Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling

After a series of very average slow episodes we finally get a nice fast moving one which is both exciting and intriguing. For McGoohan fans this one doesn't really feature him at all but for me that doesn't matter. A brilliant script, give it a watch.

Number six(Patrick McGoohan) is stunned to find out one day that his body is no longer his own, as he has been used in a new device that has swapped his mind in another man's body, in this case called the colonel(played by Nigel Stock) and now he must find the inventor whom he once knew in order to reverse the process, which is exactly what the village wants, and why it has released him from his prison - sort of- since he most certainly wants his old body back! Easily the least in the canon doesn't look or feel at all like a part of the series, and is even absurd really(with an unconvincing fiancée!), but a neat twist ending compensates.

Its cold open is not the only distinction, none of them encouraging, "Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling" has. Almost entirely missing is star Patrick McGoohan, off filming the overblown and underwhelming 1968 action-movie extravaganza "Ice Station Zebra." (He might have been better off staying in the Village.)

However, his absence necessitates the wacky spy-fi premise that has Number Six's mind transferred into another man's body, a gimmick more suited to "The Avengers" and even "Gilligan's Island," although both had their roots in Frederik Pohl's 1957 short story "The Haunted Corpse," which was quickly adapted for the radio science-fiction series "X Minus One."

While this does take Number Six out of the Village and back to his digs in London before he treks across Europe in a much-needed change of scenery, stock travelogue footage and back-projection screens yield a cheap and cheesy feel, not helped by musical director Albert Elms's cliché national motifs as Number Six passes through France and into Austria.

But not only does "Do Not Forsake Me" resemble McGoohan's previous series "Danger Man"/"Secret Agent," it resembles the stunted fourth season of that vaunted spy series, which had been running on fumes even prior to that. Its two fourth-season episodes were both scripted by Norman Hudis from the "Carry On" series of cinematic farces and were hardly up to the overall sterling caliber of "Danger Man." Moreover, "Do Not Forsake Me" fuels speculation that "The Prisoner" is just the continuation of "Danger Man"--it even has a character named "Potter" (Frederic Abbott)--despite the fact that McGoohan had felt that "Danger Man" had run its course and that he wanted to try something new, namely, "The Prisoner."

To be fair, "Do Not Forsake Me" is not without some merit, and Vincent Tilsley, who had scripted the series milestone "The Chimes of Big Ben," does what he can with what is actually an audacious premise. As Number Two (Clifford Evans) points out to the Colonel (Nigel Stock), in the Village for an assignment unknown, swapping one mind into another body has enormous espionage advantages--provided that it could actually be done. Apparently, a German scientist, Seltzman (Hugo Schuster), had managed to perfect the technique before disappearing, albeit without seeming to provide a reversal process; by now you can guess what the Colonel's assignment is.

Indeed, he wakes up in Number Six's London townhouse, initially seeming to be himself until he sees himself in the mirror. (McGoohan voices Number Six's inner thoughts while Stock speaks them aloud.) Then Number Six's fiancée Janet (Zena Walker) arrives as their mutual affection--although obviously Janet doesn't realize that Number Six's mind is in the Colonel's body--reinforces the episode's title borrowed from Tex Ritter's yearning, romantic song, used as the theme to director Fred Zinnemann's classic 1952 Western "High Noon," whose melody recurs in Elms's incidental music.

However, Janet's mere presence opens a plot hole so gaping that I'm surprised even obsessive goof-hunters haven't noticed: If, as is often noted, Village Number Twos have an exhaustive dossier on Number Six, why don't they use at least the threat of harm to his fiancée as leverage to make him tell them why he resigned? This is such an obvious trope that it single-handedly sinks "Do Not Forsake Me" as a credible story over and above the wacky sci-fi premise.

By introducing too much detail about Number Six, such as his having been in the Village for about a year, it reduces him from an enigmatic presence to an ordinary fictional character; by extension, it destroys the allegorical symbolism that makes "The Prisoner" timeless and thought-provoking and replaces it with a plodding, literal-minded, Cold War-conscious spy drama with a hokey gimmick that "Mission: Impossible" and maybe even Norman Hudis wouldn't touch.

A supporting stalwart during his long career, Nigel Stock, probably best-known as Cavendish, one of the many prisoners in director John Sturges's marquee 1963 World War Two actioner "The Great Escape," acquits himself respectably in a lead role that is doomed from the start of his quest to find Seltzman and learn if he has perfected the technique to reverse the mind transfer. However, he does generate enough empathy to make the conclusion poignant and keep "Do Not Forsake Me," the series' biggest misfire, from complete awfulness.

Seltzman does offer one intriguing aspect. Kept hidden until the conclusion, where he is brought to the Village, he stops Number Two with an imperious, "For once, I am dictating!" to which Number Two replies sardonically, "Heil!" while raising a Nazi salute. That echoes the "evil Nazi doctor/scientist" trope that "Mission: Impossible" got a lot of mileage out of and that would become ubiquitous in the 1970s from "The Boys from Brazil" to "Wonder Woman."

It does have its precedent in history, notably the Allies', including the Soviet Union, race to capture the German rocket scientists after World War Two. The United States seemingly harvested the cream of the crop including Wernher von Braun, who became a near-celebrity while spearheading the successful effort to land astronauts on the Moon. This was despite a wartime record of criminality and atrocity that had to be sanitized by efforts such as Operation Paperclip, in which an actual paperclip was affixed to dossiers like Von Braun's to indicate that they needed to be sanitized.

Also needing to be sanitized is "Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling," a poorly conceived, shabbily executed, hardly credible failure that must be forsaken to maintain the reputation of "The Prisoner."

POINT TO PONDER: Confirmation bias is the tendency to accept only facts and opinions you agree with. It is extremely difficult to avoid. Are reviews "helpful" only if they validate your confirmation bias? Are they "not helpful" if they contradict it? Thanks to the pervasiveness of confirmation bias, a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down is essentially useless as an indicator of whether a review is or isn't "helpful."

I have to say that this is by a VERY long way, the worst episode of "The Prisoner". It suffers greatly from the fact that Patrick McGoohan is absent for almost the entire episode. The fact that he was the one and only cast member made his absence all the more notable. I missed his brilliant sense of humour, hilarious one-liners (like "Oh, I'll just go to pieces" in "The Girl Who Was Death" and the sheer talent that comes through in each and every one of his performances.

I usually love body swapping episodes in any series but the main attraction of them for me was seeing what the bad guy is doing in the good guy's body because it gives the actor a chance to flex his acting muscles, not what the good guy is doing in the bad guy's. All the Colonel does in Number Six's body is lie semi-conscious on a bed wearing stupid looking goggles! I thought Nigel Stock was a poor substitute for McGoohan as well. He was a good actor but I never really bought that this was the same stubborn and extremely intelligent and resourceful man that I'd watched in the last twelve episodes stuck in another man's body. In fact, the only time he seemed to be acting or even talking like himself was at the very end when his mind was put back into his own body.

One other thing that bothered me was that Seltzman believed that he was who he claimed to be after just comparing two samples of his handwriting, one written while in his own body and the other written while he was in the Colonel's. It could easily just have been forged. A man capable of inventing a machine capable of swapping two peoples' bodies should have realised that. The final twist, however, was brilliant and I did not see that coming at all.

All in all, the low point of "The Prisoner" but every series has to have one fairly poor episode.

Trivia has it that Patrick McGoohan was off filming "Ice Station Zebra" but the production schedule must be kept. Give the writers credit for dealing with the problem, and mind transference sure is a handy storytelling fix. But if anything, it's proof that you can't have "The Prisoner" without its star. It's a particularly flat episode, and despite its wealth of location shooting, I found myself looking forward to returning to the status quo in next week's outing.

5/10