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Post by commond on May 17, 2024 15:48:14 GMT -5
I finished watching The Prisoner yesterday. I found the final four episodes disappointing let alone the finale. The finale was disappointing. It appears that McGoohan didn't know how to end the series and wrote the finale only days prior to shooting it. They had to reuse a lot of sets and actors from The Girl Who Was Death due to time and budget constraints. The penultimate episode, Once Upon a Time, had actually been the 6th episode produced, over a year prior to the finale. Banging out the finale over a couple of days probably wasn't the wisest decision. That said, this is the problem when you build the mystery and suspense to such a height that it's impossible to resolve. It reminded me of Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in that respect. The decision to make the finale completely allegorical, and the surrealist nonsense, were off-putting to me. It was like a bad 60s art house film. |
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Post by driver1980 on May 17, 2024 16:55:55 GMT -5
commond wrote this: I agree. The fact ITV’s switchboard was jammed after the final ended tells me a lot. I don’t like the finale being thought of as being allegorical - nor the entire show, to be honest. It works better for me believing that the Village was intended to be a real place. It could have been run by east, west, MI5, MI6, GCHQ, the local McDonalds for all one knows, but it has to be a real place, surely? I found it bizarre and silly that we went from the Village being near to the coast of Morocco (“Many Happy Returns”) to Number Six escaping the Village and driving a seemingly short distance to London (“Fall Out”). What was the show trying to say? Number Six left the Village in “Many Happy Returns” and was at sea for days, so I really am not sure what we’re supposed to think of that geographic discrepancy. Stating it’s allegorical doesn’t work for me. If it is, then what was all that business near the end of “Many Happy Returns”? As for Number One, I can accept countless theories out there: that Number One was a rocket, a machine, that Number Six himself was Number One, etc. Maybe there are other theories. I do think of “Hammer into Anvil”, where Number Two picks up the telephone to ring Number One. I can accept many theories (it’s fun to think about). But pulling off a mask to reveal a gorilla, and all that led into the finale, is weird, and “it was allegorical” isn’t good enough for me; it is, as you say, building up mystery and suspense to such a height that it’s impossible to resolve.
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Post by commond on May 17, 2024 17:20:32 GMT -5
I could have lived with a finale where you don't find out any of the answers to the show's central questions if he had simply escaped in an entertaining fashion. They could have still had the ending where the door closes by itself and we return to the first shot from the series to show that he's still a prisoner, etc. The only plausible explanation for the gibberish going on in the finale is that it's another drug-induced interrogation method and that he winds up in the village again. It's hard to imagine that the people in charge of the village were behaving like that without it being staged.
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Post by berkley on May 18, 2024 1:14:24 GMT -5
I'm very curious to see how I'll feel about it next time I watch the series, hopefully this time from start to finish with minimal interruptions or delays. As I mentioned earlier in the thread, because of the circumstances under which I saw the final episode (separated by a few years from my viewing of the rest of the series) I've never really assimilated it to the series as a whole. It felt like an afterthought, almost a Hunger Dogs-type return to something previously left unfinished by the creator. Even so, I don't remember it in a negative way or disliking it completely, more as a curiosity, something I didn't quite understand but still found interesting.
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Post by Icctrombone on May 20, 2024 19:30:19 GMT -5
The ending of The Odd Couple was sad and awesome. That was my most favorite comedy of all time , only matched in its cleverness by Seinfeld.
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Post by Prince Hal on May 26, 2024 11:28:54 GMT -5
Hoping I'm not hijacking the thread, but the OP ( Icctrombone) didn't say anything about TV shows only. Next to Brother Power the Geek 3, one of the best -- maybe the best? -- endings of a comic book series was this one:  (Until it was retconned, retracted, redone, turned into a dream or a hoax or an imaginary story... whatever. None of which I recognize.) |
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