(Episode 10 – “It’s Your Funeral” & Episode 11 – “A Change of Mind”)

I’ve already made mention of two elements of The Prisoner that I believe Lost borrowed from: the Rovers (smoke monster) and the hidden doors (stations). In “A Change of Mind,” there’s yet another borrowed element: brainwashing people by throwing them in front of a screen for hours on end.

Above are images from both the Prisoner episode I mentioned and Lost’s “Not in Portland” episode, featuring Karl while at the Others’ camp in season three. Both times the people are sitting in an isolated room, clearly being brainwashed or getting “aversion therapy,” conditioning them to think however the administrator wants. Though this may be a complete coincidence, I noticed that even the font used in the video shown to Karl looks remarkably similar to lettering used all over The Prisoner. Here’s an image from what Karl saw …

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(Episode 8 – “The Schizoid Man” & Episode 9 – “Many Happy Returns”)

The series is definitely getting better. As I said before, what’s neat about The Prisoner is that each episode, so far, is self-contained. For the most part, nothing we’ve learned from previous episodes carries over into the present, other than the general premise. You could catch the pilot episode and then skip a whole slew of episodes within the series, then hop right in here, at the eighth and ninth episodes, and not feel out of place. Well, “out of place” is a relative term when it comes to The Prisoner.

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