Obituaries

Patrick McGoohan
The actor behind the series 'The Prisoner' passed away.

McGoohan died on Tuesday in Los Angeles after a short illness, his son-in-law, film producer Cleve Landsberg, said.

McGoohan won two Emmys for his work on the Peter Falk detective drama Columbo, and more recently appeared as King Edward Longshanks in the 1995 Mel Gibson film Braveheart.

But he was most famous as the character known only as Number Six in The Prisoner, a sci-fi tinged 1960s British series in which a former spy is held captive in a small enclave known only as The Village, where a mysterious authority named Number One constantly prevents his escape.

McGoohan came up with the concept and wrote and directed several episodes of the show, which has kept a devoted following in the United States and Europe for four decades.

There's a fantastic interview with McGoohan here.

Troyer:
How would you have described or explained the concept of the series to those writers, the first time you sat down with them, what did you tell them?

McGoohan:
It was very difficult because they were also prisoners of conditioning, and they were used to writing for "The Saint" series of the "Secret Agent" series and it was very difficult to explain, and we lost a few by the wayside. I had sat down and I wrote a 40-page, sort of, history of the Village, the sort of telephones they used, the sewerage system, what they ate, the transport, the boundaries, a description of the Village, every aspect of it; and they were all given copies of this and then, naturally, we talked to them about it, sent them away and hoped they would come up with an idea that was feasible.

Troyer:
What about the philosophy, the rationale of the Village? What did you tell them about that? Its raison-d'etre, not its mechanics...

McGoohan:
(very deliberately) It was a place that is trying to destroy the individual by every means possible; trying to break his spirit, so that he accepts that he is No. 6 and will live there happily as No. 6 for ever after. And this is the one rebel that they can't break.

Troyer:
To what end was that process of breaking down the individual will?

McGoohan:
To what end?

Troyer:
For the Village, what was the purpose, the goal?

McGoohan:
I think it's going on every day all around us. I had to sign in to get into this joint! (Troyer: Uh-huh) Downstairs, yeah.

Troyer:
Made you angry, too? (Chuckle.)

McGoohan:
Slightly, yeah. Pass-keys and, you know, let's go down to the basement and all this. That's Prisonership as far as I'm concerned,and that makes me mad! And that makes me rebel! And that's what the Prisoner was doing, was rebelling against that type of thing!

Troyer:
But can you, in everyday life, summon the will and the energy to rebel every time any indignity occurs?

McGoohan:
You can't, otherwise you go crazy! You have to live with it. That's what makes us prisoners! You can't totally rebel, otherwise you have to go live on your own, on a desert island. It's as simple as that.

McGoohan clearly was suspicious of the creeping totalitarian tendency of observation. It's a little like the 'panopticon' concept raised by Foucault, which is probably why the series resonates so much to this day.As it is, 'The Prisoner' was a seminal piece of Television and it's hard to believe that it was conceived so simply and elegantly.

Pleaides gave me the heads up on all that, so thanks go to him.

Riccardo Montalban

Ricardo Montalban of Fantasy island fame passed away too.

The actor died on Wednesday at his home. Garcetti did not give a cause of death.

"What you saw on the screen and on television and on talk shows, this very courtly, modest, dignified individual, that's exactly who he was," said Montalban's longtime friend and publicist David Brokaw.

Montalban had been a star in Mexican movies when MGM brought him to Hollywood in 1946. He was cast in the leading role opposite Esther Williams in Fiesta, and starred again with the swimming beauty in On an Island with You and Neptune's Daughter.

But Montalban was best known as the faintly mysterious, white-suited Mr Roarke, who presided over a tropical island resort where visitors were able to fulfill their lifelong dreams - usually at the unexpected expense of a difficult life lesson. Following a floatplane landing and lei ceremony, he greeted each guest with the line: "I am Mr Roarke, your host. Welcome to Fantasy Island."

The show ran from 1978 to 1984.

More recently, he appeared as villains in two hits of the 1980s: Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan and the farcical The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad.

Funny that... Motalban will always be Khan from 'Star Trek: Wrath of Khan'. The preening, overconfident, arrogant uebermensch, ready to take his vengeance upon the clearly inferior Captian Kirk and his hapless crew. He'll never be forgotten.