We are all Pawns #6 - The General
Added 2023-09-26 13:01:59 +0000 UTCTime to get your "speed learning" on because The Professor comes to town with a new way to educate in this EXCELLENT episode of The Prisoner as we continue on the We are All Pawns podcast.
Comments
Interesting detail about this episode, The Village is NOT trying to break The Prisoner. He’s simply there, and he’s more-or-less tolerated. So my dad was an old-school software engineer, and I remember going to his office back in the early 70s. This made me think of a couple things. 1. The General is on the small side for a real 60s computer. 2. That floppy tape was the weirdest punch card I’ve ever seen. Punch cards are cool, if you’ve ever seen one. I loved playing with the punch card machine at my dad’s work. 3. An open-ended question like “why?” would have sent The General into an infinite loop that would have eventually caused it to overheat and quite possibly explode, but nowhere near that spectacularly. Maybe you would have seen a small flash of light and you definitely would have smelled the ozone. Infinite loops were so common that computers had a very obvious killswitch. Hit the killswitch, and the whole system would reboot, question rejected. You could also turn it off with the very obvious power switch. Problem solved. 4. If The General did explode, you simply would have popped the panel, found the bit that blew, and replaced it. Depending on how stupidly the hardware engineers had put everything together, soldering may have been required. But again, an easy fix. About the milk, I don’t know if people still do this, but back in the day, MEN drank milk to settle their stomachs and sooth their ulcers, which were all stress induced, naturally. So Colin Gordon’s Number Two drinking milk was a sign that beneath all his arrogant bravado, he was under tremendous buttoned-up stress. This makes me think that while he has accepted his role as a warden he is still at least one part prisoner just like Leo McKern’s Number Two who exercised his prisoner roots by taking the piss out of everyone. Colin Gordon’s Number Two keeps enough of his prisoner roots that he tells Number Twelve to watch what he says in public because THEIR MASTERS are always listening. There was also the muttered comment about running the experiment like a military exercise. Oh yeah, this Number Two is still part prisoner, and he hates it.
Keith D. Jones
2023-09-26 13:44:24 +0000 UTC
