I fail at British - it is to my eternal shame that I've never seen The Prisoner...

Have you seen any of the recent remake of The Prisoner? All I know about it is that:

- They have Ian McKellen as Number Two, consistently. Which is a perfect 50% mix of "totally awesome" and "utterly missing the point".
- They come up with an explanation for what the Village actually is, which is kind of pointless.
- They come up with a (downer) ending which actually sounds cool and appropriate and closure-providing:

So I have no idea whether to watch it or not.

Also, since you're interested in explanations of the show, are you aware of George Markstein's intended reveal? (Markstein was the co-creator of the thing who left midway through - he's the guy behind the desk in the opening sequence that Number Six hands his resignation papers to). His idea - which wasn't quite implemented, so spoiler tags aren't needed - was that the Village was originally a facility for caring for and providing a safe haven to retired secret agents who couldn't go out into the wider world, because the secrets they possessed or the things they had done put them at risk from enemy powers. Number Six was the person who devised the system in the first place, and he resigned when he realised the idea was being turned into an interrogation camp. So for the entire series he's trying to find out who's behind the Village not because he wants to know what it's for - he already knows - but to work out whether its his own employers behind it or an enemy power having stolen the idea. Apparently in Markstein's version Number One is also Number Six - because they applied that honorific to the person who devised the Village concept in the first place.

If they'd implemented that ending (well, for all we know they did...) it would have meant that Number Six actually knew far more during the series than we thought he knew about the Village, but that's completely in keeping with the paranoid nature of the show. And my favourite episode was always Hammer Into Anvil, where he used the Village's own structure against it.

(Also I'm not sure what you think London in 2010 is like, but there's less penny farthings and automatic doors than The Prisoner might make you think...)

I have heard about the remake, and I'm also not sure if it's worth watching. Of course, there's no way that Jim Caviezel can compare to the awesomeness of Patrick McGoohan, a man who can fight off Inception-style mind thieves with the power of lucid dreaming. That ending does seem similar to the one suggested in Shattered Visage,

As for the underlying explanation of the show, I'm of two minds. On the one hand, it would be nice if I could make reasonable judgments about what the various parts of the show meant. On the other, The Prisoner is one of the greatest (if not only) Rorschach blot TV shows ever made, and we should avoid in lashing ourselves to the words of the creators.

Oh, and I know London isn't really full of penny farthings and automatic doors. It's full of security cameras and small people sitting in giant rooms.

Oh, and I know London isn't really full of penny farthings and automatic doors. It's full of security cameras and small people sitting in giant rooms.

Yeah, but I think the thing which McGoohan (and Orwell, and others) didn't predict was that half the cameras are in the pockets of the citizenry...