AFTERMATH
There are many theories, some quite fanciful, as to why The Prisoner was made up of seventeen episodes - an extremely unlikely number in anyone's book. The simple truth is that, despite it's cult status today, the series bombed on it's first showing and the production, over budget and out of time, was cancelled. The cast and crew, with sixteen episodes filmed (but not necessarily completed), were told that they could make only one more episode to wrap up the loose ends - an episode unwritten and unscripted, yet due to go into production the following week!
Therefore, it's most likely that the intention was an initial run of thirteen episodes followed by a break and then a further thirteen made with more emphasis on "out-of-the-village" stories. This would have resulted in a package of twenty-six episodes, the usual way of producing filmed TV series, which would be saleable around the world particularly in America.

It would probably be untrue to say that it was driven by the seat of Patrick McGoohan's pants but the series was filmed in a rather chaotic way, with many changes and deviations taking place. One of the extras working on Arrival described how "Nobody knew what was going on". Peter Graham Scott, who directed "The General", received a call one Friday night from McGoohan asking him to take over the episode and start filming on the following Monday. He said "The script arrived on the Saturday morning, giving me only 48 hours to prepare it!". Final editing was still taking place well after The Prisoner had commenced it's run on television.

Filming the series stretched from September 1966 to January 1968 which is an enormously long time for a television series of only seventeen episodes.
 A little basic arithmetic says that each episode took an average of six weeks to make. The way it was made would certainly not be tolerated today, it wasn't even the norm in 1968. Today they make one TV series episode in ten days. So the time and the expense, coupled with declining viewing figures, led to Lew Grade's decision that things had to come to an end and the plug was pulled in early January 1968.

The episode "Once Upon A Time" had been made quite early on, in March 1967, and stockpiled with the intention of using it as a first season closer. In the event it was used almost as a buffer episode at position sixteen while McGoohan wrote "Fallout" to take up the story and provide the series resolution.

He wrote "Fallout" over the weekend following the decision to cancel the series. The script was only partly finished by the beginning of the next week and filming began with no clear indication of how it was all going to end. The rest was written "on the fly", some was improvised and Kenneth Griffith, playing the Judge, had to write his own speech. The episode has no dialogue at all in the final third segment. According to Alexis Kanner and others, they made most of the action up on the spot and the musical director describes "miles of wasted film, just because Pat didn't like it". All of which possibly means that Fallout was made as expensively and obscurely as possible as a gesture of defiance!

Filming and post-production took place over most of what was left of January and virtually everything in it was reused from previous episodes including a lot of film out-takes. Despite the week's breathing space which "Once Upon A Time" gave the cast and crew, the pressure at that time must have been unbearable as Fallout had to be completed in time for the first screening in February.

It's true to say that the Fallout episode bears little relationship to the rest of the series and the effect on the remaining TV audience, already struggling to make any sense out of it, was inevitable. They got a rope, lit torches and marched! McGoohan himself tells the story of people "beating on his door with mallets" and how he had to flee the country. A little far fetched perhaps but there was certainly a lot of resentment thrown at him and the ITV switchboards were jammed with complaints for several days after the Fallout transmissions.

So what makes The Prisoner special? Difficult to say, but it's probably that very chaos, the way that different ideas from all sorts of directions were continually injected into it, the way it defies classification and the ever-increasing list of unanswered questions which gives it it's surreal charm. Had everything been planned and executed in an orderly fashion and kept to the "strict reality" path which George Markstein had originally intended, then the series might have turned out to be just another TV series - well made, quite interesting, but safe and ordinary.

And that isn't what The Prisoner's about. It doesn't have to make sense, it doesn't have to mean anything. To use Number Six's words from "Chimes" - it means what it is! And before you ask, I don't know what that means either.
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