Spoiler Alert – this review will reveal sundry details of the episode.

The Prisoner, in the form of AMC’s new series, ends with epispde six, Checkmate. Much of what one might have suspected is confirmed: The Village is a place in one’s mind, we learn that Number 6 has the chance to run The Village, and he takes that opportunity, replacing the community administrator, Number 2.

(Number 2, by the way, lives in Palais Two, while many other residents of this imaginary place live in much smaller A-frame cottages; the imaginary Village is no egalitarian dream.)

Number 6, at the end of the episode having chosen to run The Village, commits himself to making it a better place.

And here is how the new version of The Prisoner differs from the old: the old community was a real place, and Number 6 had no interest in running it. In this way, I think the old series was actually brighter, and the new one a darker vision.
Now I know that the community in the new miniseries is meant to be a therapeutic place, but therapy so coerced and controlled is the definition of a dystopia. It’s hardly a place one would wish to live.

Ask yourself: if you could run a community, and shape the lives of all its residents with only your judgment of their betterment, would you do so?

The answer tells much about a person. To answer yes is to assume a God-like judgment. One often thinks about what one might do, what powers one might have, without considering how these powers would vastly exceed one’s judgment, even if one should magically acquire them.

And yet, it’s certainly intoxicating, for some, the thought of shaping a political community, of directing it in a particular way, through one’s vision.

The insistence that a political community requires a political leader who will bend and twist and cajole and exhort is mere pride.

Hayek was right, about order: apart from minimal rules of law and organization, one should strive for a spontaneous order. The free and voluntary transactions and associations among common people will produce a better community than any politician’s proud vision, any bureaucrat’s smug assertion of tenure and authority.

I’ve had fun blogging about The Prisoner. That imaginary world may be dark, but our own experiences offer lots of light moments. It could only be a free and optimistic society – just like America – that would develop and protect blogging, about any number of ideas, stories, and topics.

A blogger can sit at a computer, at a time of his choosing, and write on any topic he wants, as often as he wants. There’s freedom and optimism in that – The Prisoner one day, or for several, and something different thereafter.

One of the many reasons – from among others far more precious – to be grateful in America this Thanksgiving.

Spoiler Alert – this review will reveal sundry details of the episode.

In this episode, the Prisoner meets a version of himself, a version of The Village Administrator, and learns that The Village is a a created place. By the end of the episode, he has enough information to how The Village is artificial in a particular way. Some in The Village, it turns out, just can’t leave, for reasons beyond physical compulsion.

That’s one of the ways that The Village in this miniseries departs from the one in the original British series from the 1960s.

The original occupied a place alongside Thirty Six Hours, for example, as a place that wasn’t what it seemed. In that film, James Garner finds that the place he’s recovering isn’t the hospital, in the time, it seems to be.

A film like Dark City has a similar theme: is the 1940s era city in which everyone lives, and where it’s always dark, really a 1940s American city?

But this new miniseries of The Prisoner imagines a town like something out of The Matrix.

There are times in any real town, like Whitewater, Wisconsin when experiences seem out of joint, contrary to what one might expect.

That’s true of us, here, when we place the superficial and ephemeral ahead of the fundamental and enduring. Not all ways of living are the same; the long and principled American political, legal, and economic tradition will always trump public relations and an incumbent’s self-interest.

When we seem artificial, I think that’s why – the recognition that there’s a contradiction been superficial conditions and the fundamental principles of the culture in which we live.

We have in this town only limited participation in local elections, but a greater turnout for state and federal races. There’s a puzzle in this, that cannot be answered by saying that some temporary residents have a greater interest in state or federal affairs.

The opposite should be true – rationally, voters should see that they have a greater chance to influence events when the total electorate is smaller.

Yet, despite all the talk about local exceptionalism, it is state and federal races that attract greater participation. Even where a voter’s impact may seem less, those races draw greater participation.

I’ve contended consistently, from the first publication of this website, that our politics in this small town are distorted, as is a culture – the product of only several hundred – that insists on cheerleading rather than describing honestly.

It is this situation that seems artificial, a distortion, I think, from what so many more hope and admire about small town America.

It’s a temporary distortion, though; this present distortion will fade away, as Whitewater reconciles herself to trends and principles of America beyond. Those principles will, in their way, restore and reinforce the benefits of our small town experience.

Spoiler Alert – this review will reveal sundry details of the episode.

The fourth episode of the remake involves the effort of The Village’s administrator to sign Number 6 up with a dating service. The theory, one supposes, is that it will help to learn more about 6.

Fortunately, I know of no analogous program in Wisconsin; I have never heard of a city official in our state trying to arrange a dating service appointment for a resident. (There was once a report of a police sergeant from Pewaukee, Wisconsin directing someone to look up the phone number in a police database of a suspect she found attractive, but the sergeant was demoted. She has since appealed the demotion; sometimes desire doesn’t know when to stop, and walk away quietly.)

There’s enough information by now – about two-thirds through the miniseries – to question whether The Village is a real and physical place. It may be real, it seems, only in the way that thoughts are considered real. One might not doubt that a person thinks certain things, but instead question whether those thoughts correspond with the world beyond one’s head.

The residents of The Village have reason to wonder, too: unexpected sinkholes keep popping up throughout the town, large enough to swallow a person.

What to make of the holes? Well, The Village puts out a message over town loudspeakers that the sinkholes are ‘weather anomalies’ and that the best defense is a pig in every home. (Apparently pig breath is believed to improve the atmosphere, and prevent anomalies like sinkholes.)

Now, it’s a ridiculous plan, and one might suppose that I would criticize Whitewater’s politicians and bureaucrats for coming up with similar and absurd proposals.

I won’t, as they haven’t. Our small town’s leaders do not begin with absurd proposals, but with rational ones that are often ill-fitting or contradictory to policy elsewhere, beyond the city.

No one begins with the absurd; we’ve no alchemy here. Those living elsewhere would not find people – or at least no more than elsewhere – casting spells or administering leeches.

In most respects, we’re easily as modern as other places, watching the same programs, music, and films as others do though satellite television, Netflix, and the Internet. There’s nothing different about many of the products we buy.

A rural community is different in experiences and culture, but not for isolation from America.

We’re hardly primitive rustics. On the contrary, if anything, we are too quick to adopt and embrace the same management theories and practices used elsewhere, believing in them even when misapplied. Even believing in them longer than we should, and more deeply than will ever be justified.

Along the way, clear and profound principles are sometimes lost, swept aside for convenience, or distorted. Those principles are not ones of management, but of rights and liberties, of opportunities and prosperity.

Here’s commentary on the third episode of AMC’s The Prisoner.

Spoiler Alert – this review will reveal sundry details of the episode.

A man called Number 6, rather than a name, finds himself in a community called The Village, wondering where he is, how he got there, and trying to return to a place called New York.

Most of the residents would tell Number 6 that there is no New York, and that he’s simply mad to imagine that there is, and that he once lived there.

In the third episode, Anvil, the community administrator, Number 2, gives Number 6 a chance to become a spy for The Village surveillance, and to observe those dissenters the authorities consider dreamers – the madness of believing in something beyond The Village, or questioning ideas about the community.

Number 6 sees that the administrator cannot be trusted, but he agrees to be part of a two-man surveillance unit, in the hope that he might learn more about the origins and truth of the place.

There are some striking scenes in the episode, especially how children are taught, from their early school years, to observe and record their parents’ behavior, and to identify any anomalies in their parents’ routines.

As one could guess, the children lack an adult’s discernment, so even commonplace changes in routine – such as a skipped exercise class – suggest something sinister in an adult’s behavior.

The sensible conclusion, of course, is that small changes are only small; there’s no grand conclusion to be drawn. The children don’t see it that way, and they are encouraged to see minor changes as suggestive of big events and motivations.

How does that suspicion come about? The Village’s society must encourage and reinforce the notion that questions, contrary opinions, and novel ideas are both wrong and mad.

The natural, rational faculty of a person drifts into both suspicion of motivation and discomfort with contrary opinions only through tutelage.

So how does this happen? In The Village it happens because children are indoctrinated. In a small community, in rural America, I think it happens when adults set aside American individualism for a sense of order, control, comfort, and familiarity.

The description of these impulses, when they become overbearing, is telling. One will not hear someone declare, ‘this is what America expects, or requires.’ Instead, the need for order is expressed in local, seemingly practical ways, but almost always terms without reliance on the principles of this state or country.

The local convenience or need that regulators assert often has no foundation in American principle; an authority in a vulgar and unprincipled place abroad could assert something similar.

(When those who attempt to regulate locally do so with reliance on a supposed American standard, they typically misconstrue that standard. Usually, they don’t even make the effort.)

It’s not that they favor government intrusion; it’s that they favor governmemt’s support of their views as a defense of the community itself.

The community began, flourished, and would go on well with far less government, regulation, or planning, and the insistence that these three are indispensable to life. Of all the conversations, meetings, and moments between people in our town, only the smallest number depend on government.

Every encroachment from meddling bureaucrats further undermines positive and voluntary private activity.

Civil society is fundamentally a private, unregulated, uncontrolled set of associations. The number of things people do apart from government puts lie to the notion that government is necessary for community prosperity.

Yet, wherever he goes, Number 6 finds others who share his convictions, and the presence of so many hidden dreamers is reassuring to him. He’s resolute in his individualism, and comes to see that even with The Village, others share his view.

Here’s a review of episode two of AMC’s Prisoner. Spoiler Alert – this review will reveal sundry details of the episode.

There are differences from the original series and this remake, the first involving the administrator of The Village, Number 2. In the original series, there was a different Number 2 in each episode; in this version, Number 2 (played by Ian McKellan) is the same man in every episode (at least, I assume he stays the same).

I think, too, that The Village seems considerably bigger than in the original program. It must be fairly large, the size of a small city – thousands – rather than hundreds.

A clue to the size of the community comes when a family watches a televised soap opera, and refers to all the characters by their numbers, e.g., 2343, or large numbers of that kind.

(No one in The Village has anything other than a number for a name.)

Numbers for names may be recycled, of course, but other details – like the presence of an exclusive resort, or a tour bus line – suggest a large place.

We learn two new things about the community in this episode: Number 6 is supposed to have a brother, and he is recommended for psychiatric care (called the talking cure) because he persists in his conviction that he’s not just a number, The Village’s supposed harmony is a fraud, and there’s a wider world beyond.

I’ll not mention too much about the supposed brother, Number 16. There is, though, a telling scene where Number 2 draws the winner of a contest to a resort within The Village, and it just happens, just by chance, surely, that the winner is Number 6’s purported brother.

No one seems shocked, at least to let on, that the winner is the relative of the one person the community’s administrator is trying to pacify.

A small town tends toward this risk: that with a small range of people involved in projects, committees, etc., people will tend to favor those they know, rather than treating all – from a much larger and unfamiliar number – equally. In a community where familiarity matters, bias remains a constant risk.

After a while, as in The Village, it’s not even recognizable as bias.

There’s another telling segment, where administrator Number 2 recommends Number 6 for the talking cure – psychotherapy – because Number 6 persists in the conviction that there’s a world beyond The Village. To think so, and to question policy, seems like madness.

It’s not long before we learn that the administrator doesn’t believe in the talking cure, but merely sees it as a way to pressure and dupe Number 6.

It’s simultaneously funny and disturbing: dissent is treated as madness, but those who so contend know that’s not true. It’s just one more arrow in a quiver of blame shifting.

If you’re reading from California, you know very well that editorials, radio programs, magazines, and television programs cover every inch of your city’s politics. What passes for acerbic here would be mild where you are. It’s not that you’re naturally different for us; it’s that you’re socially different.

Our early time as a people, through the nineteenth century, saw robust commentary that still flourishes in many parts of America. For reasons partly inscrutable, the same robust commentary did not survive here.

On the contrary, it came to be depicted as an anti-community impulse. The irony of a nation and town founded on individualism insisting on quiet or agreement as a community requirement is lost on some in Whitewater, Wisconsin and other small towns.

It’s no irony at all in The Village, as residents there are denied knowledge of an outside world. We have no similar constraint. We have, instead, a certain and powerful tradition of individual liberty as part of a vast republic, free and exceptional, all around us, now and for centuries past.