"The Prisoner" Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling (1968)

User Rating:

7.4/10   

Director:

Pat Jackson

Writer:

Vincent Tilsley (written by)

TV Series:

"The Prisoner" (1967)

Original Air Date:

7 January 1968 (Season 1, Episode 12)

Genre:

Drama | Mystery | Sci-Fi

Plot:

With his mind transferred to another body, Number 6 wakes up in his London flat and can't convince his colleagues who he is. He takes off to Austria to find the one man who can help him, the person Number 2 wants him to find. |

Plot Keywords:

Austria | Mind Transference | Midget | Barbershop | Sports Car

Cast

Patrick McGoohan	...	Number Six
Zena Walker	...	Janet
Clifford Evans	...	Number Two
Nigel Stock	...	The Colonel / Number Six / Seltzman
Angelo Muscat	...	The Butler
Hugo Schuster	...	Seltzman / The Colonel
John Wentworth	...	Sir Charles
James Bree	...	Villiers
Lloyd Lamble	...	Stapleton
Patrick Jordan	...	Danvers
Lockwood West	...	Camera Shop Manager
Fredric Abbott	...	Potter
Gertan Klauber	...	Cafe Waiter
Henry B. Longhurst	...	Old Guest (as Henry Longhurst)
Michael Danvers-Walker	...	First New Man (as Danvers Walker)

Trivia:

The unique passenger elevator with no doors is called a Paternoster. It uses a chain of open compartments (each usually designed for two persons) that move slowly in a loop up and down inside a building without stopping. Passengers can step on or off at any floor they like.

Quotes:

[first lines]
Sir Charles: Cipher, coding, optics, film labs, computers, experts in every field, and yet we're still left with 36 rather dreary and badly photographed color shots. Yet I'm convinced they contain the clue we want. Have you tried superimposing?

Movie Connections:

References High Noon (1952)

Bottom of the barrel

I have to say that this is by a VERY long way, the worst episode of "The Prisoner". It suffers greatly from the fact that Patrick McGoohan is absent for almost the entire episode. The fact that he was the one and only cast member made his absence all the more notable. I missed his brilliant sense of humour, hilarious one-liners (like "Oh, I'll just go to pieces" in "The Girl Who Was Death" and the sheer talent that comes through in each and every one of his performances.

I usually love body swapping episodes in any series but the main attraction of them for me was seeing what the bad guy is doing in the good guy's body because it gives the actor a chance to flex his acting muscles, not what the good guy is doing in the bad guy's. All the Colonel does in Number Six's body is lie semi-conscious on a bed wearing stupid looking goggles! I thought Nigel Stock was a poor substitute for McGoohan as well. He was a good actor but I never really bought that this was the same stubborn and extremely intelligent and resourceful man that I'd watched in the last twelve episodes stuck in another man's body. In fact, the only time he seemed to be acting or even talking like himself was at the very end when his mind was put back into his own body.

One other thing that bothered me was that Seltzman believed that he was who he claimed to be after just comparing two samples of his handwriting, one written while in his own body and the other written while he was in the Colonel's. It could easily just have been forged. A man capable of inventing a machine capable of swapping two peoples' bodies should have realised that. The final twist, however, was brilliant and I did not see that coming at all.

All in all, the low point of "The Prisoner" but every series has to have one fairly poor episode.