Number 6

The Prisoner

The scene repeats like a recurring nightmare at the beginning of every episode of The Prisoner. A furious Patrick McGoohan -- presumably as John Drake of his previous show, Secret Agent -- resigns from the intelligence service. He's gassed, knocked out, and awakens in natty clothes in "the village," a pleasant burg with the air of a lobotomized 1890s. "Who are you?" he demands of a disembodied voice.

"You are Number Six."

"I am not a number," he roars. "I am a free man!"

I watched The Prisoner when it was first broadcast in the late '60s, and it was the ideal program for a student in an all-male Jesuit high school. Number 6's weekly struggle to escape, the treachery of his fellow inmates, the sneaky omniscience of his overseers, and the attained freedom that inevitably proves an illusion -- it all seemed a glamorous reflection of my education by tyrannical priests, and I aspired to Number 6's persistence, his resourcefulness, and above all, his cool. In later life, in a village that's proved to be global, I find myself most inspired by the series's final, apocalyptic episode, in which Number 6 learns that he is, after all, a prisoner of his own making.

-- Peter Keough