(This post is by Devin, but I forgot to log Katie out.)
My friend Nathan just informed me that Patrick McGoohan died yesterday.
Mr. McGoohan was the star and a creator of the 60′s British TV series, The Prisoner. I first caught several episodes of this very interesting show on the Sci-Fi channel when I was in junior high or high school. I was enthralled; it was so cool, so quirky, and so intriguing that I wanted to watch all the episodes.
I found out that I could buy the shows on VHS (this was before DVDs were around), and so I started ordering them, but they cost about $20 a piece, and I only got about a third to half the shows before my high school pocketbook was feeling the pinch.
Patrick McGoohan
The show’s intro depicted McGoohan angrily resigning from the British secret service and then going home and getting knocked out by gas. When he awakens he is in a self-contained village called, mysteriously, The Village, and is referred to as Number Six (to which he would scream, “I am not a number; I am a free man!” or something like that. “They” want to figure out why he resigned; they want “information” to which he replied, “You won’t get it”, and they say, “By hook or by crook we will get it”.
Each episode he would try to escape, but usually he would almost get away before The Rover–a totally creepy, large, mushy, air and something-else filled BALL THING–would move at disturbing speed toward him across land or sea and envelope him in its weird, white balloon-ness. I am not joking; this thing was bizarre and freaky.
The Rover
Number Two was a different person almost every episode and would try to break Number Six; Number Six would in turn foil his efforts. Finally at the end he escapes and catches a glimpse of Number One, though it is unclear who Number One really is.
So, may God rest the soul of Patrick McGoohan.
That was a cool show. I got to watch almost all the episodes on a public TV station back in the 1990s sometime.