deeply annoyed by it. His Number Six is unflappable, furious, and prone to shouting “I am not a number, I am a free man!” at anyone who’ll listen, especially if they’ve just tried to brainwash him.

And let us not forget Rover, the big white balloon of doom. Yes, The Village is patrolled by a sentient weather balloon that pursues escapees like a giant inflatable marshmallow with a grudge. It’s either terrifying or hilarious depending on how many gins you’ve had.

The Prisoner was groundbreaking in every sense—plot, structure, tone, and its total refusal to give its audience any easy answers. Allegory or spy drama? Satire or sci-fi? A warning about totalitarianism or a very long, very stylish breakdown? The answer is, inevitably, “Yes.”

The series ended in glorious chaos with an episode that made Twin Peaks look like The One Show. Questions were left dangling like unclaimed umbrellas in a London pub, fans wrote furious letters, and McGoohan presumably wandered off into the mist cackling like a man who’d just dropped the mic and then melted it down for parts.

Here at SFcrowsnest, we still occasionally mutter “Be seeing you” to strangers in the supermarket and half-expect them to salute. Because The Prisoner wasn’t just television—it was a glorious act of cultural espionage. It invaded your living room and interrogated your brain.

Number Six may never have escaped The Village—but The Prisoner most certainly escaped the 1960s. It’s still out there, roaming free in reruns and retrospectives, a bold reminder that sometimes the biggest mystery isn’t who controls the world, but why we put up with it.