Sandsquish

1967's Cold War and its counter culture are gone; they've been replaced by 2009's global village and its consumer culture. So 2009's Prisoner is no longer an angry young man fighting for his identity against secret government policies and flagrant brainwashing, he's an angst-ridden 30-something trying to hang on to his identity in the face of overwhelming marketing and soothing pharmaceuticals.

2009's The Prisoner takes all the familiar elements of 1967's cult classic and re-interprets them in a relevant way, just like good remakes are supposed to. The psychedelic, lava-lamp surrealism of the sixties may be gone, but, don't worry, they've been replaced by the post-modern, dream-like surrealism of the oughts.

Yes, the Village still needs to assimilate No. 6, but it no longer cares why he would wish to resign from its society, it only wants him to understand that he can't. Instead of foiling No. 6's repeated escape attempts from the superficially charming, but inherently oppressive, Village, this new Village, still just as pleasant-looking, and oppressive, just makes it clear that there is no place else to escape to. The consumer culture and its global village are everywhere now. There is no escape.

So, instead of a government desperately trying Pavlovian conditioning, hypnotic suggestion, and hallucinogens in the water, a corporation tries matching people with their perfect mates, giving them mind-numbing jobs to take their minds off their melancholy, distracting them with melodramatic soap operas, and, maybe, making them feel a little better with some gene-therapy.

Sure, everyone's still under surveillance in this Village, but this time, its not the Village government trying to identify revolutionaries so it can silence them, its the Summakor corporation trying to identify dreamers so it can subject them to a concentrated dose of consumer culture. And if that doesn't work, maybe a few pharmaceuticals and a promotion will co-opt the more troublesome ones.

"Info-dumps" are a hazard of sci-fi and horror storytelling. They're those parts of the story where a character stops to tell another character what's going on because, presumably, the audience hasn't caught on yet because, presumably, it's all to weird for us to decipher.

The problem is, if the authors have done their job well, the audience can already see what's happening, so the info-dump is redundant and brings the story to a halt for no reason.

Yes, this episode has several info-dumps, but most of them are short and, mostly, no one has to break character to deliver them. Since sci-fi fans have learned to tolerate these things, this doesn't really hurt the show until the end, when one of the characters actually points the camera at himself so he can explain the theme of the show to the audience. Ugh.

But, up until then, this episode was pretty effective. The characters are investigating the abandonment of another spacecraft. There's a mystery to be solved, and it's a pretty creepy one, with cryptic messages and several things jumping out of nowhere and then disappearing into the darkness of the crippled ship.

One of characters is documenting the investigation with a video-camera, so the audience literally sees the story through the eyes of someone who is involved in the situation, and learns about the mystery along with that character, in "real time," and is right there with the character as his comrades succumb to the madness that created the mystery.

It's too bad the filmmakers didn't trust that they had shown the audience everything they needed to understand the show, because the final info-dump crippled everything that went before it.