I’ve been watching an episode of Star Trek a day, starting from the beginning, so last night I watched “Dagger of the Mind”. It’s pretty similar to “A Change of Mind,” and that reminded me of something else from The Prisoner…
There are at least two episodes, “Free for All” and “A Change of Mind,” where the Villagers have “spontaneous,” organized reactions that also line up with Number Two’s plans. In “Free for All,” Number Six’s campaign was ready-made, with an army of supporters with posters and chants. In “A Change of Mind,” everyone is quick to shun the Unmutual, and just as quick to welcome back the Reformed.
There are obviously agents among the Villagers, but the premise of “Checkmate” is that the prisoners are afraid of the guards.
So what do you think is the deal with how easily the Villagers coalesce around Number Two’s schemes? Are they being coerced, are Number Six’s campaign crowds mostly guards, is it “Pavlovian” (such that coercion is no longer necessary), or is this just a statement that most people have accepted the terms of their imprisonment and will die like rotten cabbages?
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I think that there is a combination of all those things. I believe there are Village agents, “wolves among the sheep”, who influence villager actions. I also believe that many of the villagers have long been broken via drugs and/or brainwashing. This makes them pliable to anything that the agents embedded in the community wants them to do. I think that the Village probably doesn’t take on more than a handful of people like #6 at any one time for fear that they might team up and influence an easily influenced group of villagers by emulating what the embedded agents do. TLDR, I think most of the villagers are more or less brainwashed lemmings and the ones that aren’t are agents.
And when it comes to The Prisoner, we need to think allegorically. This probably makes your answer right, since in the real world, who are the guards? They’re much more than just police, and indeed, “enforcement” is relatively rare in the Village (and usually executed by weather balloon). The guards are, I think, a sort of generalized state apparatus, including (of course) the media. Which is brilliantly demonstrated in “Free for All” when the Tally Ho has an article about Number Six prewritten.
Hence in the real world, for the average middle class white, strict enforcement is pretty rare; we hardly ever have run ins with the fuzz. We respond to softer kinds of power, from propaganda to economic threats.
In the real world, the “drugs and/or brainwashing” can be replaced with poor education and fixation on cults of personality and outrage culture pushed into their brains and eyeballs through 24/7 media coverage. The wolves are the media, the billionaires, and others in power who need the sheep to move and vote in the ways that is often against their own best interest. Sorry to get a little political, but those factors are in play no matter what the ideology is.
The Prisoner is an intensely political show, it would be hard to talk about it without being political.
The drugs are probably actually just drugs, though. Psychiatry was a pretty scandalous profession in the 60s, which was what quickly drew me to the connections between The Prisoner and Star Trek.
Changing the subject, then, it’s also pretty fascinating that Star Trek changed its attitudes about psychology/psychiatry in tandem with cultural shifts. On Kirk’s Enterprise, it’s mentioned that McCoy has a background in space psychology, but that fact is basically irrelevant—or it’s weaponized against Kirk in “Court Martial”. By the time Picard is sailing around in his luxury yacht, there’s a counselor on the senior staff whose opinions and judgments are respected, and (in “The Drumhead”) Picard is intensely skeptical of using betazoid mind powers in an investigatory capacity.
