59 Years Later, The Prisoner Remains An Incomplete Masterpiece
Beware the wailing inflatable ball!
What happens when the most underrated sci-fi show of all time is also one of the best spy shows of the 1960s? And what happens when that same show also has a large white inflatable balloon as a kind of ghostly executioner? The answer is the classic show The Prisoner, a paranoid sci-fi thriller that feels ahead of its time, partly because there’s never been anything like it since. As of July 1, 2026, the entire series is streaming on Criterion. Here’s why you should binge the whole show ASAP, and why it remains, 59 years later, an unfinished work of art unlike anything on TV.
Mild spoilers ahead.
After starring in the hit British show Danger Man, actor Patrick McGoohan — sick of playing spy John Drake — had decided to end his time on the series when producer Lew Grade asked him to come up with another show. But The Prisoner was about as different from the grounded espionage series that McGoohan was known for. Instead, The Prisoner followed an unnamed spy (McGoohan), known only as “Number Six,” who quits his espionage job, only to find himself held captive in a place called The Village.
What is The Village? Why did Number Six resign? What is the purpose of keeping people in The Village? A variety of what we would now call “mystery boxes” are prevalent throughout The Prisoner, but unlike prestige TV today, the show wasn’t necessarily obsessed with answering questions. Rather the show delighted in making the audience think that the purpose of those questions — and by extension, the notion of free will — is all illusory.
The key to loving and understanding The Prisoner is to appreciate that on some level, McGoohan took the spy genre, slapped it with a Twilight Zone set-up, and proceeded to inject heavy doses of the TV version of abstract expressionism. This isn’t to say The Prisoner is surreal per se, but perhaps better described as sub-real. There is a literal situation impacting the story, but literalism isn’t really the name of the game. The most obvious successor of The Prisoner is Twin Peaks, but elements of the show live on in Severance and Black Mirror, too.
Without ruining the entire arc of the show, here’s a quick microcosm for what the show is actually like: Number Six is constantly harassed by one of the overseers of the village called Number Two, but Number Two is played by a different actor in nearly every episode, which changes the gender, age, and disposition of Number Two constantly. What Number Two wants is “information” from Number Six, but what that entails tends to change from episode to episode. In the second episode, “The Chimes of Big Ben,” the docile inhabitants of The Village — many implied to be former spies — are all encouraged to participate in an art show, in which pretty much everyone creates some sort of artistic likeness of Number Two himself. It’s tempting to say WandaVision could have pulled something off like this, but it would be like if that show switched actors who played Agatha every episode.
Number Six (Patrick McGoohan) and a Rover in The Prisoner.
To say The Prisoner is weird is both an understatement and a massive compliment. One of its better features, the aforementioned “Rover” — an inflatable white balloon that undulates menacingly — also moves/attacks with a bizarre kind of wail, which sounds like it’s both in pain and about to inflict pain. To make matters weirder, the Rover often appears to be created in water, almost like it is birthed from the ocean that surrounds the Village. The fact that this seemingly cheap visual effect evokes so much terror is a credit to the style and confidence of the show. A version of The Prisoner with “better” special effects is undesirable, which partly explains the failure of the utterly forgotten 2009 remake.
The only drawback to binging The Prisoner today is, paradoxically, its greatest feature. Although the show was, at one point, intended for a longer run, the production order of The Prisoner was shortened to 17 episodes, rather than 26 episodes. The final episode, “Fall Out,” found Number Six and a version of Number Two (Leo McKern) locked in a truly bizarre contest of wills, which later leads to Number Six getting some of the answers that he wants. Fans have debated the ending of “Fall Out” for decades, but if you look at it a certain way, the fact that The Prisoner doesn’t give you all the answers was, almost certainly, the point all along.
