io9 
Enter your username and password.
San Francisco, 1:17 PM
Sun Nov 8
11 posts in the last 24 hours
Tip your editors: tips@io9.com
Editor-in-Chief:
Annalee Newitz | Email
News Editor:
Charlie Jane Anders | Email
Associate Editor:
Meredith Woerner | Email
Assistant Editor:
Lauren Davis | Email
Weekend Editor:
Graeme McMillan | Email
Contributors:
Joshua Glenn
Stephen Goldmeier | Email
Ed Grabianowski | Email
Austin Grossman
Paul Hogan | Email
Lauren Davis | Email
Chris Hsiang | Email
Lynn Peril | Email
Ann VanderMeer
Alasdair Wilkins | Email
Graphic Designer:
Stephanie Fox | Email
Interns:
Tim Barribeau | Email
Julia Carusillo | Email
Alex Eichler | Email
Cyriaque Lamar | Email
Caitlin Petrakovitz | Email
Mary Ratliff | Email
Josh Snyder | Email
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
07/29/09
07/29/09
07/28/09
07/28/09
07/28/09
And then I finished it. I cannot tell you how disappointed I was with the ending:
Looping Beatles music? check
Anti-climatic over-simplistic success? check
Chilldhood programming? Check
Cultlike Courts? Check
I now have trouble recommending episodes. I mean, how can you recommend something that's got no payoff?
Watching (my wife for example) say: "OOO, I can't wait to see how this plays out"
Me: Errrr, actually the ending doesn't make any sense?
Her: Oh. I guess I don't need to watch it any more then.
07/29/09
After the episode aired, the BBC switchboard was flooded with calls from asking what they had just watched. McGoohan himself was forced into hiding for a short period of time because people kept showing up at his house asking him to explain what happened in that episode.
07/29/09
07/28/09
He simply doesn't radiate the intellectual electricity that McGoohan did.
If I bother to watch this at all, it will be because of McKellen, who is easily the most compelling thing in this. I don't think he would have been out of place next to McGoohan in the original.
07/28/09
07/29/09
07/28/09
07/28/09
07/28/09
07/28/09
07/28/09
Be seeing it.
07/28/09
In the last article on this remake, the writer said that he envisions his version as a "response" to the original Prisoner and I really like that idea. Obviously, that's the most important part of a "remake", is making sure that this new version has themes that are important to new audiences. I'm definitely gonna check out the remake.
But with that said, I think the new Rover is too big! Hopefully that's not its regular size.
07/28/09
This new one looks pretty good too. Looking forward to it.
07/28/09
We can sometimes forget that, in the past:
1. They really did try to bring these things in cheap.
2. Producers, by and large, took themselves much less seriously than they do now.
The original series was not logical. It was a cinematic poem, an inkblot test for the audience and it was FUN.
There is NO Meaning to the series or the final episode...the writers did not know what the show was really about and they REVELED in the fact.
Watch the final disc of the bx set and you will see what I mean.
I think this series is in danger of being far too earnest. We shall see.....
07/28/09
Better clip with some footage of it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSbCwYU_SZo
07/28/09
Part of what made Rover work so well in the original was that it was idiom-breaking and inexplicable. It was like a warning flare to alert both the views and Number 6 that there was some heavy-duty weird coming up.
I mean, watch the clip of Rover's first appearance in the first episode. No. 6 has this look on his face of total incomprehension. Rover completely breaks the paradigm of a spy show, and as it serenely bounces away after feasting/capturing/absorbing its target, it takes with it any sense of conventional safety, because the conventions of the genre are clearly already broken.
Gotta love that little smirk from No. 2 as Rover finishes its job.