The Prisoner: A. B. and C.

"Mr. Sandman, Bring Me a Dream"

The Prisoner: Episode 3 A. B. and C.

Written by Anthony Skene

Directed by Pat Jackson

No.14 "You know I haven't had time to prove the drug"

No.2 "Just get it right or I'll see it's proved on you".

The Village still want to know why No.6 resigned. No.2 believes he was going to sell out, but what and to whom. He's broken down the suspects to three people, A. B. and C., all of whom frequented Madame Engadine's celebrated parties in Paris. Pressured to get a quick result from his superiors ("No.1" perhaps?) he persuades No.14 to bring forward her experimental drug trial. They abduct a drugged No.6 in his sleep and take him to No.14's secret laboratory. There, they can see into his dreams on a large screen. The drug allows them to 'manipulate' his dreams. They feed him images of the party and then the face of each suspect. However, due to the dangerous nature of the drug they can only administer one dose at a time and must wait twenty four hours between doses.

On the first night No.6 awakes and sees No.14 briefly before she lulls him back to sleep. Each night they show him one of the suspects and see what would happen. But on the first morning No.6 sees No.14 buying flowers and recognises her from his dream. Checking his wrist, he notices a needle mark. On the second night No.14  experiments with putting words into B.'s mouth, but a suspicious No.6 asks her questions she cannot answer. The next morning No.6 sees a second needle mark. He follows No.14 to her laboratory, where from the equipment, film, and box files he deduces what's going on.  He decides to play a trick on them with suspect C.

This is a superb episode, one of my favourites. Again, the fact that Colin Gordon appears twice as No.2 makes the idea of a 'definitive' episode order dubious. In this episode during the opening credits he says "I am No.2" whereas in "The General" he says "I am the new No.2" which would suggest this should be viewed after that episode. But since in both No.2 seems desperate to achieve success fearing that he would be replaced (or worse) his catastrophic failures in both would surely have meant his doom. Did The Village give him a second chance? Is it likely they would be so forgiving? It's more likely that he might have survived this episode, but THERE'S NOT A HOPE IN HELL after what happens to The General itself that he would survive that.

The plot is by Anthony Skene, a talented and well respected writer of thrillers, who nicely constructs his plot, using the three dreams as the three acts for his drama, with each dream followed by No.6's increasing awareness of the situation. There's an ineluctable progress which seems completely natural and unforced. This is aided by Pat Jackson's excellent direction. A journeyman director not noted for his film career, he had however worked on former ITC shows The Saint, Man In A Suitcase, and of course Danger Man, so obviously knew the genre, and helped by a tightly constructed script. Each dream is slightly different, held together by the party framework, and excluding the dream machine plot device would not have been out of place in Danger Man. We get the party as a metaphor for a battlefield, the witty repartee between No.6 and the excellent Peter Bowles as A. (I love the way he whispers "surprise me"). We get some great fight sequences, and the second is excellently framed by Jackson, with the fight in the background whilst B.'s back is in the foreground so we can see from the right another henchman appear who slowly pulls a gun and points it at her head. Wonderful, this is the kind of magic that raises these shows from mere genre hackery. 

Notice how, despite the episode's emphasis on dialogue (after all, No.2 wants to know why No.6 was selling out and to whom), there's a wonderful sequence of about five minutes after dream two when No.6 follows No.14 to her laboratory. There's no dialogue, just action. The following itself is accompanied by Albert Elm's excellent incidental music (see bottom for some video examples of his music). But once No.6 is alone, we just have silence as we watch No.6 wander around the laboratory deducing what's going on.

McGoohan is excellent at scenes like these, they often occur in Danger Man when he's doing a bit of skullduggery, and his gimlet stare, and thoughtful countenance, plus his wonderful sense of movement (he was an amateur boxer in his youth) make him completely compelling, you can't take your eyes off him. It's audacious for a TV show, which normally abhors silence, but it's the correct decision by Jackson and editors Geoffrey Foot (film) and Eric Mival (music), and shows the care and thought that went into the making of these episodes, spurred on by McGoohan's insistence that everybody gave100% and more when working. 

The acting too is uniformly superb. Bowles has already been mentioned (all vocal charm that hides menace). Sadly, Annette Carell, who played B., died shortly after this, but she's magical as the spy who "even looks like a spy" as No.14 says ("yes, from a long line" replies No.2), relaxed and charming when speaking as herself, who quickly changes to fear and desperation when voiced by No.14. It's  a compliment to Skene's dialogue that he's able to make a difference in tone and language between B. and No.14 impersonating B. (a spy would never say "swap", always "trade"), and a tribute to Carell's skill.

Among the baddies Colin Gordon, a greatly underrated British character actor, is exemplary as No.2, menacing, cajoling, with a neat if nasty turn of phrase yet who becomes giddy as a schoolgirl at the prospect of discovering a fourth suspect ("you'll have to call him D" No.14 sardonically replies). His shock at the abrupt unmasking of D. is excellent, as is his increasingly weary look each morning as he clearly cannot sleep. Sheila Allen is competent if not out rightly brilliant as No.14 but as her star performance in Bouquet of Barbed Wire shows, she was a subtle actress who underplayed beneath the histrionic soap surface, so she was probably deferring to No.2 and No.6 (both powerhouse performances) here. Georgina Cookson (whose appearance as a No.2 in  a later episode further confusing things) has a nice cameo as The Blonde Lady at the party, "Number six ... I'm sure it's your lucky number", and avid extras spotters will note among the party guests the ubiquitous Pauline Chamberlain and Ann Barrass.

That final party sequence is a blast. I absolutely love it ("this is a dreamy party"), and is one of the many reasons I love the show. The music used is excellent, really groovy, but sadly it's not incidental music but stock library music, so unavailable, but here's  a video clip.

The use of Dutch angles gives us a clue to the 'unrealistic' nature of this dream, and I love No.6's attempts to literally correct the angle by physically moving the off-kilter mirror. This is a fantastic sequence, with McGoohan obviously having fun ("haven't they killed you yet", he says to Barrass who's wearing B.'s dress, "sorry, must have been thinking of someone else"). The denouement is of course excellent, if it's your first time watching it you don't see it coming.

A word must be said here about the excellent incidental music first featured here. As with the first episode Arrival, I've posted some of the incidental music (see below). McGoohan had been unhappy with the efforts of both Robert Farnon and Wilfred Josephs on the first episode, but used some of their incidental music (along with Ron Grainer, who wrote the theme tune) for it. However, normally you would  score the first few episodes and thus build up a set of incidental music that you could reuse throughout the series. They weren't able to with "Arrival", so McGoohan hired ITC music mastro Albert Elms to score both this and the next episode "Free For All", and it is these musical cues and stings that would be used until the filler episodes. The music nicely mixes nursery rhyme phrases with menacing guitar stings, thoughtful tympani, and alternately playful and dramatic woodwinds. Excellent. It's another reason I love these ITC shows. If you compare his work on The Prisoner and Man In A Suitcase, both being shot at the same time, you might notice a similarity between one of the pieces. 

Finally, this episode is clearly more interested in the plot mechanics - why did No.6 resign, will his dreams give him away etc. than in more thematic material. But there is another of  a long line of medicine being perverted to harm rather than heal, more suited for the use of authoritarian structures in keeping their subjects in tow. This was the decade of CIA experiments in the use of LSD,  the MKUltra project, The Stanford Prison Experiment, and Robert Laing's theories on how psychology was being used to 'normalise' certain behaviour, and penalise any contrary behaviour, plus the widespread use of Valium on American housewives.

Of course, this episode is one that is most readily accessible to a strictly Freudian analysis of the show. The Village is the super-ego, No.6 (awake) is the ego, and No.6's dream state obviously the subconscious. There's even a nice joke about the libidinous nature of the dream subconscious state when No.2 says "he's spotted somebody .. no, that's not B." when No.6 notices a pretty French maid at the party. Of course, The Village as the super-ego and No.6 as the ego is  a quite common interpretation of the series, but it's sometimes difficult to posit 

what represents the id, the subconscious. Some have argued that each week, the events portrayed in The Village are a subconscious battle itself between those two elements, thus making any sense of continuity (and therefore which order to watch them) superfluous. This episode is the most obvious example of that viewpoint.

Incidental Music

VILLAGE rating (out of 6): No.6

Cast

The Prisoner .................................................................. PATRICK McGOOHAN

Number Two .................................................................. COLIN GORDON

Number 14 ..................................................................... SHEILA ALLEN

Engadine ........................................................................ KATHERINE KATH

A. .................................................................................... PETER BOWLES

B. ...................................................................................  ANNETTE CARELL

Blonde Lady.................................................................... GEORGINA COOKSON

Flower Girl ..................................................................... LUCILLE SOONG

Maid at party .................................................................. BETTINE LE BEAU

First Thug ...................................................................... TERRY YORKE

Second Thug ................................................................. PETER BRAYHAM

Henchman  .................................................................... BILL CUMMINGS

Be Seeing You!

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