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.