OCCULT ARTIST: Patrick McGoohan, John Drake, 'David Jones' & Number Six
Is There Anything Left To Say About ‘The Prisoner’? Actually, Yes.
“The number 97 represents perseverance, endurance, hope, motivation, inspiration, intuition, and determination. It is the largest two-digit prime number, and both a Proth prime and Pierpont prime number, making it quite special among primes.” — Blend of Numerology websites
“I am not a number. I am a free man!” — Patrick McGoohan, as Number Six, in The Prisoner
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I suppose I should be writing today about how we’re heading into the Dark Occult “Season of Sacrifice,” like I have the past couple years. But I don’t have the stomach for it. In short: Lotta death and destruction by fire and water the next 40 days. You’ve been warned.
It sucks. I hate this time of year even as it keeps proving me right again and again, and my birthday sits flat in the middle of it. Instead, I’ll retreat into nostalgia like I have a few times in the past, and note that today would’ve been the late great Patrick McGoohan’s 97th birthday, had he not died at the age of 80 in January 2006.
The brilliant but mercurial McGoohan was the highest paid TV star in the world in the 1960s, and stands among my all-time favorite actors, though he was much more than an actor: A genius, a mad man, a pacifistic revolutionary, a stubborn iconoclast, a versatile writer, a skilled director, a control freak, an egomaniacal bully, an insensitive asshole, a dual citizen of America and Ireland, a creative Artist and rigidly disciplined Catholic who fiercely guarded the privacy of his wife and children at the height of his fame, and the man who made me believe from a TV-programmed childhood that spies were cool good guys (they're mostly not, but I still foolishly believe), even more than 007 or, uh, Maxwell Smart.
McGoohan’s 1967-1968 sci-fi spy-fi surrealist action-adventure allegory The Prisoner — superficially about an elite British intelligence operative who resigns his job and is kidnapped and spirited away to a remote and isolated Village, where people from all nationalities who know too much are given numbers instead of names (“You are Number Six”), and live in what appears to be a bucolic Utopia but is actually a 24/7 surveillance and brainwashing open-air prison — remains the bravest, greatest, most groundbreaking television show in history, the only series I've watched more than twice (4x, a few top episodes much more than that). You can start watching it here for free in 720p.
More Happy Nostalgia: Once upon a different timeline, when I was a high school teacher in rural Georgia, half-hour west of Savannah in the mid-to-late 1980s, I used to show my classes select episodes of The Prisoner on VHS that I had recorded off PBS a couple years earlier, and it was quite the localized sensation. Even two decades after The Prisoner ended, it was still unlike anything my Freshman or Sophomore students had ever seen; they were fascinated and gained teen cachet among their classmates because they were the only ones watching it and people were talking about it. I became the school’s coolest teacher (also because I was reading Alan Moore’s Watchmen and Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns comic runs, both of which became huge topics of conversation at the high school), ultimately catching the intrigued attention of the smart, well-read, much-desired, bespectacled and bosomy-blessed French teacher from Kentucky who up to that point thought I was an over-opinionated blowhard. That’s all I have to say about that, other than “Thank you, Patrick McGoohan” and “Brrrrrblblblph!”
Phew. Where was I? O yeah, The Prisoner. The Prisoner ran only 17 hour-long episodes, and while it was the #1 series on British television during its run, it crashed & burned so badly at the time with its bizarre and abstruse final episode that McGoohan literally had to leave the country; he and his family were getting death threats and other extreme harassments. Thank god he didn’t own a Tesla! The actor's career never fully recovered.
Today, The Prisoner is considered one of the greatest television series of all time, even that last episode (that I don’t like). Its rep has become so great that it unfairly overshadows The Prisoner's preceding television series, Danger Man (known as Secret Agent in the USA).
Another worldwide smash hit from the storied British television production house ITC (I’ve written about them before here and here), Danger Man/Secret Agent is a noir diamond. 86 episodes, 84 of them in B&W, at least 66 of them worth seeing, and maybe a dozen that are as good as a John Le Carré adaptation. McGoohan is absolutely magnetic as the steel-spined NATO, then British intelligence, clandestine operative John Drake: The most moral spy in fiction, who rarely carries a gun and relies on his formidable wits over violence whenever possible (though of course it proves impossible at least once per episode).
Danger Man had two separate runs: 39 half-hour episodes from September 1960 to January 1962, after which it was cancelled; then 45 hour-long episodes from October 1964 to April 1966, revived when the James Bond craze made all things espionage financially attractive and reruns of the original 39 episodes had become a global sensation.
In what proved a savvy marketing move, CBS retitled the revived series Secret Agent for American audiences and changed the opening theme from Edwin Astley’s instrumental “HighWire” (ahem) to Johnny Rivers’ smash hit single of the title. There were two final episodes shot in color for an aborted amped-up third version that sat around for a couple years before they finally got released in 1968; they’re far more gimmicky and loaded with gadgets, set in Japan to capitalize upon the 007 picture You Only Live Twice, and among the worst of the run. McGoohan quit after the second color episode was shot, he had accumulated enough power he was able to do that, and moved on to The Prisoner.
McGoohan claimed until the day he died that John Drake and “Number Six” were not the same character and The Prisoner was not a continuation of Danger Man, but that’s bullshit. The two characters look the same, are both British spies, and share the same mannerisms and vocal inflections. Drake as “Number Six” has a shorter temper and a bit less self-control, but that’s to be expected when a man used to doing his own thing ends up in a human zoo.
Finally, and most candidly, George Markstein, a Danger Man writer who was co-creator of The Prisoner, never wavered in his assertions that Drake became Six, and the only reason McGoohan never admitted it was because he didn’t want to pay creator rights to Danger Man’s Ralph Smart. That sounds about right for McGoohan, who ultimately fled the UK for Switzerland when his town wouldn’t let him build a wall around his house after The Prisoner ended and people kept harassing him, then moved to L.A. in the mid-1970s, where he finally died decades later after winning two Emmys for a couple great Columbo episodes but also walking out on another series, the medical doctor drama Rafferty.
The biggest knock against John Drake becoming Number Six is that there is no explanation for why Drake, a company man throughout the Danger Man series who becomes increasingly disillusioned with his bosses (but not his job) would resign in the first place.
But I think I’ve got an explanation: Ice Station Zebra.
Ice Station Zebra is a big budget 1968 espionage thriller (and Howard Hughes’ favorite movie) shot in 70mm but rather leadenly directed by John Sturges (The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape), about a secret submarine mission to the North Pole, ostensibly to rescue some very cold guys from the titular base, but actually (we find out later in the film) it’s to track down a crashed Soviet satellite that had been using British technology stolen by the commies. One of the key characters is a British spy who says his name is “David Jones” (David Bowie’s birth name, FWIW), who is played by McGoohan and talks, acts, moves and has the moral compass and personal discipline of John Drake. The character’s name in Alistair MacLean novel has been changed from the mysterious Dr. Carpenter to one with the inverted initials of the Danger Man character: from JD to DJ.
Ice Station Zebra ends very cynically, with a bunch of double crosses and backstabbings among Russian spies infiltrating the Americans and vice-versa, and climaxes with “Jones” making a terrible mistake, shooting and killing the American sub’s true blue captain. Then the dead man’s replacement destroys the material from the satellite so nobody can have it — not the Americans, not the Russians, not the Brits. Nobody wins. Everybody loses.
It’s a massive operational failure for “David Jones,” quite unlike anything that happened to John Drake in the television series run, and could most certainly be the tragic catalyst that would cause him to resign from British intelligence.
I originally posited this in an article I wrote about Danger Man/Secret Agent for The Washington Times back in the early 1990s, when the series was being syndicated on a local D.C. indie channel (do those exist anymore?). Far as I’m aware, I’m the first person to make the connection. The theory popped up again on Reddit six months ago, where I weighed in to endorse it.
So that’s basically why I wrote this Substack, which concerns minute and arcane lore for a character whose decade-long story arc ended nearly 60 years ago. I’ve actually got even more than this, but suspect maybe 1% of my readers give a shit and I’m probably shooting my “personal brand” in the foot by following up one of my most-read Substacks ever with what’ll likely be my least-read.
But Patrick McGoohan had his Muse, for better and for worse, and so do I. We’re tired of writing about how much trauma is going to be inflicted upon humanity in the next 40 days, how many people and renowned structures are going to die and/or be destroyed. I don’t want to go back over the past five years. I want to go back fifty-five. So be careful out there. Watch your six. Patrick McGoohan, R.I.P.
I loved The Prisoner. Of course there's more to say about it. Besides; someone, somewhere, some time ago, said something like, "Everything that needed to be said has already been said. But nobody was listening. So it all needs to be said again."
Tom, great read. TV of that era framed by the mad 60s was an experience that remains imprinted. When my children were small, I shelled out for the complete series of ‘Thunderbirds’ and ‘Jonny Quest’ on DVD to offset my ex-wife’s preference for constructive social brainwashing by ‘Barney.’ And how about another ITV gem — ‘The Avengers’? original with the delicious Emma Peel? Kooky stuff and hardly kids’ fare which is why we loved it 🤩