Episode Name: A, B, and C
Original Air Date: October 13 1967
TV Airing Order: 3
KTEH Airing Order: 9
Summary - A desperate Number Two tampers with Number Six's dreams to discover where his loyalties lie.
We're going way back to the third TV episode here, though it feels much more at home in the KTEH order. It features the same Number 2 as The General, providing one of the few solid bits of continuity in the show. We also get the rare reminder that there is someone more powerful than Two, and they are most displeased with how difficult it has been to crack Number Six. Results must come soon, or he will most certainly be replaced.
This opening scene alone guarantees the episode's spot in the middle of the order. It makes sense that tensions would be running high, especially now that Number Six has been shifting his strategy yet again. He isn't trying to escape, nor is he mildly fucking with their minds. Now he is devoted to fighting back and dismantling their traps, hoping to destroy the establishment and gain victory from the inside. We saw this in full force in The General and to a lesser extent in The Schizoid Man (they put him through the ringer, but he ends up getting their man killed, and only a minor verbal gaffe botched his escape). Now it continues as Number Six wages his battle within the confines of his own mind. The Village has created a drug that allows them to observe and modify a person's dreams. They intend to use this to place the dreaming Six into a party along with three people he might have revealed his resignation to, in hopes that he'll play out the scene again without realizing that it is all in his head (and that it is being watched).
The scenario may be a familiar concept, but it is one that can be used in so many ways, all depending on what any given writer believes about the power of dreams. I expected a little bit of back and forth from the players, but instead Number Six easily figures out what is happening, and sabotages the second and third nights of testing. In the end, he completely humiliates Number Two, and all we learn is that his theory - that Six planned to sell everything he knew to the highest bidder - was incorrect.
The problem I have with this episode is not that Six gets the upper hand, but that the way he does so feels cheap. He gains a small victory in Schizoid Man because the Village did not expect him to put together all the pieces. He won in The General because they didn't expect him to get inside help. These are both fairly plausible mistakes to make, and aside from them the Village still had most angles covered and considered. Here, they lose because they didn't expect Number Six to notice the puncture wounds in his arm, or that the characters in his dream were acting out of place. Their security got so poor that they allowed him to follow a doctor into the testing chamber. The Village is lazy here, plain and simple, and I can only wonder if it is the result of inattentive writing, or something deliberate. Maybe they want to show that this Number Two is letting his fear and obsession obscure his judgment, or that the entire system only appeared to be airtight, back when Number Six wasn't as intent on poking around where he isn't wanted.
This episode still manages to be entertaining thanks to the dream sequences (which are at times witty and dripping with 60's trippiness) and the small amount of continuity that we get. But I feel that this episode doesn't suffers the most on its first viewing. There's nothing here to anchor it down. Previous questions about the Village were inconsequential. It didn't matter why they did anything, because it always worked. But now that Six is altering his strategies, the changes to the Village are reactions rather than plans, and reactions always have consequences. Without knowing whether they'll step up their game, the episode ends with the feeling that it is missing some context that only the rest of the series can possibly provide. In other words, up until now The Prisoner has always dealt with the "good questions" that manage to thrill and entertain regardless of whether they are answered. Now I am getting that uneasy, "what will happen next time?" feeling that comes from the "bad questions" that make a show feel stilted and incomplete. I am fully confident that these feeling will go away by the next show, and that I'll feel a lot better about A, B, and C once I have completed the series. Let's hope I'm right.
Edit - There's a comment in the AV Club's blog reviews that says
"I can't help but recognize that A, B and C is... really good? I just never CONNECTED to it, you know? Not in the same way as Schizoid Man or Dance of the Dead."While my choice of episodes would be different at the end, this sums up how I felt about A, B, and C as well
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