Cult TV Blog

The introduction to this series of posts can be found  here. This post is a continuation of the discussion I started in my last post about the episodes Checkmate and Free for All, as they were released joined together to make a film. In my last post I talked about the theme of these episodes and the whole film, and this post is about the structure of the two episodes put together. A Chess game B Talk about black/white and escaping C Psychiatric assessment D1 Given Number 8 as his monitor, who is also tricked E Rejects her, takes her pendant and gets ready an escape attempt with others Attempts escape F Brought back to the village A Introduces the theme of the election which is just as Alice in Wonderland as the chess game B Number 2 says he wants to distinguish the guards from the prisoners D2 Given Number 58 for the election period, but she is in on the deception Dissolution of outgoing council Spins round and goes down through the floor into a corridor C Tested in the labour exchange

The introduction to this series of posts can be found  here. This post is about the joined together episodes Checkmate and Free for All, released as one video called Checkmate by Precision Video in October 1983. David Fakrikian (see web page and video linked at the bottom of the page), whose work inspired these posts, says that they are joined together by going straight from the scene in Checkmate where the butler places a pawn on the chessboard to the scene in Free for All where the phone rings in Number 6's cottage and he answers it with 'What do you want?' This post has proved surprisingly complex so I'm going to have to split it over two, or even three blog posts. This one is about the theme which links the two episodes. Fakrikian feels the linking theme used to make the two episodes a single film with a unifying theme is that of telling the difference between the black and the white (Checkmate) and between prisoners and warders (Free for All). He identifies as othe

The introduction to this series of posts can be found  here. This post is about the episodes Many Happy Returns (MHR) and A, B and C, released edited together into a film by Precision Video in July 1982 as Many Happy Returns. It is based on an online paper and video by David Fakrikian (link at the bottom of the page) with further padding by me. Fakrikian feels (in the video linked below) that the theme which joins the two episodes together is of returning to dreamland repeatedly, and the question of what is real and what isn't. For example is the village really empty, and is my real house real. Ultimately in this view the Village becomes the only reality and the outside world becomes the dream. He identifies some points of similarity: he compares Number 6 walking around the empty village as if in a dream in MHR and saying 'This is a dreamy party' in A, B and C; he also identifies Mrs Butterworth as a point of connection between the two. However I was delighted to find, when

The introduction to this series of posts can be found  here. This post is about the two Prisoner episodes Arrival and The Schizoid Man, considered together as joined together to make a film, which is as they were released on the first UK video release in the 1980s. I briefly considered the structure of Arrival alone in my previous post, to compare it to Koroshi and Shinda Shima, but I would like you to forget what I said there for the purposes of this post. That is because David Fakrikian's article which prompted this series of posts suggests a slightly different structure for the double episodes of The Prisoner and Dangerman (link below) so they must be considered slightly differently. Instead of the straightforward two related plots of the doubled up Danger Man episodes, of course The Prisoner structure as suggested by Fakrikian, requires a change of Number 2 rather than a change of baddie. Edit: Because my brain is like a sieve I managed to publish this blog post without stating

The introduction to this series of posts can be found  here. As I stated in the introduction the purpose of these posts is to examine several episodes of Danger Man and The Prisoner in pairs to see how they work and particularly to identify any structure. So I have identified the following repeat structure in Koroshi and Shinda Shima, the final episodes of Danger Man, which were also joined together as a film. Koroshi : A Japanese female spy is pursued and killed. B Drake arrives in Tokyo as Edwards. C Potter gives him a record. D The record includes a picture of an emblem. E Drake seeks an explanation of the emblem from an old wise man. Drake meets Rosemary F Rosemary takes Drake to see Nigel Saunders. (Inversion of the going to the wise wo/man motif at E) G Drake is introduced to the death cult through the very heavy hint of a koroshi murder scene. H A man tries to kill Drake. I Drake saves Rosemary from a murder attempt. J The purpose of the death brotherhood is to end rule by the p

I have had it in mind for a long time to do a series of posts about the different suggested viewing orders for the episodes of The Prisoner. That I have not so far done so is purely because I can't work out how to and feel that a single blog post about a single viewing order for the seventeen episodes would be unwieldy, and if they were split up it would become confusing. However there's another issue on the periphery of this subject. Actually, as is always tha case with The Prisoner, there are several. We all have heard that McGoohan had his seven favoured episodes and felt the others were merely padding. You can see quite an extensive discussion of this  here but the usual list given is Arrival, Free for All, Dance of the Dead, Checkmate, The Chimes of Big Ben, Once Upon a Time, The Conclusion. That's one issue: that the show's creator didn't mean it to look like it does. But then it gets more interesting. On  this web page (by David Fakrikian) you will see seve

You're all going to have to bear with me as I go into my usual raptures when blogging about some of my favourite TV. As is usually the case this is a show with somewhat lukewarm reviews, and I can't for the life of me think why. This show picks up on so much in the X-Files universe, which is ours, and deep seams of richness. We have the obvious aspect of 'remote viewing', and I'm afraid I've got one criticism here. What was Mulder playing at not mentioning the Stargate Project which was in the public domain when this one was made? You've gotta love the US government for spending billions of $ on researching psychics. It's one of those cases where it looked like it was positive unless you looked at the whole evidence, when the results didn't exceed chance, but this was just asking to be dragged in and have Mulder and Scully disagree about the research and the nature of the evidence. This is even the actual subject matter of the show but didn't get