Warning:  spoilers for The Prisoner, Mr. Robot, Westworld season 1 and Orphan Black.

This came about because someone asked me my opinion about the finale to The Prisoner.  The problem is, watching the show today gives a completely obvious answer.  Had I seen it when it was broadcast…

The black hat means he’s a bad guy

A long time ago there was a communication medium called “television.” This consisted of a device which could take a signal and convert it in real time only into a blurry image on a small screen.  Fine detail was impossible, and any given viewer would be able to see any given “program” only a few times at most, and on a schedule determined by a broadcaster.  In practical terms, any storyteller who wanted to use “TV” (as it was then called) had only one shot at telling their story.  So for effective communication, they used various symbols and conventions that had been previously established by live theater, which itself that has issues with the intended audience having limited viewing opportunities and non-ideal viewing conditions1.  Just like a theater could drop

a scrim behind the actors, or change lighting, etc. to indicate that the onstage action was not “literal” (in the sense of the rest of the performance) so too could a TV storyteller indicate flashbacks, dreams, insanity and the like through the use of sound or visual effects.  A loud “bang,” followed by an actor gripping their chest and falling down, indicated a fatal gunshot wound.  The same, but with the actor gripping their shoulder, indicated a gunshot wound that was non-lethal.

The screens got bigger and clearer, and these conventions (or “tropes”) multiplied and ossified.  But then something happened:  home video.  Now people could watch something over and over, increasing the chance that they’d notice something subtle.  Relatively soon thereafter, the internet came along, rendering it a lead pipe cinch that any storyteller’s cleverness would be noticed by someone that would then propagate it to the rest of the world so that the cleverness could be acknowledged by everyone who would then pretend that they had figured on R + L = J all by themselves.  Of course, this capability did put an end to some of the pranks such as putting porn still in kiddy cartoons, but it allowed for some greater potential for storytelling.  In particular it removed the need for expository dialogue.  You could rely on the audience to figure things out, and the audience needing to figure it out encouraged them to pay attention.  Plus you can give the audience a “penny drop” moment in a way that just wouldn’t be possible otherwise.  Both Westworld and Mr. Robot did this masterfully.  While this technique of dropping the flashback signal had been done previously in movies3, I don’t know that it had ever been attempted for such an extended period of time… except maybe in The Prisoner.  But We’ll get to that.

I could have sworn there was a town around here

Don’t worry. This time it’s not her blood.

The other interesting thing that you can do by choosing to jettison tropes is you can make the narrative more “real,” since you’re choosing to show how things work in the “real world” as opposed to TV world.  Orphan Black is my favorite example of this.  The premise is silly – there are a large number of clones who while being (nearly) genetically identical somehow have completely different personalities, interests, and sexualities.  But when you’ve got people focusing on “wait?  Did that really happen?” then the silliness takes a back seat.  Example 1:  The clone’s toddler gets hit by a car in a relatively low-speed collision.  It’s fine.  Is this an example of any of the tropes (or network Standards and Practices rules) involving not splattering children?  Or is it an attempt to communicate that the clones are somehow tougher than usual?  Example 2:  Clone v. Clone fight.  One clone takes a blunt piece of rebar and shoves it completely through the torso of the other clone, in a location that corresponds to the liver IRL.  The wounded clone staggers off bleeding, but after obtaining some vodka, gauze and a sewing kit pulls the rebar out of her torso, and patches herself up.  Now in TV world, anatomy is fungible, heroes can do things like shove a blunt piece of metal completely through another human being, improvised weapons always work, and major characters survive fatal wounds as a matter of course.  But in this case, I believe it was a hint that the clones were in fact stronger and more durable than standard model humans. This is never explicitly stated in the series, but some other instances of breaking a trope in favor of real world accuracy2 make me believe it.  It makes watching a TV show a more active experience for the viewer.  I like that, YMMV.

So if you want to communicate that something weird is going on, you just show something that is impossible.  In Mr. Robot, the first time I noticed that something is not right here was the scene in which Eliot goes to a shooting gallery to score some smack.  A girl who has just injected heroin into her arm becomes super-horny and tries to jump his bones.   In my extremely limited experience with opioids, this is not something that actually happens, and as it turned out, it didn’t happen.  But the definition of “impossible” isn’t quite so easy in a world where most people believe a horse walking sounds like coconut halves banged together, a defibrillator can resurrect people without heart rhythm, and swords can cut through steel, as long as you’ve folded the blade enough times.

It gets even more difficult in genre fiction.  To return to The Prisoner, so many impossible things happen that it should be easy to just say “the dude is mental.”  But, each era has it’s own set of bullshit that people believe and of course there are the genre tropes in which the impossible is taken as fact.  For the former, people actually believed that computers had ultra-predictive power, that secret government agents had hyper-tech, hypnotism really was involuntary mind control (and could also let you recover memories with photographic clarity), psychic powers and aliens were plausible etc.

Hate Bill Gates all you want, but before him this is what computers looked like.

And as for genre conventions, ever since Sherlock Holmes, it’s been canon that people were capable of “logic” that would let the protagonist deduce that the clocks were set an hour off from where they should be, based on the tide and shipping schedules of four different seaports even though he had been sealed in a crate the entire time.  So when I watched the series, I had to wonder “is this something that was TV-reality in the mid-1960s?“  Furthermore, there’s so much I didn’t know about BBC’s standards and practices that when I would see something not right, I would have to wonder if there was a IRL reason for it.  So when No. 6 pulls a stack of dollars out of his London safe in order to make a getaway, is that a clue that something weird is happening, or was there some sort of rule against counterfeit British currency?  Likewise, why would the guards be using Thompson submachine guns4?  To indicate that the Americans were behind the whole thing?  Surely British prophouses were stuffed with Stens – it should have been easier (and cheaper?) for those to be given to the actors.

TFW you look at this picture and think that the guns are the oddest part.

And it was those little bits of wrongness that made me reexamine what I had presented with and conclude that no, none of this was “real.”  Another major inconsistency — the location of the Village.  The aforementioned superhuman logic episode established that the Village is one time zone away from London.  The episode where the Village is empty and No 6 escapes by raft and navigates by the stars (and even in 1960s genre fiction, people don’t have the ability to fake the sky5) also establishes that it ain’t in England.  Except that it totally is and you can quickly drive from there to London according to the last episode.  But really, the most compelling piece of evidence that the entire run of The Prisoner is just a psychotic break is…

The leader of a government funded black site dresses like this? You really expect me to believe that?

 

 

 

  1. This is not just limited to western theater.  In Japanese theater, ninjas were not typically represented onstage (since they were invisible assassins).  Instead a grip would put a prop weapon into/onto the victim indicating that the arrow/dagger/whatever suddenly seemed to appear out of nowhere.  At some point, these stagehands came to represent ninjas in the popular imagination, which is why the “shinobi” “uniform” is exactly the same as a grip’s outfit.
  2. A clone “rescues” her cryogenically stored embryos by transporting them in a Dewar flask, sometimes storing the flask on its side. A later episode has her holding a funeral for them because “nobody told me I needed to refill the liquid nitrogen.”
  3. Two obvious examples of this are of course The Sixth Sense and Fight Club. Of the two, I personally prefer the former since (IMO) it takes more skill to pull off the misdirection while showing the audience what is happening as it is happening without relying on the crutch of “oh, that scene you watched didn’t really happen.”  However, that camera-as-unreliable-narrator can be used effectively, as in Mr. Robot.
  4. And were they chambered in 11.43x23mm or 11mm43?
  5. Being able to fake the sky is a major plot point in Three Body Problem.  I guess I should include a spoiler tag for that too.