Troyer: For the Village, what was the purpose, the goal?
McGoohan: I think it's going on every day all around us. I had to sign in to get into this joint!
Troyer: (Uh-huh) Downstairs, yeah.
Troyer: Made you angry, too? (Chuckle.)
McGoohan: Slightly, yeah. Pass-keys and, you know, let's go down to the basement and all this. That's Prisonership as far as I'm concerned,and that makes me mad! And that makes me rebel! And that's what the Prisoner was doing, was rebelling against that type of thing!
Troyer: But can you, in everyday life, summon the will and the energy to rebel every time any indignity occurs?
McGoohan: You can't, otherwise you go crazy! You have to live with it. That's what makes us prisoners! You can't totally rebel, otherwise you have to go live on your own, on a desert island. It's as simple as that.
In the final episode, "Fall Out," another young member of the Village, Number 48 (played by Alexis Kanner), is on trial for the simple rebellion of "youth." Without revealing too much about the controversial ending of the series, we are confronted with the reality that too much rebellion is perhaps as difficult as too much conformity. Number 6, when asked to address the assembly, can only mutter "I feel..." before he is interrupted by everyone else speaking simultaneously. The apocalyptic destruction of the Village itself is a vision of the consequences of unchecked rebellion. In the TV interview, McGoohan says:
McGoohan: I think progress is the biggest enemy on earth, apart from oneself, and that goes with oneself, a two-handed pair with oneself and progress. I think we're gonna take good care of this planet shortly. They're making bigger and better bombs, faster planes, and all this stuff one day, I hate to say it, there's never been a weapon created yet on the face of the Earth that hadn't been used and that thing is gonna be used unless...I don't know how we're gonna stop it, no[w] it's too late, I think.
These themes are nothing new, though technology has made the stakes much higher. The movement of Romanticism, placing an emphasis on the aesthetic experience, regardless of the consequences, led to a darker counter-Romanticist movement. Quite possibly, the most famous or archetypal example of this movement is Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein. The warning is stark: with every new technology (or, in Spider-Man's case, super-power), there are consequences. Responsibility has to evolve in tandem. Who can resist the lure of the Ring of Gyges? Can it be tamed, like Boromir and other characters wish (in vain), in Lord of the Rings? Or does all new power have to be thrust into the fires of Mount Doom, never to be used again? Like the Invisible Man, will we all simply go mad with its power?
If the Rebel is thrust into the center of these questions, the consequences can be truly disastrous. And yet, the Rebel is usually at the center of progress in the first place. Imagine if we all thought the same thoughts, behaved the same way, and reacted the same way to everything we encountered. Like the Parable of the Roast, we would never recognize an inefficiency, let alone seek out a way to improve it. It was only the questioning of the Church's spiritual monopoly and earthly authority during the Renaissance that led to the Enlightenment (in contrast to Pope Benedict XVI's view of history), resulting in a new age of science and technology. J. Robert Oppenheimer's innovations into the atomic bomb resulted in the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which led him to reverse his personal stance and lobby against its future use.
I feel
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