John Drake, Secret Agent

Patrick McGoohan was more than just the unnamed spy in The Prisoner who was kidnapped and taken to the Village after resigning from the British Secret Service. He was more than the agent named John Drake in Secret Agent, the only realistic spy on television in either the United States or Great Britain.                                                                                             

Secret Agent was more adult than TV shows like The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and The Avengers or the early James Bond movies with Sean Connery.

McGoohan's Secret Agent can be compared with the characters of serious novelists like Graham Greene, Len Deighton, and John le Carre. Secret agent John Drake defended the realm against extremism from the right and the left.

Once Drake assumed the role of an ex-prisoner in order to infiltrate an English fascist movement. Usually Drake went overseas to fight Cold War enemies from Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

The Prisoner on trial

Even if he wasn't quite a pacifist or a celibate, John Drake didn't carry a gun and didn't have casual sex. The myth is that McGoohan didn't want his character shooting people or making love to them indiscriminately because he didn't want to portray immoral behavior to his younger audience (like me). I'd like to believe this, but I can't, based on the stories.

Neither Drake nor the Prisoner trusted women.

In the Village, Number Six has very few significant contacts with women, either fellow prisoners or captors like the female Number Two, who, dressed as Peter Pan for a Village party, is not quite a woman and is therefore allowed to be in charge. When Number Six does trust a woman in the Village, she betrays him. 

In the Village, you can't even trust Little Bo Peep

John Drake's relations with women in Secret Agent are more conventional, since they take place in the real world and not a fantasy-land Village run by spies, concealed from satellites and other technology, and patrolled by roving balls that suffocate anyone who tries to escape. But Drake's attitude toward women is no more healthy than Number Six's. Drake often warns his colleagues in the secret world against trusting women. He's usually right. (This puts Drake in the tradition of every film noir hero since Walter Neff in Double Indemnity.)

McGoohan was more than the Secret Agent who woke up one morning to find himself the Prisoner.

Dr. Syn, alias the Scarecrow

He was the Zorro-style adventurer Dr. Syn in The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh on Walt Disney's TV show. My mother took me to the theater she went to when she was a little girl to see McGoohan in another Disney movie, The Three Lives of Thomasina. I was too old not to feel uncomfortable in that movie, but now I'm glad I have the memory of seeing it with my mother.

McGoohan turned the tables on everyone, including the audience, in the Cold War melodrama Ice Station Zebra, one of director John Sturges's better action flicks (along with The Eagle Has Landed and The Magnificent Seven).

At Ice Station Zebra: Still a spy

In Ice Station Zebra, as a (what else?) British secret agent, McGoohan fights the American submarine commander played by Rock Hudson after a Soviet reconnaissance unit starts World War III. In the movie (which came out in 1968) there's already a sense of nostalgia about the possibility of the Cold War turning hot. The two opposing officers—the Soviet played by Alf Kjellin and Rock Hudson's American commander—end the battle respecting each other, while they seem contemptuous of their civilian superiors, such as McGoohan's British agent.

Patrick McGoohan's influence didn't end with the TV shows and movies he made. In the TV series The Invisible Man (2000-2002), starring Vincent Vetresca and Paul Ben-Victor, an American secret agent is turned into an Invisible Man. In one episode ("A Sense of Community") the invisible agent and his handler see something they're not supposed to and awaken to find themselves in a gated village filled with former spies. Instead of a balloon-shaped Rover keeping them prisoner, there are small laser-firing helicopters that keep everyone inside. Since The Invisible Man was American television, not British, our heroes escape at the end of the episode.

Maybe Number Six escaped, too. When last seen, he was driving his car along the same road he was on in the first scene of the first episode.

The Prisoner was probably the best dramatic television series ever created. Even though Patrick McGoohan is no longer here, we see the Prisoner's face every day of our lives, when we look in the mirror.

The Prisoner finds Number One