Number Six

For me, things in The Prisoner are, bizarrely, just as they appear.

Number six is a real prisoner, coolly and determinedly, who, under cover of the blazer and detached air, thinks of nothing but escape.

There are 12 chapters in total, which I'll run through quickly.

One crazy idea is about selling the prisoner to low-grade, who gave McGowan a lot of creative freedom.

It's set 20 years after the series, where a woman who is an agent of some kind and recently divorced from her husband, also an agent, takes a holiday by sailing her catamaran single-handedly on an historic voyage in unspecified waters using only state-of-the-art computer navigation.

Predictably, she's wrecked on the beach of the Village, where she encounters the former Number Six, who has lived here ever since the events of Fall Out, growing his beard to fully occupy a hermit role.

And note at this point that unlike the people around her, the woman isn't named, and the text takes pains to cleverly avoid revealing her identity in any dialogue.

So the narrative splits between what's going on in the Village and what's happening with her ex-husband, Tom, and the agency from which she's recently resigned.

Tom has a relationship with both her former boss and also an American agent called Lee.

They discuss her motives for resigning, and it seems Tom and Lee have engineered a plot by tampering with the woman's navigation systems, causing her to pass by the Village on her voyage.

Meanwhile, in the Village, our protagonist interacts with both McGoohan as former Number Six and McKern as former Number Two.

She initially finds the Village overgrown and abandoned, and on exploring, she finds Number Six in the green dome, sitting in the iconic chair that's normally occupied by Number Two.