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.