"The Prisoner"

The Opening Sequence of The Prisoner, Adapted from "Roadster"

A stormy sky, a powerful thunderclap, an empty roadway dividing a deserted moor; driving toward the viewer, at high speed, a bare-headed man in an open roadster. Squinting in the sunlight and smirking with ready contempt, he turns into the bowels of a building shadowed by London's Big Ben, strides purposefully down a bureaucratic hallway, and pounds furiously on a superior's desk (a tea saucer breaks). He drives home in his Seven, unwittingly shadowed by a black hearse, and hurriedly packs; meanwhile, his photograph is x-ed out in an automatic typewriter and deposited in a file drawer labeled "Resigned". Noxious gas sprays through the apartment's front-door keyhole, the man passes out, and all appears normal when he awakens...until he looks out the window and discovers his home has been replicated in a strange but beautiful compound.

Here, in The Village, the man is addressed only as Number Six, to which he defiantly responds "I am not a number, I am a free man!" His protest is met with gales of laughter from Number Two, the master of The Village with whom Patrick McGoohan--The Prisoner, Number Six--does battle in each episode, physically and emotionally, psychologically and intellectually. The Prisoner henceforth has but one double-faceted dream: to escape from The Village, and to discover the identity of his captor, Number One.

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