So I finally finished slogging through The Prisoner on DVD (and after watching the final ep I can understand why outraged fans stormed Patrick McGoohan’s home). I have the A&E series and each DVD case has a blurb about the “episode order debate.” How widespread is the debate? A&E presents the episodes in this order:
[ul]Arrival
Free For All
Dance of the Dead
Checkmate
The Chimes of Big Ben
A, B and C
The General
The Schizoid Man
Many Happy Returns
It’s Your Funeral
A Change of Mind
Hammer Into Anvil
Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling
Living in Harmony
The Girl Who Was Death
Once Upon a Time
Fall Out[/ul] Is this fairly standard? With a few exceptions (Arrival, Fall Out, Many Happy Returns) it seems to me like the eps could be viewed in pretty much any order one wanted and the series would make about as much sense. Don’t get me wrong, in large measure I liked the series (with some big exceptions like The General and Fall Out) but very few of the eps build on anything that came previously.
Yes, it’s an ongoing debate amongst fans of the series. There are two definite “standard” orders, neither of which is entirely satisfactory in terms of the internal dating (which is fragmentary and inconsistent anyway - look at the relative dates of the episodes The Schizoid Man and Many Happy Returns, for example, both of which apparently take up most of the month of March). The order on the UK DVD set I have is
Arrival
The Chimes of Big Ben
A, B and C
Free For All
The Schizoid Man
The General
Many Happy Returns
Dance of the Dead
Checkmate
Hammer into Anvil
It’s Your Funeral
A Change of Mind
Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling
Living In Harmony
The Girl Who Was Death
Once Upon a Time
Fall Out
We know Arrival has to be the first episode, and Once Upon a Time/Fall Out the last two … some of them have internal dates (we know that by the time of Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling, Number Six has been in the Village for a year), and some people believe that the longer he’s in the Village, the more intense and desperate Number Two’s strategies get.
One little point I’ve noticed concerns the two episodes with Colin Gordon as Number Two … in the introductory voice-over to A, B and C, he says “I am Number Two”, not “The new number Two”. I’m inclined to conclude from this that A, B and C is supposed to come directly after The General, in which Gordon is “the new Number Two”. I think this is borne out by the fact that Number Six doesn’t comment on Gordon’s reappearance, whereas he does remark on the reappearance of Leo McKern’s Number Two in Once Upon a Time … You see? The internal ordering is something Prisoner fans can have lots of fun arguing over …
I saw them presented in the order Steve Wright mentions. I think CBS (or my local affiliate) was running them late at night. Of course, I first saw part of “Free for All”, missing the end for some reason, went in order from there (but missed “Many Happy Returns”), came back around to the beginning, and finally saw “Many Happy Returns” on the second run-through, at which point they stopped running them. Very odd experience.
The Prisoner & Max Headroom both had an inappropriately profound effect on me as a teenager. I may never quite recover.
Based on the episode order comments on the A&E set, it appears that the order Steve Wright posted is the original UK running order. A&E disputes some of them with comments like “watch for a reference to Number Six as a ‘new recruit’” in Free For All to slot it second (also noting it was the second episode shot, although other episodes are slotted out of production order so that’s not definitive). One for which A&E is quite adamant is Chimes of Big Ben with reference to the timeframe of the Arts and Crafts Show and “a matter of months” that Number Six has been missing, A&E sternly chides “this must not be considered an early episode.” Interestingly A&E includes an alternate version of COBB on disc 1 of the set, placing it right after Arrival!
Any other suggested orders out there?
If I remember the discussions on this from The Prisoner Companion and some other sources … there were a number of arguments and problems about the number of episodes that were produced (seventeen is a weird number even for British TV, which tends to view a “season” as a literal quarter of the year, so does things in runs of thirteen quite a lot). ITC wanted as many as 30; the initial concept was for a run of only seven (if memory serves, Arrival, Dance of the Dead, Free for All, Checkmate, The Chimes of Big Ben, Once Upon a Time and Fall Out). More than one writer was given the script for Arrival with a brief to write a follow-up episode, so there are several that could be “episode 2”. (I’m pretty sure both Dance of the Dead and The Chimes of Big Ben are among them … Dance of the Dead contains several references to Number Six being “new here”, but may well have been moved back in the running order because it’s so weird that the producers wanted to give viewers time to “get into” the show before throwing that one at them…)
I think Steve Wright is onto something. The first episodes I saw in full were “The General” & “The Schizoid Man”–which are, while not immensely more real-world, perhaps a bit more conventional as science-fiction or action-adventure than “Many Happy Returns”, “Dance of the Dead”, or the last few episodes.