@@jelkel25 The worse part is that they're becoming very hard to avoid. Once a neighborhood has an HOA, it's almost impossible to get rid of and, of course, anyone moving in must join the HOA as part of their home purchase. Unless you buy a home in a brand-new development, or way out in the boonies, you may not have much choice.
@@jelkel25 progressive takeover of california in the 60's is what made it a staple. It doesn't go away because it's both a way of curb checking what others see as undesirables and at the same time works almost as a status to show off that you aren't poor. And yes, it's one of the most anti-american things ever devised
The nice thing about the show was his spirit. He won the war for the most part even though he lost most of the battles. He also never gave up despite the adversity.
It really is amazing we're still analyzing the meaning of the Prisoner more than 50 years on from the original series. I introduced my older children to this show and they saw something different almost in every episode that I had not considered after multiple viewings.
I'm pretty sure that everyone here would love it if our Savage Professor here would make longer videos. Not always but I'd listen to an hour long rant any day. Also, I'm just really we all found this channel, and that someone like him made it. Thanks Bro
I've been waiting for this one. Your interpretation falls pretty close to my own. I watched Danger Man / Secret Agent as a kid, but did not pick up on The Prisoner until college in 1980. The college library had the entire series with the commentary and interviews by Warner Troyer from TV Ontario. My friends and I watched the entire series over about a week. (They were on reel to reel video tapes). The remake was off the mark in my opinion. Unfortunately, most of our leaders would see this as a "how to" instead of a warning, much as they do with 1984, Animal Farm and others.
Aldous Huxley feared a Benevolent & Technological Autocracy more than what Orwell showed us in 1984. As of 2024, we can see his fears were realized, concerning the terrible future to come...
Kind of funny. Three Days of the Condor, The Parallax View, and yes, The Prisoner were the reasons why I chose Intelligence for my career specialty when I joined the military so many decades ago. An odd choice but not really I suppose since I come from a military family with a long history. It was the height of the Cold War and the world was far more grey than people realized (even now). When you joined the game you learned you couldn't fully trust any side. Everybody lies. Like the show, you were always trying to puzzle out the truth of what was being told to you. "Be seeing You."
Fantastic episode and an excellent analysis. I could have watched another half hour. I also hadn't read Clearly's essay before, so thank you for the link. One of my own favorite "pet" interpretations of Fallout is to take it literally. Throughout the series, we see the inner workings of the Village, and instead of some all-knowing mysterious power it is generally revealed to be a pretty standard bureaucracy run by the exact same type of bureaucratic idiots that run offices, agencies, and regimes since time immemorial while spouting doublespeak about their policy goals that becomes more sinister the more powerful they get. So imagine you're #1, and you have been running this place after you got coopted in your own version of Fall Out. And you decide to escape and be free of these idiots because even you can't change this. So what do you do? Well... You've got all the identity-challenging technology of any 1960s mad scientist, including mind transfer machines and face-changing tech. And you've got a new prisoner who is almost exactly like you once were who had just left their life behind and won't be missed for a while. The solution is obvious. Bring him in. Prepare his life for you to take it over. And then whether he decides to stay or go, YOU are the one (pun intended) who walks out and escapes the village. It might even have worked, except #6 rebels even harder! You could actually see a huge chunk of the series as an almost comedically frustrating series of attempts by #1 to find some kind of mind/face/body-swapping technique that will work long-term and let him escape all while being sabotaged by his own subordinates and #6's uncompromising rebellion. Takes the entire series into a kind of scary/groovy Kafka comedy. Which works as well anything else.
Yooooo you're covering some crazy deep cuts. I know the prisoner was a big deal when it came out but nobody knows it now Looking forward to seeing your take on the ending. Keep it up homie, you're a real one
It has a consistent and enthusiastic cult following in the UK, it's an excuse to wear boating jackets if nothing else. The internet is the ideal platform for the speculation that accompanies the series so it still has a life there. In a way I'm glad the remake didn't take off as the modern era has a habit of s*itting on classic shows and movies it finds "problematic", it means the shows legacy will remain intact for those who prefer uncomfortable freedom in the future.
No one after GenX knows it you mean. For Gen X "I am not a number, I'm a free man" was one of the things that made up our identity. It is referenced countless times in our music and media and why alot of GenX are not comfortable with everyone wanting to collect labels. Patrick McGoohan was a man who lived his beliefs and turned down many big roles because they went against them. He famously refused to be Bond due to the gun play and the treatment of women. He had retired to an apartment in my area and I used to enjoy talking to him at the coffee shop. He was hard to talk to at first, but once he knew you were not there just to see a celebrity or babble nonsense he really opened up.
@rutgaurxi7314 He didn't bother others or push his veiws on random people but he definitely didn't care about social norms if you approached him and would not soften his responses just to make the other person comfortable or to seem more genial. If you were going to make him part of the conversation you got him as is. He didn't insult people or become nasty he just didn't hide how he felt about a subject and became dismissive if he felt the topic was nonsense. Other than that he was generally polite and stuck to his own. He also had a style of dress and manner that felt anachronistic, not so much a rejection of modernity in general but a personal decision not to actively take part in it completely. When he was sitting with a beverage and book he had a basic cell phone on the table, per the request he have it from someone close to him, but he seemed to distance himself from it and when his eyes happened to fall on it he would absently push it aside out of his veiw. Of course I can only speak directly to his later years when I knew him and not how he was during the time of his shows.
@@KelsaRavenlock I am reminded of the homage to _The Prisoner_ in, of all things, _Reboot._ It's a dream sequence, but it also marks the protagonist's change from 'aimless survivor' to 'hero.'
I found fascinating similarities between number 6 journey and the knight Lancelot, main character of Soviet fantasy movie "To Kill a Dragon" made in 1988. Both are strong individuals that got trapped in the village under totalitarian control with compliant populace that feels indifferent to the protagonist goal of dismantling the system, with some trying to stop him. But while "The Prisioner" ends with number 6 successful rebellion that destroyed the village and led him and his accomplices back to freedom, "To Kill a Dragon" focus more on the aftermath - that despite destroying figurehead of the oppressive order it would quickly be replaced by softer yet still the same one in nature, as the other seen option for society is complete anarchy. And even if Lancelot will take power to lead people out of this deterministic fate, he will eventually end up doing the same things that did previous oppressors. Highly recommend to watch the movie yourself - to me at least it's a good example of anti-totalitarian fiction from people that actually experienced it, not form western observers that heard or read about the topic. Not sure if there were any dub of this classic in English, only know that there is a sub version on UA-cam
I haven't seen this but it heavily reminds me of "We Happy Few", a game with a similar premise and theme. They both also draw from this tendency in British Society to "Keep Calm and Don't Rock the Boat".
We Happy Few is a great dystopia trapped in a so-so game. Story-wise, I thought it was a fascinating twist on the genre. Especially how the fall of the city doesn't come from any kind of deliberate organized rebellion, but through individual mistakes and low-information decisions causing knock-on effects that breed systemic instability. And yes, WHF was undoubtedly inspired by the Prisoner, at least a bit. The idea of using Simon Says as a method of social control absolutely sounds like something McGoohan might have cooked up.
Can you add an additional 5 or 10 seconds after your sign off to the videos? If I don't pause the video at the end quickly enough, YT starts another ad. So a gap between the end of your presentation and the video would be helpful. You're doing great work and I enjoy your insights.
A movie I truly liked was Circle of Iron, the ending might give light to what Prisioner and its ending was trying to tell us, where the anwser lies and how the path to it maintains thr journey rather than destination.
I had a crazy dream as a kid where the balloon security drone hunted me down in the swamp. I've never seen or even heard of the show until I was an adult.
I highly recommend a trip to the village of Portmeirion in Wales where The Prisoner was filmed for anyone interested in architecture. Not that deserts aren't also interesting and beautiful (for any fans of the reimagining).
I think a key issue of the underlying dilemma is - in my view - the need for rules and conformity with them for security and prosperity. Without those rules and conformity to them, the individual gets outcompeted by those who conform. There is a choice, but a false one since noone can afford to go alone against society.
This is one of my favorite videos from you. I suppose that's partly due to how much The Prisoner means to me. I remember vividly when the idea of an omnipresent surveillance state was science fiction. Now, it is just fact.
On the one hand, it was their go-to method for inducing unconsciousness. On the other, if they wanted to drug him (or beat him) unconscious, there's not a whole lot he could do to stop them.
What made McGooan totally believable as the Prisoner was his role as Danger Man/Secret Agent Man … We already identified him as a Cold War spy . All those episodes of skullduggery and assassination … not James Bond … colder , harder … more deadly .
Aw yeah, my favourite speculative fiction analyzing mountain anarch covering my favourite espionage-themed theatre of the subconscious. There's an interview Patrick McGoohan did for Canadian public access TV (if memory serves) that really illuminates his line of thought behind the show, and his personality in general. It's the latter which feeds my current reading of the Prisoner. Interpreting it as social commentary is valid, it's the way the work was intended to be received, but there's plenty of artistic reaction to the pressures of oversocialized modernity. But there's only ever going to be one Patrick McGoohan. For me, the Prisoner plays out as pure autobiography. He was *the* Secret Agent Man after all, and the Prisoner is the sort of recontextualized, lumbering beast that results when mainstream spy thriller tropes are run through the gauntlet of Patrick McGoohan's resentment towards the constraints and expectstions of that role. I was told once that McGoohan was considered for the role of James Bond but he turned it down because the Bond character was morally distasteful. The Prisoner really benefitted from the South Park expedient writing. Especially towards the end, it is an auteur dredging from his Lynchian subconscious. McGoohan strikes me as a 19th century reactionary who had the misfortune of being born a century too late, and filtering his values through a modernist 20th century lens. I know he would have loved to see what the 21st is like. Imagine explaining to him what Tinder is, let alone the recent medical-related totalism...
Well, well, well, someone made video on The prisoner in 2024. Myself, only by a chance, have discovered the series this year, watching an interview with Bentley Hart. It was stunning to see how modern, the series was for its time, and still is.
Bab5 absolutely took that 'be seeing you' gesture from 'the prisoner.' I figure its some sort of meta-reference to the show itself - nodding at Bester's authoritarianism/system he represents.
You should make a grand Playlist on your channel for all your analyses videos. I tend to watch a few at once, when a new one is released, and it would be more convenient. I expect I'm not the only one. There used to be a "Play All" option on peoples' home YT page which would essentially do that. However the YT overseers, in their great wisdom, appear to have removed that feature in recent months. Anyway, thanks for another great vid!
I wonder if Feral Historian will do "Master and Margarita" in the future. Aside from being a modern classic, it covers the Stalinist iteration of pathologizing dissent.
UA-cam teased me with this and an Oculus Imperia video side by side. I had to flip a coin 😎 Awesome work Feral and thanks for pushing out such awesome content! One of these days I do want to be a Patron when finances allow 🤘
I'd love to hear your take on the Metal Gear series, particularly Metal Gear Solid 2, which came out in 2001, but many have pointed out managed to predict the current socio-political climate with surprising accuracy. You don't have to actually play the games, by the way. Most of the plot and exposition is delivered through cutscenes and "codec" calls (basically, segments where the main character converses with one or more characters over a radio built into his inner ear), of which compilations can be found all over youtube.
In the GURPS game, they took up the idea of lifers. People are sometimes simply stored in the Village. They have no purpose to the Masters but can't be let loose. This includes much of the staff.
There were many interesting things about The Prisoner--it was such a good show. But two of the biggest points to me were that The Village really wasn't one side or the other, East or West, but was really part of both sides, stressing the point that he quit simply because he was disgusted by the whole thing. In true paranoid fashion, nobody could believe that was his reason for quitting. If he's quitting our side, then it must be because he's going to the other side--all the travel brochures they considered a mere blind, and not the truth. The irony of not being willing to believe what is true. But yeah, ultimately, no matter how you try to interpret it, it's more about asking questions than giving answers. I originally thought it was about the inner struggle each of us has, and to some degree that might be true. Why else would it be his face when he saw #1? But it's more likely about the struggle between the individual and society in general, with the episode's various takes on different aspects of society, in addition to his own individual struggle to deal with those aspects of society. But again, no clear answers--it's up to the viewer to decide what answers, if any, actually apply to the struggle.
Great analysis overall! One note that I disagree with is the Religion part. I don't think it has anything to do with materialism or modernity, otherwise McGoohan would have specifically said so. I think it is more a question of not muddying the waters with alternate elements of control designed to be cantilevered to the central edifice of control, not quite a part of it but not fully against it either, like sports, television, popular music, etc... The fact that there was an episode planned with a church and #2 as it's preacher, that never saw the light, seems to me more that McGoohan decided against it, because it belabored the point of the series into unnecessary and probably inescapable brambles.
I've had this ongoing debate with a mathematician friend of mine regarding "systems" when it comes to the way societies operate. He posits that the moment of a systems inception there becomes a hard dividing line between "possible" and "impossible" within the rules of a system, and nothing is "new under the sun" as far as the system is concerned; either the rules allow it or they don't, and the only way to break from that is to make a new system. Things like The Prisoner make me question if that theory is a political ideological viewpoint rather than a (unproven) logical axiom, in a sort of reimagining of the phrase "Everything Within the State, nothing Outside the State" as a critique of how societies setup things and then keep them that way, in this case by a synthesis of cognitive hazard and physical force. I'll have to give this series a watch, it sounds oddly topical.
Seems like the obvious counter-argument is that humans are chaotic and never follow rules perfectly. Human behavior is fuzzy. Rules are ignored, overlooked, bent, and broken in everyday life, and that's even before talking about outright corruption and malfeasance.
@@jasonblalock4429 Yeah that was the first tack I went after with him on, but consider this: we accept that these are possibilities, and implement laws within the system to constrain (or depending on the locality, enable) those actions. But what's interesting about The Prisoner is this depiction of people who can't conceive of stepping out of the defined rules of the system, and when someone tries to, there's apparatus of the system to bring them back to the mean. It's not *unique* to The Prisoner, but the way it explores various modes of such authoritarian systems that have "perfect control" of their people, and show how someone dropped in from a different context might pinball around, but the low entropy authoritarian state has seen "everything" that people can offer and has adapted.
@@byrondumont-eve By that definition, something 'new under the sun' is the same thing as 'breaking the system.' Or, if you prefer, 'acting outside the system' is synonymous with 'instituting a new system.'
Maybe it's just because it's late at night and I've had a couple drinks, but it suddenly occurs to me that "The Prisoner" and the Monkees movie "Head" actually have very similar themes. Both are surrealistic and highly reinterpretable stories of people with 'fake' imposed identities trapped in systems-within-systems of control that they may be truly unable to escape.
The difference between de facto power and de jure power might have been expanded upon. Not like we didn't see that break people's heads in the past few years.
One thing that often reveals this break is the question of whether an absolute monarch needs to play politics to accomplish his domestic agenda. The answer, of course, is that if he doesn't he'll soon find he's no longer king.
Any conversation with a Villager is uncertain. The Villager telling no. 6 they wish to stay could be planted by the Masters to seed that idea. They could believe you are a guard, and refuse to incriminate themselves. I liked the no. 2's. Every no. 2 had their own approach to coercion, their own flairs and flaws.
Currently re-watching your video on The Forever War, and it made me wonder, do you think you'd be interested in doing a video about the lore of Helldivers 2 sometime?
I loved this series while watching it, but soured on it by the ending. I think I watched it like ~2010, so strong in my mind was Lost (which ended in 2010) and the fact that both series started out introducing *strong mysteries* but then failed to wrap it all up in the end. Hearing someone comment just on the politics of it makes me wish they _didn't_ have the spy stuff. That would've just let me focus on the facts about the village (which still had plenty of mysteries) without trying to tie it back to whether this guy was sent to some remote location after retiring or whether it's all a crazy gas-induced fever dream and he's gonna find out Number One is actually his Ego, Number Twos were his Superego and he (Number Six) was the Id. (Of course the actual reveal presents One as an id-like laughing buffoon, so yeah I was way off.)
Not sure if you take recommendations from comments, but I think you might enjoy taking a look at the patlabor films- specifically the second film has an interesting sequence and overarching story about the nature of conflicts and a "justified war vs an unjust peace". Watch the movies in order. The third movie doesn't exist and can't hurt you
Saw this show for the first time as a kid in the early 80s. Watched it on PBS. I loved Fallout, the episode. When he pulled the mask off and it was a gorilla and then himself, I thought it was cool. No clue what the hell it meant, but it was odd and cool.
Patrick McGoohan was an "odd duck". If you look at his film oeuvre, he made interesting choices, which I believe coincided with his character. He turned down the role of James Bond for "moral" (or aesthetic) reasons. I have always regarded The Prisoner as his greatest and most self-revelatory work. (And the miniseries was an abomination!) One gets the impression that Number Six is the most important person in The Village, but why are all those other people there, and who are the occasional victims of Rover? In ways, it is reminiscent of the "retirement home" in The Borgia Stick, where failed mobsters are taken, to be lobotomized, a terrifying alternative to being whacked. And then, there's Rumpole showing up. Repeatedly. “A slave cannot be freed, save he do it himself. Nor can you enslave a free man; the very most you can do is kill him!” ― Robert A. Heinlein, Double Star Oh well half dozen of the Other, one might say. But I have the DVD set, so perhaps another seventeen?
I saw the Village as a place to also store people who have given up their secret, or fulfilled the job the Village needed. People who know too much can't leave. A bunch of people are menial staff, they do the custodial or administrative or security work. Many are just held indefinitely in the Village limbo.
I never saw the Prisoner as "totalitarian" more a mundane bureaucratic rabbit hole that is hard to escape or change because no one is willing to take responsibility. All too similar to our own modern world.
I saw it as a literal prison. The Village is a society the same way Alcatraz or Stalag Luft or Gulag are societies. Sometimes the Village simply stores people. They do no work, have no secrets the Masters need. It is supplied and maintained from some outside world. It does not really need to produce anything.
I liked the surrealism of the Village. There are rules, but the rules are malleable and never truly consistent. The Village has shops and stores and services but its not clear how anyone earns anything. The Village will try to get you through various angles, but very rarely overt violent coercion. Village events and festivals appear as needed. Large parts of the Village serve no real purpose, or hide a true purpose. The people of the Village fall into unclear categories of prisoners, guards, menial staff etc where a persons role is unclear. Some people are too without purpose, their secrets or usefulness already absorbed by the Village until they are simply stored.
Patrick McGoohan Wrote and started in the Prisoner and was a prolific writer and director as well as actor. I’m a big fan of his Columbo episodes. He was an eccentric creator who purposely violated conventions and refused to be normal. I get the feeling the Prisoner is semi-autobiographical and the last episode of the Prisoner is one of the weirdest moments in tv history.
If you have not seen this, I highly recommend that you start it. I don't recommend that you stay all the way to the end. The Prisoner was superb... to begin with. Each episode gets progressively worse. You are the slow boiled frog. It never gets better. When you decide you have had enough, jump ship without regret. There isn't another gem in there if you only hang on. The Cowboy bit is particularly jarring and it is all downhill from there.
I think why most people don’t want actual freedom is because they don’t feel like they’d be able to properly protect and take care of themselves Maybe the way to achieve freedom for everyone is to help the weak get out of their learned helplessness by teaching them how to protect and provide for themselves and in general actually be independent
True independence is impossible, unless you're living in the mountains eating elk and fish. Even then you aren't free from the fickleness of nature and your body's needs. The only free person is the one who doesn't care about the external world at all, as the moment you care about anything external you become a slave to something you do not control.
This got a GURPS setting book, because every mid-sized cult sci fi/fantasy/pulp world could be licensed into a GURPS setting. In it, you create and populate a Village. It seeks to draw the secret, whatever it is, out of the player characters. You are encouraged to set up your own highly arbitrary Village. It is very hard to play a Prisoner game and buy into the surrealism and double-bottom plots.
No. 2 answers to the Masters. Who the Masters are is unclear. Like all Village rules this is surreal. If necessary, there is an election. Otherwise a new no. 2 simply appears with a mandate from the Masters.
i Always thought of the village as a commentary over society in general rather than totalitarism and the last "they're free... or are they?" always stuck as the main proof of that. It's not that he's still a prisoner of the same organisation per se it's that the regular world has become The Village written large, and just like in the village, each one is his own number one.
UA-cam does not like my comments, but let's see if this one goes through. I have never watched The Prisoner. But as a Norwegian living in one of the most elaborate welfare states in the world, I immediately recognize the village as my own home. 2:28 A few months ago, the Norwegian political party that built itself on being anti-mass migration and pro-individual freedom, released their party representatives to allow them to personally decide what to vote on the question of abortion. Which meant that some members switched sides and voted for the expansion of abortion by additional weeks. I was at a friend's place when we accidentally saw this on the news right after we had eaten. I obviously groaned. Not just because I'm a grumpy pro-life Calvinist. But because this political party has been given endless opportunities to become the biggest political party in Norway. If they simply formed themselves alongside a broadly nationalistic party and tapped the untapped Social Conservative and anti-woke vote, they would easily become the largest. Yet, they keep shooting themselves in the foot by having a Pepsi Max obsessed blonde running the party. The response I got? "But it's progress." Nobody in this country, besides a tiny handful of Christians, considers any sort of morality to the question. Instead, it is simply a matter of progress. And that ends the conversation. ------ The Norwegian healthcare model, which is one of the very few single-payer healthcare systems in the world. What that means is that the National government runs and budgets every single hospital in the country. Which means the hospitals can only treat and care up to the point that the budget allows. Sarah Palin was laughed at back in the day when she ran to be Vice President, when she talked about death boards in socialized healthcare. But this is literally true. Also, Norway has some of the best care in the world for breast cancer. it is visual, flashy, and easy to budget. While at the same time, we are among the worst countries in Europe when it comes to complications and deaths tied to chemotherapy and being immunocompromised. As this falls outside the direct cancer mortality, and so becomes more complicated to budget. Also, the hospital system is run on the worst form of slavery. Enslaved and exploited hopes and dreams. The suicide rate among our nurses is horrendously high. We have strict rules on labor and we have powerful labor unions. But nursing is a national necessity. Therefore, the rules don't apply. Our nurses gets paid overtime for less than half of their worked overtime, as they are literally being worked to death. But, if they were paid what they are owed, the entire healthcare system would go bust. Also, the public employment space is a method to employ refugees and immigrants. Where Norwegians require formal educational papers to clean in the hospitals. The migrant women, who don't speak the language, walk around mopping the floor. Which has led to Norwegian hospitals having repeating outbreaks of diseases, especially in the baby wards. Where, in many things, the great oil nation of Norway score at the bottom when it comes to healthcare. Down by countries like Hungary and Romania. -------- Freedom of speech does not exist. To quote my grandfather and one of my few friends, "But not everything should be allowed to be said. There has to be some..." As they, and most, believe we have freedom of speech. While at the same time we have necessary restrictions. Because there must be restrictions. One reporter of one of our major newspapers. At the start of the Russia-Ukraine War, wrote something that was considered to be pro-Russian. This reporter was then picked up by the police and brought to an interrogation room. Where the police talked to him for hours about the fact that he had to be compromised by Russian propaganda and had succumbed to fake news. That he really had to reevaluate his views and what he believed. A Norwegian comedian (a very bad yet very popular one), got drunk at a pub and called another female celebrity of some foreign background a variation of the color brown. He was arrested and interrogated by the police. As written in our hate-speech law, it places mocking on equal term with threaten. And places discrimination on equal term with hateful expression. Which, carried up to 1-3 years in prison, depending on circumstances. And, the hate speech law is set up in such a way, that the insulted can report you. And then the accused has to prove that what they did or said was not, in fact, insulting. And the law covers everything from skin color, national or ethnic origin, religious or life view, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, and disability. --------- And just like the village, we are also judged by three or so judges at a trial. We got rid of juries by our peers a long time ago. All in the name of efficiency. ------------ The arts too, all controlled by the State. As a writer, you can apply for 40K USD a year. As long as you can prove that you are indeed writing. And they approve of what you write. By now, I could have been 400K USD richer if I had been a writer of progressive children's books. And also, the State will buy thousands of your books to place in our libraries. If, they approve of them, of course. The theatres. 100% the State. Movie companies. 100% the State. Music, you want the advertisement and exposure that the State TV and State Radio can provide. --------- I detest universal democracy. it is a system, the only system, that legitimizes itself by the actions it commits. As majority rule, you have no innate human autonomy or rights. Where the bribe of the welfare state keeps everyone in line. Well-fed animals indeed. The village is not Totalitarian. it is merely a Social Democracy. With everything that entails.
Ah ha! So there _is_ a second Norwegian on UA-cam who regularly presents thought-provoking content. I won't say I always agree with either, but it's definitely worthwhile.
I think there was a living memory in 1920 of the old, dirty, cold and hard Scandinavia with overbearing state churches and malnutrition. And any sort of step away from that had to be better. Today we look back at the nice upper middle class apartments, not the worker barracks.
24:15 I was super convinced a big balloon was going to come take the feral historian away at the end of this video
Why did you think a balloon would stop him?
Nvm let’s get you some ice cream 🍨
The Rover is great. They tried to build a robot guardian on a Dalek-level budget, but settled on a wire-pulled balloon when the robot was a hassle.
The Village is a model for homeowner associations (HOA).
@@user-ed1gj1ng5g Those things really make me scratch my head, I'm very surprised Americans tolerate them.
@@jelkel25 The worse part is that they're becoming very hard to avoid. Once a neighborhood has an HOA, it's almost impossible to get rid of and, of course, anyone moving in must join the HOA as part of their home purchase. Unless you buy a home in a brand-new development, or way out in the boonies, you may not have much choice.
@@jelkel25 progressive takeover of california in the 60's is what made it a staple. It doesn't go away because it's both a way of curb checking what others see as undesirables and at the same time works almost as a status to show off that you aren't poor. And yes, it's one of the most anti-american things ever devised
@jasonblalock4429 You can, by the power of Christ!
Save us Mr Gault!
Will you stop being socialist?
No!
Then there is nothing I can do!
almost 25 minutes of my favourite hilltop historian? A surprise, but a welcome one.
The nice thing about the show was his spirit. He won the war for the most part even though he lost most of the battles. He also never gave up despite the adversity.
It really is amazing we're still analyzing the meaning of the Prisoner more than 50 years on from the original series. I introduced my older children to this show and they saw something different almost in every episode that I had not considered after multiple viewings.
I'm pretty sure that everyone here would love it if our Savage Professor here would make longer videos. Not always but I'd listen to an hour long rant any day. Also, I'm just really we all found this channel, and that someone like him made it. Thanks Bro
“Who does number 2 work for!?!”
Careful, buddy, you're going to blow out your o-ring.
You tell that turd who's boss.
"That would be telling."
You, are number six.
Man of culture, I see.
I've been waiting for this one.
Your interpretation falls pretty close to my own.
I watched Danger Man / Secret Agent as a kid, but did not pick up on The Prisoner until college in 1980. The college library had the entire series with the commentary and interviews by Warner Troyer from TV Ontario.
My friends and I watched the entire series over about a week. (They were on reel to reel video tapes).
The remake was off the mark in my opinion.
Unfortunately, most of our leaders would see this as a "how to" instead of a warning, much as they do with 1984, Animal Farm and others.
Aldous Huxley feared a Benevolent & Technological Autocracy more than what Orwell showed us in 1984.
As of 2024, we can see his fears were realized, concerning the terrible future to come...
And still, CS Lewis is the one who saw in the clearest way where everything was going.
I love everything about your channel man. I like the raw conversational approach you take on books movies and shows. Please keep these coming
Kind of funny. Three Days of the Condor, The Parallax View, and yes, The Prisoner were the reasons why I chose Intelligence for my career specialty when I joined the military so many decades ago. An odd choice but not really I suppose since I come from a military family with a long history.
It was the height of the Cold War and the world was far more grey than people realized (even now). When you joined the game you learned you couldn't fully trust any side. Everybody lies. Like the show, you were always trying to puzzle out the truth of what was being told to you.
"Be seeing You."
Fantastic episode and an excellent analysis. I could have watched another half hour. I also hadn't read Clearly's essay before, so thank you for the link. One of my own favorite "pet" interpretations of Fallout is to take it literally. Throughout the series, we see the inner workings of the Village, and instead of some all-knowing mysterious power it is generally revealed to be a pretty standard bureaucracy run by the exact same type of bureaucratic idiots that run offices, agencies, and regimes since time immemorial while spouting doublespeak about their policy goals that becomes more sinister the more powerful they get. So imagine you're #1, and you have been running this place after you got coopted in your own version of Fall Out. And you decide to escape and be free of these idiots because even you can't change this. So what do you do? Well... You've got all the identity-challenging technology of any 1960s mad scientist, including mind transfer machines and face-changing tech. And you've got a new prisoner who is almost exactly like you once were who had just left their life behind and won't be missed for a while. The solution is obvious. Bring him in. Prepare his life for you to take it over. And then whether he decides to stay or go, YOU are the one (pun intended) who walks out and escapes the village. It might even have worked, except #6 rebels even harder!
You could actually see a huge chunk of the series as an almost comedically frustrating series of attempts by #1 to find some kind of mind/face/body-swapping technique that will work long-term and let him escape all while being sabotaged by his own subordinates and #6's uncompromising rebellion. Takes the entire series into a kind of scary/groovy Kafka comedy. Which works as well anything else.
YES THE PRISONER!
Most relevant show today.
The remake doesn't match up to the original!
@chrismac7416 never even seen it.
For a spiritual sequel, try "Nowhere Man" with Bruce Greenwood.
Yooooo you're covering some crazy deep cuts. I know the prisoner was a big deal when it came out but nobody knows it now
Looking forward to seeing your take on the ending. Keep it up homie, you're a real one
It has a consistent and enthusiastic cult following in the UK, it's an excuse to wear boating jackets if nothing else. The internet is the ideal platform for the speculation that accompanies the series so it still has a life there. In a way I'm glad the remake didn't take off as the modern era has a habit of s*itting on classic shows and movies it finds "problematic", it means the shows legacy will remain intact for those who prefer uncomfortable freedom in the future.
No one after GenX knows it you mean.
For Gen X "I am not a number, I'm a free man" was one of the things that made up our identity.
It is referenced countless times in our music and media and why alot of GenX are not comfortable with everyone wanting to collect labels.
Patrick McGoohan was a man who lived his beliefs and turned down many big roles because they went against them.
He famously refused to be Bond due to the gun play and the treatment of women.
He had retired to an apartment in my area and I used to enjoy talking to him at the coffee shop.
He was hard to talk to at first, but once he knew you were not there just to see a celebrity or babble nonsense he really opened up.
@@KelsaRavenlock He was by all accounts based beyond all belief, often going against social norms.
@rutgaurxi7314 He didn't bother others or push his veiws on random people but he definitely didn't care about social norms if you approached him and would not soften his responses just to make the other person comfortable or to seem more genial.
If you were going to make him part of the conversation you got him as is.
He didn't insult people or become nasty he just didn't hide how he felt about a subject and became dismissive if he felt the topic was nonsense.
Other than that he was generally polite and stuck to his own.
He also had a style of dress and manner that felt anachronistic, not so much a rejection of modernity in general but a personal decision not to actively take part in it completely.
When he was sitting with a beverage and book he had a basic cell phone on the table, per the request he have it from someone close to him, but he seemed to distance himself from it and when his eyes happened to fall on it he would absently push it aside out of his veiw.
Of course I can only speak directly to his later years when I knew him and not how he was during the time of his shows.
@@KelsaRavenlock I am reminded of the homage to _The Prisoner_ in, of all things, _Reboot._ It's a dream sequence, but it also marks the protagonist's change from 'aimless survivor' to 'hero.'
I found fascinating similarities between number 6 journey and the knight Lancelot, main character of Soviet fantasy movie "To Kill a Dragon" made in 1988. Both are strong individuals that got trapped in the village under totalitarian control with compliant populace that feels indifferent to the protagonist goal of dismantling the system, with some trying to stop him. But while "The Prisioner" ends with number 6 successful rebellion that destroyed the village and led him and his accomplices back to freedom, "To Kill a Dragon" focus more on the aftermath - that despite destroying figurehead of the oppressive order it would quickly be replaced by softer yet still the same one in nature, as the other seen option for society is complete anarchy. And even if Lancelot will take power to lead people out of this deterministic fate, he will eventually end up doing the same things that did previous oppressors.
Highly recommend to watch the movie yourself - to me at least it's a good example of anti-totalitarian fiction from people that actually experienced it, not form western observers that heard or read about the topic. Not sure if there were any dub of this classic in English, only know that there is a sub version on UA-cam
7:30 "at the time the show was being produced the Breznev era soviet union...". Yeah. Let's not mention MK ULTRA
You have become easily one of my favorite creators. Hope this channel gets huge and becomes all you could want and more.
I've never heard of this one, now I've got a show to track down this weekend.
Amazon Prime has it. Or did last month when I finally got around to watching it, spurred on by a couple of McGoohan's appearances on _Colombo._
I haven't seen this but it heavily reminds me of "We Happy Few", a game with a similar premise and theme. They both also draw from this tendency in British Society to "Keep Calm and Don't Rock the Boat".
We Happy Few is a great dystopia trapped in a so-so game. Story-wise, I thought it was a fascinating twist on the genre. Especially how the fall of the city doesn't come from any kind of deliberate organized rebellion, but through individual mistakes and low-information decisions causing knock-on effects that breed systemic instability.
And yes, WHF was undoubtedly inspired by the Prisoner, at least a bit. The idea of using Simon Says as a method of social control absolutely sounds like something McGoohan might have cooked up.
Can you add an additional 5 or 10 seconds after your sign off to the videos? If I don't pause the video at the end quickly enough, YT starts another ad. So a gap between the end of your presentation and the video would be helpful.
You're doing great work and I enjoy your insights.
I suggest Charles Einstein's "Mutiny of the Soul" and Drapetomania for additional reading.
Another excellent analysis of an old favorite. Well done, sir!
A movie I truly liked was Circle of Iron, the ending might give light to what Prisioner and its ending was trying to tell us, where the anwser lies and how the path to it maintains thr journey rather than destination.
Shout! Studios YT channel plays the Prisoner, literally playing Many Happy Returns on a livestream right now. My favorite episode.
I had a crazy dream as a kid where the balloon security drone hunted me down in the swamp. I've never seen or even heard of the show until I was an adult.
Don't know when you were a kid but I've seen that drone parodied on the simpsons and some other stuff.
@benjackson1454 I grew up with two channels. The news and the weather.
Aliens bruh.
Maybe it was based on a super friend legion of doom episode...they had orb in that one too!
11:35 mandatory fun with Leo McKeen!
Be seeing you.
Welcome to the GLOBAL Village. Be seeing you.
"... in all the old familiar places..."
There are rumors that Christopher Nolan is interested in rebooting The Prisoner.
I just threw up a little in my mouth. What does he do for an encore, paint a "better" version of "la traison des images"?
I highly recommend a trip to the village of Portmeirion in Wales where The Prisoner was filmed for anyone interested in architecture.
Not that deserts aren't also interesting and beautiful (for any fans of the reimagining).
I think a key issue of the underlying dilemma is - in my view - the need for rules and conformity with them for security and prosperity. Without those rules and conformity to them, the individual gets outcompeted by those who conform. There is a choice, but a false one since noone can afford to go alone against society.
This is one of my favorite videos from you. I suppose that's partly due to how much The Prisoner means to me.
I remember vividly when the idea of an omnipresent surveillance state was science fiction. Now, it is just fact.
Great show, though #6 really should have been more wary of the drinks offered to him since they almost always knocked him out.
He was just a man thirsting for a drink lol
On the one hand, it was their go-to method for inducing unconsciousness. On the other, if they wanted to drug him (or beat him) unconscious, there's not a whole lot he could do to stop them.
What made McGooan totally believable as the Prisoner was his role as Danger Man/Secret Agent Man …
We already identified him as a Cold War spy .
All those episodes of skullduggery and assassination … not James Bond … colder , harder … more deadly .
Aw yeah, my favourite speculative fiction analyzing mountain anarch covering my favourite espionage-themed theatre of the subconscious. There's an interview Patrick McGoohan did for Canadian public access TV (if memory serves) that really illuminates his line of thought behind the show, and his personality in general. It's the latter which feeds my current reading of the Prisoner. Interpreting it as social commentary is valid, it's the way the work was intended to be received, but there's plenty of artistic reaction to the pressures of oversocialized modernity. But there's only ever going to be one Patrick McGoohan. For me, the Prisoner plays out as pure autobiography. He was *the* Secret Agent Man after all, and the Prisoner is the sort of recontextualized, lumbering beast that results when mainstream spy thriller tropes are run through the gauntlet of Patrick McGoohan's resentment towards the constraints and expectstions of that role. I was told once that McGoohan was considered for the role of James Bond but he turned it down because the Bond character was morally distasteful. The Prisoner really benefitted from the South Park expedient writing. Especially towards the end, it is an auteur dredging from his Lynchian subconscious. McGoohan strikes me as a 19th century reactionary who had the misfortune of being born a century too late, and filtering his values through a modernist 20th century lens. I know he would have loved to see what the 21st is like. Imagine explaining to him what Tinder is, let alone the recent medical-related totalism...
Channel is growing nicely and we're gifted a 25 minute video on Friday? My man, you produce my favourite content on youtube.
I'm glad you covered this show, it get's so little attention on youtube.
I watched this on TV. Now I need to rewatch
New FH video dropped just in time for my walk home from work. Nice!
Well, well, well, someone made video on The prisoner in 2024. Myself, only by a chance, have discovered the series this year, watching an interview with Bentley Hart. It was stunning to see how modern, the series was for its time, and still is.
I'm glad you made this one.
I have a funny feeling were largely on the same wavelength.
Questions are a burden to others, answers a prison for oneself
Also, love the Bester sign off!
You mean the Prisoner sign off...
Bab5 absolutely took that 'be seeing you' gesture from 'the prisoner.' I figure its some sort of meta-reference to the show itself - nodding at Bester's authoritarianism/system he represents.
@@SteveT3D, I agree! And I love me some B5, lol.
@@SteveT3D Yeah, JMS said as much back in the day. It was 100% a deliberate homage.
You should make a grand Playlist on your channel for all your analyses videos. I tend to watch a few at once, when a new one is released, and it would be more convenient. I expect I'm not the only one.
There used to be a "Play All" option on peoples' home YT page which would essentially do that. However the YT overseers, in their great wisdom, appear to have removed that feature in recent months. Anyway, thanks for another great vid!
A, B, & C and Dance of the Dead are among my favorites. I also adore Living in Harmony.
I wonder if Feral Historian will do "Master and Margarita" in the future. Aside from being a modern classic, it covers the Stalinist iteration of pathologizing dissent.
UA-cam teased me with this and an Oculus Imperia video side by side. I had to flip a coin 😎
Awesome work Feral and thanks for pushing out such awesome content! One of these days I do want to be a Patron when finances allow 🤘
Cool, something I've never heard of. Time to add it to the watch list.
Number Six is one of the greatest TV protagonists!
I'd love to hear your take on the Metal Gear series, particularly Metal Gear Solid 2, which came out in 2001, but many have pointed out managed to predict the current socio-political climate with surprising accuracy.
You don't have to actually play the games, by the way. Most of the plot and exposition is delivered through cutscenes and "codec" calls (basically, segments where the main character converses with one or more characters over a radio built into his inner ear), of which compilations can be found all over youtube.
Never heard of this show gotta put it on the watch list
“You are, Number 6.”
Commas are important.
We're not locked in here with them...... they're locked in here.... with us....
In the GURPS game, they took up the idea of lifers. People are sometimes simply stored in the Village. They have no purpose to the Masters but can't be let loose. This includes much of the staff.
I remember bits and pieces of the 2009 remake with Number 2 played by Ian McKellen
Love your insights and reviews
There were many interesting things about The Prisoner--it was such a good show. But two of the biggest points to me were that The Village really wasn't one side or the other, East or West, but was really part of both sides, stressing the point that he quit simply because he was disgusted by the whole thing. In true paranoid fashion, nobody could believe that was his reason for quitting. If he's quitting our side, then it must be because he's going to the other side--all the travel brochures they considered a mere blind, and not the truth. The irony of not being willing to believe what is true.
But yeah, ultimately, no matter how you try to interpret it, it's more about asking questions than giving answers. I originally thought it was about the inner struggle each of us has, and to some degree that might be true. Why else would it be his face when he saw #1? But it's more likely about the struggle between the individual and society in general, with the episode's various takes on different aspects of society, in addition to his own individual struggle to deal with those aspects of society. But again, no clear answers--it's up to the viewer to decide what answers, if any, actually apply to the struggle.
Great analysis overall!
One note that I disagree with is the Religion part.
I don't think it has anything to do with materialism or modernity, otherwise McGoohan would have specifically said so.
I think it is more a question of not muddying the waters with alternate elements of control designed to be cantilevered to the central edifice of control, not quite a part of it but not fully against it either, like sports, television, popular music, etc...
The fact that there was an episode planned with a church and #2 as it's preacher, that never saw the light, seems to me more that McGoohan decided against it, because it belabored the point of the series into unnecessary and probably inescapable brambles.
I watched all of this in one day, when i was 17, off vhs. It was a strange day
I've had this ongoing debate with a mathematician friend of mine regarding "systems" when it comes to the way societies operate. He posits that the moment of a systems inception there becomes a hard dividing line between "possible" and "impossible" within the rules of a system, and nothing is "new under the sun" as far as the system is concerned; either the rules allow it or they don't, and the only way to break from that is to make a new system. Things like The Prisoner make me question if that theory is a political ideological viewpoint rather than a (unproven) logical axiom, in a sort of reimagining of the phrase "Everything Within the State, nothing Outside the State" as a critique of how societies setup things and then keep them that way, in this case by a synthesis of cognitive hazard and physical force.
I'll have to give this series a watch, it sounds oddly topical.
Seems like the obvious counter-argument is that humans are chaotic and never follow rules perfectly. Human behavior is fuzzy. Rules are ignored, overlooked, bent, and broken in everyday life, and that's even before talking about outright corruption and malfeasance.
@@jasonblalock4429 Yeah that was the first tack I went after with him on, but consider this: we accept that these are possibilities, and implement laws within the system to constrain (or depending on the locality, enable) those actions. But what's interesting about The Prisoner is this depiction of people who can't conceive of stepping out of the defined rules of the system, and when someone tries to, there's apparatus of the system to bring them back to the mean.
It's not *unique* to The Prisoner, but the way it explores various modes of such authoritarian systems that have "perfect control" of their people, and show how someone dropped in from a different context might pinball around, but the low entropy authoritarian state has seen "everything" that people can offer and has adapted.
@@byrondumont-eve By that definition, something 'new under the sun' is the same thing as 'breaking the system.' Or, if you prefer, 'acting outside the system' is synonymous with 'instituting a new system.'
"I'm not a number, I'm a free man!
Live my life where I want to
You'd better scratch me from your black book
'Cause I'll run rings around you!"
Boots-boots-boots-boots-movin' up and down again.
...
There's no discharge in the war!
I think “We happy few” took some inspiration from it.
Maybe it's just because it's late at night and I've had a couple drinks, but it suddenly occurs to me that "The Prisoner" and the Monkees movie "Head" actually have very similar themes. Both are surrealistic and highly reinterpretable stories of people with 'fake' imposed identities trapped in systems-within-systems of control that they may be truly unable to escape.
The utter definition of hell. No escape, a reckoning for past sins.
Do v for vendetta and children of men. Particularly in regard to Britain's BNP phobia.
Also no mention of it being in wales.
The difference between de facto power and de jure power might have been expanded upon. Not like we didn't see that break people's heads in the past few years.
One thing that often reveals this break is the question of whether an absolute monarch needs to play politics to accomplish his domestic agenda. The answer, of course, is that if he doesn't he'll soon find he's no longer king.
Any conversation with a Villager is uncertain. The Villager telling no. 6 they wish to stay could be planted by the Masters to seed that idea. They could believe you are a guard, and refuse to incriminate themselves.
I liked the no. 2's. Every no. 2 had their own approach to coercion, their own flairs and flaws.
Currently re-watching your video on The Forever War, and it made me wonder, do you think you'd be interested in doing a video about the lore of Helldivers 2 sometime?
Helldivers is too on the nose for interesting commentary.
I loved this series while watching it, but soured on it by the ending. I think I watched it like ~2010, so strong in my mind was Lost (which ended in 2010) and the fact that both series started out introducing *strong mysteries* but then failed to wrap it all up in the end.
Hearing someone comment just on the politics of it makes me wish they _didn't_ have the spy stuff. That would've just let me focus on the facts about the village (which still had plenty of mysteries) without trying to tie it back to whether this guy was sent to some remote location after retiring or whether it's all a crazy gas-induced fever dream and he's gonna find out Number One is actually his Ego, Number Twos were his Superego and he (Number Six) was the Id. (Of course the actual reveal presents One as an id-like laughing buffoon, so yeah I was way off.)
Prescient as ever.
I just wrote a paper on this last week.
Not sure if you take recommendations from comments, but I think you might enjoy taking a look at the patlabor films- specifically the second film has an interesting sequence and overarching story about the nature of conflicts and a "justified war vs an unjust peace". Watch the movies in order. The third movie doesn't exist and can't hurt you
Watched it yesterday, what a fantastic film, I also recommend Jin-Roh, if you haven't seen it yet.
Saw this show for the first time as a kid in the early 80s. Watched it on PBS. I loved Fallout, the episode. When he pulled the mask off and it was a gorilla and then himself, I thought it was cool. No clue what the hell it meant, but it was odd and cool.
I think I know some answers but whether or not those are the answers that you seek is debatable.
Patrick McGoohan was an "odd duck". If you look at his film oeuvre, he made interesting choices, which I believe coincided with his character. He turned down the role of James Bond for "moral" (or aesthetic) reasons. I have always regarded The Prisoner as his greatest and most self-revelatory work. (And the miniseries was an abomination!)
One gets the impression that Number Six is the most important person in The Village, but why are all those other people there, and who are the occasional victims of Rover? In ways, it is reminiscent of the "retirement home" in The Borgia Stick, where failed mobsters are taken, to be lobotomized, a terrifying alternative to being whacked.
And then, there's Rumpole showing up. Repeatedly.
“A slave cannot be freed, save he do it himself. Nor can you enslave a free man; the very most you can do is kill him!”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Double Star
Oh well half dozen of the Other, one might say.
But I have the DVD set, so perhaps another seventeen?
I saw the Village as a place to also store people who have given up their secret, or fulfilled the job the Village needed. People who know too much can't leave. A bunch of people are menial staff, they do the custodial or administrative or security work. Many are just held indefinitely in the Village limbo.
It's true it would be as difficult to make a truly entertaining show about a totalitarian state as a utopian one.
Brave New World was filmed a few times, and it is a stable, utopian dystopia.
where do I get that jacket of yours
I never saw the Prisoner as "totalitarian" more a mundane bureaucratic rabbit hole that is hard to escape or change because no one is willing to take responsibility. All too similar to our own modern world.
I saw it as a literal prison. The Village is a society the same way Alcatraz or Stalag Luft or Gulag are societies.
Sometimes the Village simply stores people. They do no work, have no secrets the Masters need. It is supplied and maintained from some outside world. It does not really need to produce anything.
yes! new video
This synopsis is almost as good as 'The Computer Wore Menace Shoes'.
Who is number one? You are number six! (or, did he say "You are, number six!")
Yeah, the opening text feels real different at the end when you hear the punctuation.
I liked the surrealism of the Village. There are rules, but the rules are malleable and never truly consistent. The Village has shops and stores and services but its not clear how anyone earns anything. The Village will try to get you through various angles, but very rarely overt violent coercion. Village events and festivals appear as needed. Large parts of the Village serve no real purpose, or hide a true purpose. The people of the Village fall into unclear categories of prisoners, guards, menial staff etc where a persons role is unclear. Some people are too without purpose, their secrets or usefulness already absorbed by the Village until they are simply stored.
Greatest tv show EVER!
All those colors. It must really be the village of joy.
I love your videos
I would love to see your take on Fahrenheit 451. I feel like that gets neglected.
"Prisoner, step forward and state your name"
Patrick McGoohan Wrote and started in the Prisoner and was a prolific writer and director as well as actor. I’m a big fan of his Columbo episodes. He was an eccentric creator who purposely violated conventions and refused to be normal. I get the feeling the Prisoner is semi-autobiographical and the last episode of the Prisoner is one of the weirdest moments in tv history.
The best. 👌
Jon B. Wells talks about this show all the time.
Interesting
If you have not seen this, I highly recommend that you start it. I don't recommend that you stay all the way to the end. The Prisoner was superb... to begin with. Each episode gets progressively worse. You are the slow boiled frog. It never gets better. When you decide you have had enough, jump ship without regret. There isn't another gem in there if you only hang on. The Cowboy bit is particularly jarring and it is all downhill from there.
I love the cowboy episode. And the final two episodes are a triumph.
'tis what ' tis, tisn't what tisn't.
I think why most people don’t want actual freedom is because they don’t feel like they’d be able to properly protect and take care of themselves
Maybe the way to achieve freedom for everyone is to help the weak get out of their learned helplessness by teaching them how to protect and provide for themselves and in general actually be independent
True independence is impossible, unless you're living in the mountains eating elk and fish. Even then you aren't free from the fickleness of nature and your body's needs. The only free person is the one who doesn't care about the external world at all, as the moment you care about anything external you become a slave to something you do not control.
"Give me Liberty, or give me higher wages..." -2024- YP
This got a GURPS setting book, because every mid-sized cult sci fi/fantasy/pulp world could be licensed into a GURPS setting.
In it, you create and populate a Village. It seeks to draw the secret, whatever it is, out of the player characters. You are encouraged to set up your own highly arbitrary Village.
It is very hard to play a Prisoner game and buy into the surrealism and double-bottom plots.
How does one become No2?
Loser at "Paper, Scissors, Rock"??
No. 2 answers to the Masters. Who the Masters are is unclear.
Like all Village rules this is surreal. If necessary, there is an election. Otherwise a new no. 2 simply appears with a mandate from the Masters.
i Always thought of the village as a commentary over society in general rather than totalitarism and the last "they're free... or are they?" always stuck as the main proof of that. It's not that he's still a prisoner of the same organisation per se it's that the regular world has become The Village written large, and just like in the village, each one is his own number one.
I keep thinking youre an old channel with 1,000s of reviews I haven't seen yet.
Its the only disappointing thing about your channel
No gods, no algorithms
UA-cam does not like my comments, but let's see if this one goes through.
I have never watched The Prisoner. But as a Norwegian living in one of the most elaborate welfare states in the world, I immediately recognize the village as my own home.
2:28
A few months ago, the Norwegian political party that built itself on being anti-mass migration and pro-individual freedom, released their party representatives to allow them to personally decide what to vote on the question of abortion.
Which meant that some members switched sides and voted for the expansion of abortion by additional weeks.
I was at a friend's place when we accidentally saw this on the news right after we had eaten. I obviously groaned. Not just because I'm a grumpy pro-life Calvinist. But because this political party has been given endless opportunities to become the biggest political party in Norway. If they simply formed themselves alongside a broadly nationalistic party and tapped the untapped Social Conservative and anti-woke vote, they would easily become the largest.
Yet, they keep shooting themselves in the foot by having a Pepsi Max obsessed blonde running the party.
The response I got?
"But it's progress."
Nobody in this country, besides a tiny handful of Christians, considers any sort of morality to the question. Instead, it is simply a matter of progress. And that ends the conversation.
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The Norwegian healthcare model, which is one of the very few single-payer healthcare systems in the world. What that means is that the National government runs and budgets every single hospital in the country. Which means the hospitals can only treat and care up to the point that the budget allows.
Sarah Palin was laughed at back in the day when she ran to be Vice President, when she talked about death boards in socialized healthcare. But this is literally true.
Also, Norway has some of the best care in the world for breast cancer.
it is visual, flashy, and easy to budget.
While at the same time, we are among the worst countries in Europe when it comes to complications and deaths tied to chemotherapy and being immunocompromised.
As this falls outside the direct cancer mortality, and so becomes more complicated to budget.
Also, the hospital system is run on the worst form of slavery. Enslaved and exploited hopes and dreams.
The suicide rate among our nurses is horrendously high.
We have strict rules on labor and we have powerful labor unions. But nursing is a national necessity. Therefore, the rules don't apply. Our nurses gets paid overtime for less than half of their worked overtime, as they are literally being worked to death.
But, if they were paid what they are owed, the entire healthcare system would go bust.
Also, the public employment space is a method to employ refugees and immigrants. Where Norwegians require formal educational papers to clean in the hospitals. The migrant women, who don't speak the language, walk around mopping the floor.
Which has led to Norwegian hospitals having repeating outbreaks of diseases, especially in the baby wards.
Where, in many things, the great oil nation of Norway score at the bottom when it comes to healthcare. Down by countries like Hungary and Romania.
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Freedom of speech does not exist.
To quote my grandfather and one of my few friends, "But not everything should be allowed to be said. There has to be some..."
As they, and most, believe we have freedom of speech. While at the same time we have necessary restrictions. Because there must be restrictions.
One reporter of one of our major newspapers. At the start of the Russia-Ukraine War, wrote something that was considered to be pro-Russian.
This reporter was then picked up by the police and brought to an interrogation room. Where the police talked to him for hours about the fact that he had to be compromised by Russian propaganda and had succumbed to fake news. That he really had to reevaluate his views and what he believed.
A Norwegian comedian (a very bad yet very popular one), got drunk at a pub and called another female celebrity of some foreign background a variation of the color brown.
He was arrested and interrogated by the police.
As written in our hate-speech law, it places mocking on equal term with threaten. And places discrimination on equal term with hateful expression. Which, carried up to 1-3 years in prison, depending on circumstances.
And, the hate speech law is set up in such a way, that the insulted can report you. And then the accused has to prove that what they did or said was not, in fact, insulting.
And the law covers everything from skin color, national or ethnic origin, religious or life view, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, and disability.
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And just like the village, we are also judged by three or so judges at a trial.
We got rid of juries by our peers a long time ago.
All in the name of efficiency.
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The arts too, all controlled by the State.
As a writer, you can apply for 40K USD a year. As long as you can prove that you are indeed writing. And they approve of what you write.
By now, I could have been 400K USD richer if I had been a writer of progressive children's books.
And also, the State will buy thousands of your books to place in our libraries. If, they approve of them, of course.
The theatres. 100% the State.
Movie companies. 100% the State.
Music, you want the advertisement and exposure that the State TV and State Radio can provide.
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I detest universal democracy.
it is a system, the only system, that legitimizes itself by the actions it commits.
As majority rule, you have no innate human autonomy or rights.
Where the bribe of the welfare state keeps everyone in line.
Well-fed animals indeed.
The village is not Totalitarian. it is merely a Social Democracy. With everything that entails.
The US also has death panels. They're just privatized in the form of health insurance who can decide what they cover and don't.
Ah ha! So there _is_ a second Norwegian on UA-cam who regularly presents thought-provoking content. I won't say I always agree with either, but it's definitely worthwhile.
I think there was a living memory in 1920 of the old, dirty, cold and hard Scandinavia with overbearing state churches and malnutrition. And any sort of step away from that had to be better. Today we look back at the nice upper middle class apartments, not the worker barracks.