The Annotated Prisoner - ‘Checkmate’ part 1

The Village - Pawn Hub

Opening Gambit

After the dense and textually rich ‘Arrival’ and ‘Free For All’, it was quite a surprise to begin writing about ‘Checkmate’ and discover how different it is. It is very much more straightforward an episode, although no less compelling.

What we have here is less an A story and a B story, and more two stories just happening to take place at once. Story 1 is the escape plot, Story 2 the love tracker plot. They barely cross over - the transistor in the Queen’s locket being used to complete the Rook’s signal transmitter is more or less the only direct connection, though both plots are thematically linked by the appealing motif of the human chess game.

The most dubbed scene in dubbing history - everybody is Robert Rietty

Story 1 is a very traditional prison escape attempt story, with a neat twist. It wouldn’t be out of place in a wartime POW saga, so long as the Stalag in question was on an island. There’s even a searchlight tower. The induced infatuation of Story 2 is much more unusual, but it’s told in a similarly nuts-and-bolts way.

In fact, this episode - and the Village within it - is written a lot less weird than the previous instalments. This is a world of cause and effect, of science and reason. There are modern but familiar technical devices; transistors, signals, radar. There is very ordinary-looking admin, with tests and procedures and files, and reports in folders. The quasi-mystical election ‘project’ of ‘Free For All’, with its Truth Test and cave of Rover worship, is replaced here by cold, bald explanation - ‘all done under the strictest medical supervision’. There is no dizzying magic, nothing is inexplicable; the previously uncanny ‘electrics’ can this week be disconnected, their parts cannibalised. The cameras are just CCTV cameras that occasionally go ‘kaput’ (a very WW2 British Army phrase, we might note.) We are told all about the Queen’s infatuation, which we see being created through drugs and hypno-therapy. It’s a mystery to P, but not to us. We are, as far as we ever can be in The Prisoner, in a much more conventional storytelling mode.

Which is rather fun, and makes a nice change. In fact, we’ll be moving between these two modes for the duration. This makes the series feel less consistent, but more surprising and interesting. No two episodes feel quite the same in tone or theme.

Story 1 - the escape plan - revolves around the very engaging idea of P’s improvised test of individual villagers. A casual remark by the Man With The Stick inspires P to work out a way to ‘distinguish between the Blacks and the Whites’ of the Village by their ‘dispositions … the moves that they make’.

The scene at the fountain in the square is the first of several unfortunate but hilarious occasions in the series when it looks like P is soliciting men, or that he is being scoped out by men. (The opening of ‘The General’ takes the prize for this.) Obviously, this practice should always be accompanied by the music from this scene

Wanna come back to my place?

Possibly about to gay panic

It speaks volumes that P doesn’t approach any female villager in assembling his team. In fact he’s prepared to add both the Rook and the Shopkeeper - who are fat and middle-aged - and George Colouris, who cannot walk unaided, to his roster of desperate escapees who must be prepared for rough stuff. But no girls!