The Prisoner in the Asylum: Introduction
I see it is five years since I went through The Prisoner on the blog so it is high time I had another go at him. I have been thinking about the various viewing orders but I'm having some difficulty with deciding how to do it so I'm going to do a series of posts on Number 6 as a psychiatric patient and The Village as a hospital. In fact, this always strikes me as one of the more blindingly obvious ways of understanding the series beyond the usual understanding of control and freedom, although I'm rather surprised to see little on it online. I would hate to think that you would find actual original research on this blog! For the record I don't think that one single approach to the series, beyond repeating underlying themes, is correct or even possibly intended by McGoohan. However when you look on the show in a psychiatric sense it suddenly begins to look very different. I think it can be understood to be about a very special inpatient of a very special psychiatric hospit...