Watching the show The Prisoner (for a second time) along with the podcast The Prisoner’s Dilemma (for the first time). The podcast is using the ITV broadcast order, which doesn’t match the order of the A&E DVD set I have.
So before I watch every episode, I am reminded of this alternate order. One that was intentionally chosen, possibly as definitive (after all, why release a DVD box set if not to present an authoritative version1?).
This means that every other week, I am temporally in two places in the narrative: “Checkmate” is episode 9 in ITV-podcast order, but episode 4 in my set.
How do story and character read now vs how they would have read with a different set of episodes before and after? And what does this show about the (dys)function of the Flashback, even if it is not signaled within the text and is only legible as one if you have a paratextual reason to read it as one?
Or if you have to make it one in order to fit character and events into a preconception of linearity, one in which people and places are always moving in one direction rather than having setbacks and looping around to old ways?
It’s a weird feeling: “This is episode 9; this is episode 4; this is episode 9, which is a flashback to events from before; order is meaningless; order is everything.”
- money! ↩︎