I was inordinately pleased to learn, while working my way through the archives at the invaluable Horror-Movie-A-Day, that Omar Khan made a horror film. The often-wry reviews posted at The Hot Spot Online (A/K/A the most awesome ice cream shop ever) can be helpful in learning a bit about the context of Bollywood/Lollywood horror movies.

Patrick McGoohan is dead.

The Prisoner inspires Trekker / Browncoat levels of devotion in me. (When I saw last week that AMC is streaming the original series online, my first thought was, “which episode order are they using?”) It was my first exposure to science fiction TV other than Star Trek, and it shaped my tastes immensely at a fairly young age. (I seem to recall that my father taped the show when CBS aired it after The Pat Sajak Show—which would make me ten or eleven years old at the time—but I think that I actually saw it on PBS before that.)

The Prisoner wasn’t a perfect show on an episode-by-episode basis; like too much television, it was padded out for commercial reasons to a greater length than its premise could sustain. But on the whole it did what any good show does, blending familiar story elements into something distinctive.

(For the uninitiated: imagine if Keifer Sutherland left 24 to star in a show about a nameless man exactly like Jack Bauer, who has been imprisoned and tortured by his former employers because he doesn’t want to work for them anymore. Also, there’s a enigmatic monster like on Lost, only it’s a sentient weather balloon that acts as a guard dog, which is way cooler than a cloud of smoke that thinks it’s a taxicab anyway, so stop snickering and get off my lawn.)

A huge part of the appeal of The Prisoner to my younger self was McGoohan’s ferocious performance. The Prisoner (the character) is a loner who absolutely refuses to compromise with the society he has rejected:

I will not make any deals with you. I’ve resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.

But just because he’s dropped out doesn’t mean he’s mellowed, man:

I’m going to escape, come back, wipe this place off the face of the Earth, obliterate it; and you with it.

I mean, come on. That’s awesome. Not exactly a likeable character, true, but one comes to admire his sheer determination in the face of the seemingly limitless resources that The Village expends in its attempt to break him. (Come to think of it, I wonder if my failure to succumb to Rand or Heinlein the way so many of my peers did as a teen is because I’d already been exposed to a far cooler Rational Superman, at an age when it couldn’t do me as much harm.)

In my favorite episode, The Village, which has always refused to call The Prisoner anything but “Number Six”, creates an imposter Number Six, and insists that The Prisoner is—and always has been—Number Twelve. The scheme, of course, is to goad the individualistic Prisoner into asserting his “true” identity as Number Six, cementing his socialization into The Village. In the end, he wins (they don’t break him) but loses (he doesn’t escape). The moral? Doppelgängers + electroshock aversion therapy + spies + monsters = entertainment.

Certainly The Prisoner compares favorably with many shows that have followed it. Despite the occasional absurdity of the genre trappings, the padding, and its infamous ending, The Prisoner still had a much clearer point of view and narrative thrust than a certain inexplicably popular sci-fi drama ever has.

(Oh, yeah, they’re remaking it. Whatever.)

Further reading:

• I am not a number, I’m a mefi front page post
• Warner Troyer interviews Patrick McGoohan (March 1977)
• The LOL’ing Prisoner, a variant on the LOLCats meme from Fiona Moore, which has just been updated with a surprisingly effective tribute.

Apparently 2009 is officially The Year of Serious Reading.

In addition to working through the Personal MBA Reading List, I’ve just joined the Gene Wolfe Solar Cycle Book Club. (I even introduced myself, which is a step I very rarely take.)

Gizmodo: Palm Stock Jumps 34.85% On Palm Pre News.

I am pleasantly surprised that the new Palm Pre is getting such positive initial buzz. I’d long accepted that Palm was on death watch, and for good reason: “stagnation” doesn’t even begin to describe how badly they’ve botched product development this millennium. It will be interesting to see how the Pre does.

I’m not a huge fan of the cloud computing concept as such, but otherwise the Pre looks very intriguing. I refuse to use a Windows Mobile device, dislike Blackberry, am indifferent to Android, and won’t even consider the iPhone (no keyboard = useless for me). The only other device that intrigues me even a little is the Nokia E71. (And no, I never seriously considered the Openmoko platform; I may prefer to use a Free Software distribution, but I’m not a complete masochist.)

Of course, I’m not going to be adopting the Pre any time soon: at a minimum, I want a phone based on GSM, and preferably unlocked, not a CDMA phone exclusively tied to Sprint. Fortunately, according to PC World the new Palm Pre will go on sale in European countries during the first half of this year as well.

Assuming Palm doesn’t screw it up—never a safe assumption—my next phone may very well be a Pre.

Elizabeth Bear may well be right when she says that this is the best Amazon review ever. Hysterical satire.

(Update: Not surprisingly, the spoilsports at Amazon have apparently pulled the review. Rather surprisingly, the spoilsports at Amazon have apparently put the review back up! Good for them. Here’s another copy, just in case.)