A tip of the kippah this week to Gazan writer Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib for the evocative title of his new book, Hamas and Its Two Million Hostages. Whatever readers ultimately think of the book itself, the title captures an uncomfortable reality about life under authoritarian rule: sometimes a regime’s first victims are its own people.

The title also transported me back nearly fifty years to another story about captivity. Not a war. Not the Middle East. But a quirky British television series that posed a question I would spend the next fifty years trying to answer.

During my years at UMass Amherst in the late 1970s, a small group of us had a ritual. After we had finished studying, or at least convinced ourselves we had, we would gather around a television late at night to watch reruns of a strange British series called The Prisoner.

When the show ended, the television station would sign off for the night. Younger readers may not remember that TV stations once literally went off the air. Before the screen dissolved into a test pattern, an announcer would recite John Gillespie Magee Jr.’s famous poem High Flight over scenes of soaring aircraft, while my friends and I recited along.

The Prisoner debuted in 1967, but it never really belonged to 1967. Patrick McGoohan borrowed the anxieties of the Cold War to tell a much older story about conformity, conscience, belonging, and freedom.

McGoohan plays a British intelligence agent who abruptly resigns. Before he can leave, he is kidnapped and awakens in an idyllic seaside community known only as the Village. No one has a name. Everyone is identified by a number. McGoohan is Number Six.

The Village is weirdly quaint, almost beautiful. There are cafés, shops, gardens, music, even democratic elections. Beneath its postcard charm lies something deeply unsettling. Every conversation feels manipulated. Every explanation raises more questions than it answers. Escape is impossible. Rover, a giant white balloon, always makes sure of it.

Each episode follows the same pattern. A new Number Two arrives to run the Village and devises another strategy to break Number Six’s will, discover why he resigned, and convince him to accept the identity the Village has assigned him.

He refuses. Every time.

His defiant declaration became one of television’s most memorable lines:

“I am not a number. I am a free man.”

Curiously, McGoohan never tells us why Number Six resigned.........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)