The Prisoner: “Fall Out”

“All About You Is Yours”: “Fall Out” & The Prisoner As Accidental Memoir

By Magellan J. Pfluke

Television is a medium of rampant contradictions: the serial and the standalone, the committee and the showrunner, the subversion and the commercial, the vast and the intimate, the show and the showrunning, text and meta-text. Successful and evocative programs are, at times, those that illuminate and are marred by these inherent contradictions, none more so than The Prisoner. Although one could begin the encyclopedia entry on The Prisoner by referring to it as a “science-fiction-allegorical television series” (as Wikipedia does), those larger structural contradictions in relation to The Prisoner can prove far more interesting and distracting than the contents of the show itself. In that sense, it can be tempting to consider The Prisoner, especially in viewing its final episode, “Fall Out,” as a work of biography rather than allegory.

This reading of “Fall Out” is substantiated by the eponymous “Fall Out Theory,” a Prisoner fan theory that situates “Fall Out” as Patrick McGoohan’s personal commentary on his television career and on The Prisoner itself. It reads the jury as his demanding public, the judge as television executives, and his unmasking of Number 1 as the man that the audience demands him to be — a twisted shadow of himself grimacing under an ape mask, playing a role written for him without his consent. This conception of The Prisoner seems corroborated by McGoohan’s own daughter in the documentary In My Mind, in which she notes that during “Arrival,” when Six discovers that his time of birth has been omitted from his personnel file, he divulges McGoohan’s own birthdate to fill the gap. The documentary, along with other ancillary behind-the-scenes material, attests that while other creative voices played a role in the shaping of The Prisoner, it was ultimately McGoohan’s that remained the most powerful and steadfast throughout production. And, certainly, any final thoughts that you may carry forward about The Prisoner come from the final two episodes, both penned by McGoohan himself. Undeniably, it is his program. The question arises, then, of the extent to which the program must be read in conversation with his own life.

In considering The Prisoner-as-biography, certain plot contrivances become entirely justified and rich: Six’s defiant “resignation” from the life of the spy mirrors McGoohan’s own distaste with continuing work on Danger Man, the technicolor splendor of The Village feels akin to a television set in which he feels trapped, the Numbers 2 are a rogue’s gallery of directors, producers, bosses that still fearfully serve some ineffable, unseen higher power. If you want to be cute, their “Number 1” is the ever-present directive to reach Number 1 in the ratings. The entire series unfolds as a study of the anxieties inherent in the life of an actor: the paranoia of discovering that you may be replaced by someone who looks remarkably like you (“The Schizoid Man”), the fear that you may get lost in the excitement of a new role and become someone you detest (“Living in Harmony”), the suspicion that you may one day take on a project that turns you into a hackneyed mockery of yourself (“The Girl Who Was Death”). The defiance of expectations in “Fall Out” is McGoohan’s very own defiance of the “leading man” role. When he takes the stage at the behest of the Judge to address the audience in his moment of victory, any joy he could have taken in the moment falls flat at the realization that nobody is listening. The larger your bullhorn, the more you find yourself drowned out by the roars of preemptive approval. More than any other, that moment explains why Six (and Patrick McGoohan) felt the need to resign — what good can be done in taking a leading role in a broken system? Even the well-intentioned can become egomaniacs and tyrants in the end.

I wonder, though, whether this constant conversation in television between text and meta-text is in service of art, or of gossip. In watching In My Mind I certainly felt the voyeur, and I suspected that the more I learned about the life McGoohan had put in his art, the more I felt that he hadn’t put it there entirely for me to find. McGoohan’s own insistence that the show is pure allegory is, unfortunately, not the case. Whether it was his intention or not, the conversation around The Prisoner, the manner in which the meta-text has imposed itself upon the text, has made the work an accidental memoir of sorts. Where the analysis of the “Fall Out Theory” falls short, then, is in its treatment of the program as mere biography, rather than memoir. The theory treats the episode as a solvable puzzle, one that ends once you have put together all the pieces, seen the full picture of McGoohan’s life, and then swept the whole thing back into the box. This reading is compelling, but does not follow the full arc of engaging with memoir even as it attempts to unpack the biographical allegory. While the conclusions of allegory are broad and societal, (as was McGoohan’s intention and as have been my own readings of the show at times), the genre of memoir rhymes with an inherent quality of television: it is a personal art form. It is meant to be lived with and discovered in one’s own home before venturing outside.

The enduring question of The Prisoner, then, is not that of allegory, of what is “wrong with society,” so to speak. While the show certainly gestures at those ideas, even in this episode, I find those reachings to fall short (the character of Number 48, while delightful in his chaos, is no clear commentary). The same is true of the show’s more strictly allegorical episodes, which are among its least successful (“The General” and “It’s Your Funeral,” as prime examples). The enduring question is also not that of biography, of what it was that imprisoned McGoohan. Rather, the irony here is that the show must first be wholly McGoohan’s before it can be wholly yours, and it must become wholly yours to have any meaning at all. The meta-text is an important component in transfiguring this program into a work of memoir, and posing the question to you, instead. How do you imprison yourself? How are you complicit in your own captivity? How do you plan to free yourself, and how do you plan to live when you come to terms with the fact that you can never be truly free?

It’s hard to know for sure, but I don’t know that I could have felt those questions with quite the same gravity had I not known McGoohan’s own personal backstory. I think I may have just thought that Six rode off into the sunset and that was the end of it. I also don’t think that this reading holds without the final episode existing as it does — it fundamentally recontextualizes The Prisoner and changes its purpose as a work of art almost entirely. As McGoohan says himself, “What is the most evil thing on earth? Is it jealousy? Is it hate? Is it revenge? Is it the bomb? What is it? When one really searches it’s only one thing, it’s the evil part of oneself that one is constantly fighting until the moment of our demise.” He contends that those who fail to confront and wrestle with this evil, those who allow it to carry on unnoticed and unchallenged, run the risk of becoming part of “the sort of gang that Hitler had.” McGoohan came of age during the Second World War — he understood that evil institutions and evil people do not act without accomplices, en masse. His own rejection of his prison, even if such rejection ultimately baffled more than it instructed, is in that sense a memoir of the truest form, what author Tim O’Brien would call a “true war story.” In his 1990 collection of short stories, The Things They Carried (another work of fiction-as-memoir with perhaps more intention to be so), O’Brien casts his work as that of writing “true war stories,” and concludes “How to Tell a True War Story” by writing:

“In the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It’s about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It’s about love and memory. It’s about sorrow. It’s about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.”

“Fall Out” demands that we take the time to read The Prisoner as a true war story. It lays bare McGoohan’s own fears, anxieties, flaws, contradictions, defeats, triumphs, and defiance, not so that we may better understand McGoohan, but so that we may ask ourselves: what are the things we are afraid to do, and why do we never listen?

And Now, A Re-Ordering Of The Prisoner

As a final exercise, I think it would be fitting to completely individualize The Prisoner by positing my own viewing order. Parts absurd, surreal, obtuse, and insightful, I hope McGoohan would have had a laugh at it.

Act 01: The Prisoner As Allegory

Begin by viewing The Prisoner as a work of science fiction, one with questions that may in fact be answered and symbols that may in fact correspond to the institutions of the real world.

The Prologue Triad

01 — “Arrival”

02 — “Dance of the Dead”

03 — “Checkmate”

The Power Triad

04 — “The General”

05 — “Free For All”

06 — “It’s Your Funeral”

The London Triad

07 — “The Chimes Of Big Ben”

08 — “Do Not Forsake Me, Of My Darling”

09 — “Many Happy Returns”

Act 02: The Prisoner As Biography

Explore how The Prisoner is shaped by the experience of McGoohan himself and his own career as an actor.

The Actor As He Was

10 — “A, B, & C”

A — All of Danger Man (Find The Missing Link)

11 — “The Schizoid Man”

The Actor As He Could Have Been

12 — “Living In Harmony”

13 — “The Girl Who Was Death”

B — In My Mind (Put It Together)

Act 03: The Prisoner As Accidental Memoir

Conclude by examining the manner in which Six is a prisoner of his own design, in both his victories and his defeats, and then examine how those themes play out in your own life.

Studies In Defiance

14 — “A Change Of Mind”

15 — “Hammer Into Anvil”

16 — “Once Upon A Time”

17 — “Fall Out”

C — “All You Need Is Love” (Bang!)

Are there flaws with this order? Yes. Is it the wrong way to watch The Prisoner? Yes. But hey, at the end of the day, it’s mine.