The Prisoner

[besilarius]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4eUSmUWsUY

For those of a certain age, the Prisoner was always put on in re-run at the end of summer.  Late 60s and early 70s it was always on.  And the bad thing was the final episode, with the reveal, was always scheduled for the first weekend of college.  If you lived in the dorms you missed that episode.
Here is a new intro to this Klassik.

[Staggerwing]

Didn't the bizarreness of The Prisoner's final episode just recently come up on these forums?

[Sir Slash]

Yeah, but it's British so 'bizarre' is automatically assumed in that case. If the Prisoner had been done in America, it would've been about a guy who breaks into prison to get his falsely-accused brother broken out. Like that would ever work on TV huh?  ::)

[Staggerwing]

Yeah, but it's British so 'bizarre' is automatically assumed in that case. If the Prisoner had been done in America, it would've been about a guy who breaks into prison to get his falsely-accused brother broken out. Like that would ever work on TV huh?  ::)

What? The only way that'll work as a series is if the brother has to break into prison more than once and the audience would see right through that as a plot-stretch device. It can't be done.

[JasonPratt]

Then after failing as a series, the principle actor and one of the secondaries would go on to play... I dunno, a freaking live-action Captain Cold and Heatwave.  :P

Because American TV is like that. We're likely to cast a former Doctor Who as a guy with birdpoop on his head who plays with rabbits, and another one in unrecognizable makeup and language as a space dark elf for a Thor movie.

[JasonPratt]

Didn't the bizarreness of The Prisoner's final episode just recently come up on these forums?

It did!

I've read from several interviews that McGoohan did originally have a final story planned, back when he thought the series would only be 6 or 7 eps, where #6 (whom he and the writers did regard as Drake from the Danger Man / Secret Agent series and called him that to each other during production) reveals that he has been gaming the system the whole time: his resignation was a sham (though he didn't tell anyone because he didn't know who he could trust) to provoke his capture so that he could locate the Village and either destroy it from within or escape to bring the true authorities down on it. He had heard rumors of the Village's existence, and felt responsible for it because he had written the original plan for it as a retirement home for agents (including defectors) so that their secrets could be protected, and he was pissed that his benevolent idea had been so badly perverted. That's why he himself would be revealed as #1.

But by the time the end of the series had come along, McG and the other writers under him had played around too much with the secrecy and hidden plot things so that the originally planned ending wouldn't possibly make sense anymore. Thus his scrabble to come up with an ending on short notice, which he had been putting off while digging himself deeper and deeper into a plot hole.