Hello Folks
Written by Jace
Wondering just what screenwriter Bill Gallagher intended with the ending
of AMC's six-hour miniseries The Prisoner, which wrapped its run last
night? You've come to the right place.
I caught up with Gallagher a few weeks back when I interviewed him for a
piece about The Prisoner and asked him some particular questions about
the ending to the series (which I won't reveal here lest you haven't
watched it yet).
What did Gallagher reveal about the ending of the reimagined Prisoner?
Just what was The Village? Read on...
Televisionary: The episode titles seem to sharply recall some of the
titles from the original series. What attracted you to the episodes you
reference? (The western-themed "Living in Harmony" or the
Doppelganger-oriented "The Schizoid Man" for instance?)
Bill Gallagher: Well, to be honest about that, that wasn’t my idea and
that came really late in the process. It came when we were cutting the
episodes and someone said, wouldn’t it be fun to pick up on the titles
of [the original]? I hadn’t given each episode a title; I had just
numbered them. So that came at a late hour. I thought it was lovely, it
was a really nice idea and in fact the episodes do fit with those
titles. That wasn’t my idea and it came late in the process. It wasn’t
something I set out to do, that’s what I’m saying.
Televisionary: One major departure from the original--among several
other notable examples--is that Number Two is played by one individual,
rather than multiple actors. Was this a conscious decision made during
the script process or in terms of the production itself?
Gallagher: Do you know, that was one of the first decisions I made. One
of the things I love about the original is that it was a series driven
by ideas. Each episode was driven by a big concept and the whole idea of
a new Number Two every week and the drama of the repeated battle between
Number Six and Number Two. Each week, Six peels off the new Number Two
and, because that series was about an invisible system that governs
people and that system bringing a new Number Two each week, that was all
great. I didn’t want to repeat what they did. And my approach with
writing anything has always been to start with character and moral
dilemmas.
So I knew very early on that I wanted a Number Two and this Number Two
would do battle with Number Six across the whole series and then given
that then I start to ask, who is this Number Two? What is the moral
quicksand in his life? What brought him here? And I wanted the whole
thing to have stakes for him, to matter to him, not just at the level of
a conflict but at the level of a man and his soul. So I gave him a
family and part of his story is that his son doesn’t understand the
nature of The Village. One of the strands of the series is Two’s family
coming to terms with the nature of the world that they live in. My
approach to story is not to build but to dig. So I wanted to create this
man that was interesting, that we were intrigued by, and then keep
digging for more.
Televisionary: Can you speak about some of the larger issues you were
interested in exploring, such as knowledge, truth and self-awareness?
Were you influenced at all by Plato’s Allegory of the Cave?
Gallagher: It’s interesting you say that. I wasn’t consciously going for
that but I can see why you say that. I don’t sit down in that way and
try to consciously say that I am going to make some meaningful
reference. I start with the character, I start with the story, and
ultimately what I did was split it into episodes and I wanted to do an
episode about love, about education, an episode about family, and
episode where Number Six’s brother turns up so is it his real brother?
Is it not? Is it something that they’ve done to him?
Those are things that I wanted to address episodically. I like to start
small. I wanted to write a story about the family for Six so rather than
immediately setting a path for myself for some great mechanical,
thematic approach, I just gave him a brother. So I start small and I go
looking for where this takes me and then within the story of a man and
his brother—is it my brother? Is it not my brother?—I then go looking
for the things I like. They might interest you or they might interest my
neighbor or be of interest to anyone who watches it and then through
that... That’s my approach to universality. It’s to start small and then
go looking rather than to start with Plato. Because if I started with
Plato, I wouldn’t write a word; it would scare me to death.
Televisionary: How did you envision the ongoing struggle between Six and
Two in your version of The Prisoner? Does it come down to obedience and
resistance?
Gallagher: Absolutely. The word I use for it is assimilation. You know
that the objective of The Village is to assimilate Number Six into
becoming a villager. His objective is to resist but in resisting he is
convinced that he alone knows the truth. Everyone around him tells him
that there is The Village and only The Village, he only claims to know
the existence of our world, another world, another place, as they call
it in the series.
But I am immediately interested in doubt. The given is, of course,
Number Two is going to try to crush Number Six and of course Number Six
is going to fight back but what if each of them doubts themselves and
what if that doubt creeps into the series? It would be really simple to
give Number Six conviction and to stick with it but what if he starts to
doubt himself? What if he’s wrong? And what if, bit by bit, the evidence
starts to stack up against him. I thought that would be really
interesting to write that and that’s where I started and that’s where I
went. I think any political or ideological or philosophical argument is
for me much more interesting when the protagonists doubt themselves. So
that became a major driving force in writing in the series for me,
giving those doubts.
Number Two rules this world, created this world, and what if he doubts
himself? Why does he doubt himself? What is it that would make this man
begin to wonder about his own morality? And without giving anything way
that doubting has in it the resolution of the series. And where we get
to at the end of the series begins with that doubt. If that makes sense.
Televisionary: Should we view the ending as a sense that the road to
hell is paved with good intentions and that if we don’t learn from our
own history, we’re doomed to repeat the same mistakes? After all, 313’s
tear seems to indicate that Six will make the same errors that Two
did...
Gallagher: The decision that Two makes at the end about the sort of
inheritance of The Village comes from the beginnings of his doubts, what
he’s been doing to his wife, and why he’s doing it. Am I right to be
doing this? And the cost of it all. It’s a story about family and a
man’s own conscience and for me that’s the politics of the series.
Televisionary: It’s at its heart about moral relativism; Two honestly
believes what he’s doing is helping these people though there’s an
undercurrent of nihilism and darkness.
Gallagher: ...If we can sympathize with Number Two, if we can see him
struggling, if we can at times believe that this man thinks what he is
doing is utterly for the good, then for me that has tension in it and
drama in it. And is much more interesting to me than a two-dimensional
ogre who rules by violence and terror.
In one sense, all saviors believe that they are the only bearer of the
common good and on the other side what if there genuinely is something
within them that has the impetus to do something for others? It’s about
finding where the drama is. If Two is evil and that’s where his
decisions are made, then the drama is over. The drama begins if (A) we
ourselves are complicit in that and (
if the man doubts and struggles.
That’s what’s interesting to me to write.
Televisionary: The towers that the Dreamers see in the desert do seem to
bear an eerie resemblance to the Twin Towers; was this intentional and
is it intended to invoke a 9/11 reference?
Gallagher: It wasn’t. I honestly didn’t sit down and say let me make
that reference. It came more from mythology and the passages through
mythological journeys and the gates that you pass through and those
images. This is mythological image in the distance which is the way out
of here. Having said that, as I writer, I would be kidding myself if I
put two towers in a series and then pretended that it didn’t have a
reference. I can honestly say that I didn’t intentionally invoke that
but, having done it, it’s kind of unavoidable...
Televisionary: How was Helen able to tap into people’s subconscious? Did
they drug their victims with a biochemical compound?
Gallagher: Yes, I came across this thing that Carl Jung said which I had
in my head for ages about levels of consciousness. Jung said we commonly
accept nowadays the idea of the unconscious, we commonly accept that
there are two levels of consciousness, so if we accept that there are
two levels of consciousness, why can’t there be more? And that
fascinated me because then The Village is a layer of consciousness... In
turning that layer of consciousness into a story, how do we do this? It
was always a combination of chemical compounds. You have that scene
where 11-12, the son, takes the pills to be examined at the Clinic and
the contents are unknown and some are not known and some are chemical
compounds that have not yet been invented. That was just a simple sci-fi
notion to get us to this Jungian idea of layers of consciousness. You
asked me a very simple question and I gave you twenty minutes of answer;
that’s a very Bill Gallagher moment right there.
Televisionary: Given the fact that The Prisoner is only six episodes,
did you feel any pressure to create something as symbolic or open-ended
as the original series’ ending (“Fall Out") or did you want to tie up
the central mysteries somewhat neatly?
Gallagher: ...I thought what could be the most dramatic thing is that
Number Six inherits The Village and takes on the mantle of [Two];
everything he’s fought against, he now becomes. He says, we could do it
differently. I found it to be such a difficult and painful place to get
to and ambiguous, even. So I set out to get there and the final episode
itself did morph and change. I had other ideas in there but that place
that we finally get to, that was something I was clear about from early
on. How we get there, I had to work on. But where we got to, I always
had a sense of.
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