Let me start by repeating what I've said a few times before: Of all the TV series out there, my all time favorite is probably the Patrick McGoohan The Prisoner (1967).  While the show is certainly "of its time", it presents an absolutely fascinating, and original, premise: A secret agent (or someone in a very high, very sensitive office) angrily resigns from his job.  His future plans appear to be to fly off to an island, perhaps as a vacation, perhaps as a way to leave civilization.  However, as he's packing, knockout gas is shot through the keyhole of his front door.  He awakens on a bizarre island where the inhabitants live in the blandly titled "Village" and each inhabitant has a number rather than a name.  In the course of the show's 17 episodes, McGoohan, rechristened number "6", fights the powers of the island, in the form of the ever changing number "2" (the face of control in the island), determined to alternately escape and discover who is number "1".

As much as I love the show, however, I'd be lying if I said all 17 episodes were great.  There are a couple here and there that simply aren't, and the big finale, "Fallout", the episode that should have wrapped up everything and, we imagined, provided us with the answers to all the questions we've asked (like who exactly is #1, where is the island, etc. etc.), wound up being an almost incomprehensible disappointment.

But even with these problems, all the remaining episodes, at least 90% of them, were stunning, thought provoking, and incredibly entertaining.  And I would recommend anyone interested pick up the series, particularly now that its available in HD on Blu Ray (the images are beautiful!).

Which brings us, inevitably, to the new, 2009 Prisoner mini-series.  Given my love of the original series, it was obvious I'd eventually watch the new mini-series.  But I entered this new show with considerable trepidation.  The critics, almost all of them, were most unkind about this new series, stating that it was alternately boring or undecipherable.  They praised Ian McKellen as number 2, but lambasted James Caviezel as the protagonist, our number 6.  The only other praise was devoted to the show's setting, a beautiful and eerie town in the middle of an equally beautiful and eerie desert.

So, thanks to DVR, I finally watched the show all the way through, and while I can't fault the critics, I can't entirely side with them either.

The new Prisoner show, to me, was an attempt to create something big, something intellectual, something interesting...but it simply fell apart by the resolution.  Unlike the original Prisoner, the finale here mattered, and it was what the show was building up to.  Paradoxically, the original Prisoner can be enjoyed for its individual episodes while ignoring its finale.

This new series presents situations and scenes that never really pay off in the end.  Perhaps the best example of this is that the show begins with a clear reference to the original series and the original number 6:  Our protagonist, James Caviezel, awakens in the desert outside the village.  He sees an elderly man on the run from a group of thugs with dogs.  He rescues this old man, who is dressed in our old number 6's garb.  The old man dies, and James Caviezel buries him.  Subsequently, he reaches the Village and finds that the powers that be are eager to find the old man, and that may be why they're interested in Caviezel's number 6.  However, the time elapses and suddenly the old man is no longer of interest to anyone, and his grave is shown toward the end of the series but without giving us any idea why he was important (or caring why he was important) in the first place.

Further, while the original show presented us with recognizable elements from the start (a possible high level spy trying to outwit his captors) this show presents a far murkier set of circumstances for our protagonist.  He works for a sinister company that is willing to assassinate people and kidnap people's daughters because it is engaged in some kind of mind experiments devoted to...helping people?!  I just don't know, and the idea is so complicated, versus the elegance of the original show, that I don't care.  Indeed, given so many disparate ideas from the original, I can't help but wonder if, perhaps, the new Prisoner story was something else that the writer did, and in the end he shoehorned his ideas into this remake of the old series.

And I wonder, if that is the case, if this show might have been better off as something original, rather than a "re-imaging" of the old series.