What’s your favorite episode? I am currently re-watching the series and my favorite as always is Hammer Into Anvil.
spoiler
It’s my favorite because I love how #6 turns the tables and through his actions makes #2 paranoid.
First off, “Hammer into Anvil” is a masterpiece. You can see the ending coming from a mile away, but it’s the execution that matters. Honestly it’s almost more like one of the episodes of Columbo with McGoohan in it—“By Dawn’s Early Light” and “Identity Crisis.” (Also McGoohan directed an episode of Columbo called “Last Salute to the Commodore,” which is a bit like Columbo does “Fall Out.”)
Anyway, as much as I love “Hammer into Anvil,” I love “Once Upon a Time” more. McKern is such a good counterpart to McGoohan, and you can’t top, “The lone wolf belongs to the wilderness!”
Wow! I never paid much attention to Columbo. I am definitely going to have to seek those episodes out.
Peter Falk (Columbo) and Patrick McGoohan were friends in real life, and it definitely shows when you see them act together.
Also if you haven’t seen it, the “predecessor” to The Prisoner, called Danger Man in the UK and Secret Agent in the US, is surprisingly good. Especially in later seasons you can start to see Drake (McGoohan) getting disillusioned with NATO and the Cold War. One wonders how much influence McGoohan himself had on the show taking that direction.
I watched Dawn’s Early Light and Identity Crisis, both were great! I definitely preferred Identity Crisis because McGoohan’s “american” accent is jarring and weird in Dawn’s Early Light. I did a quick check on Escape From Alcatraz to see if his accent was the same there, and it was still not great but it was a little better. I guess he had some practice in the five years between those gigs.
“Identity Crisis” was a crazy episode, including Leslie Nielson showing up as the victim. That’s one of the really cool things about Columbo, by the way, is that a lot of big names of the time came on to play killers: William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Johnny Cash, Dick van Dyke…
