In anticipation of the re-imagined The Prisoner, coming to AMC November 15th, and in celebration of the new blu-ray release, I’m re-watching all 17 classic episodes. Join me, won’t you?
“The General”
“You’re never too old to learn.”
A university level degree in three minutes? Sign me up! Well, after this episode, actually… let me think about it.
This is a lesser episode, one in which McGoohan tries to destroy a giant instructional (and potential mind-controlling) computer called The General. It has a couple of good moments, especially when one of the core lessons of the episode – that information without context and understanding is useless – is revealed. But at the end its just kind of “meh” with a “reveal” of The General at the end that is rather dates (it’s very similar to every third episode of the original Star Trek).
And, like in Star Trek, McGoohan does his best Captain Kirk impression (not literally, of course – boy would I have paid good money to see that) and makes the super computer blow up, because he asks it the one question that cannot be answered… “Why?”
Like I said, meh. So far this is the shortest episode recap I’ve posted because, well, it just didn’t do much for me. The episode after this one, thankfully, is a different story. And I’ve begun to sense a trend on these shows – every other episode tends to be better than the one that proceeded it. I think, since the epsiodes were filmed out of sequence that this was a decision of the producers to make sure they had some degree of consistent quality throughout… but it’s still peaks and valleys.
Now here’s Prisoner-in-a-minute: