Television Review: Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling (The Prisoner, S1X13, 1967)

Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling (S01E13)

Airdate: December 22nd 1967

Written by: Vincent McTiesley
Directed by: Pat Jackson

Running Time: 50 minutes

Patrick McGoohan laboured intensely to inject a novel twist or conceptual daring into each instalment of The Prisoner, ensuring the series remained a constantly shifting, intellectually provocative puzzle. Yet, inevitably within such an ambitious endeavour, certain episodes diverged more radically from the core template than others. One of the more peculiar—if not the most peculiar—entries is Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling. Notably, its distinctive flavour stems less from McGoohan's own creative vision and more from a confluence of behind-the-scenes exigencies, rendering it a fascinating anomaly within the series' canon.

The episode announces its divergence immediately, eschewing the standard opening titles for a ‘cold open’. A cabal of top British intelligence officials, led by the imperious Sir Charles Portland (John Wentworth), debates the disappearance of one Professor Jacob Seltzman (Hugo Schuster). When the familiar titles finally arrive, they are truncated, and the customary introduction of a new Number Two (Clifford Evans) is absent. Instead, we find this Number Two greeting a mysterious top agent known only as ‘The Colonel’ (Nigel Stock). The Colonel reveals that Seltzman, while studying yogic phenomena in India, has perfected a process for transferring one person's consciousness into another's body—an intelligence asset of incalculable value.

The Village’s scheme swiftly unfolds: Number Six is extracted from his home and subjected to Seltzman’s machine, his mind forcibly transplanted into the Colonel’s body. With ironic benevolence, his captors then release him, calculating that he will inevitably return to London to reclaim his former life, safe in the knowledge that no one will credit his fantastic story. Indeed, upon seeking out his fiancée, Janet (Zena Walker), and attempting to explain his predicament to his former superior—who, in a neat dramatic knot, is both Sir Charles Portland and Janet's father—he is met with understandable disbelief. Portland, though sceptical, is sufficiently unsettled to order this unsettling doppelgänger placed under surveillance.

Unbeknownst to his pursuers, Number Six possesses a crucial clue to Seltzman’s location. Through a series of photographs and coded messages, he reconstructs her identity and journeys to the fictional Austrian town of Kandersfeld. There, he discovers Seltzman living incognito as a local barber. After convincingly proving his own impossible identity, just as he prepares to act, both he and the professor are overcome by gas and whisked back to the Village.

In the Village’s control room, Number Two demands Seltzman reverse the process, ostensibly to retrieve the Colonel. The exhausted professor reluctantly agrees but insists on performing the procedure himself. What follows is revealed as a perilous three-way transfer. The effort proves mortal for the aged Seltzman, who expires upon its completion. Number Six’s consciousness is restored to his original body, and the Colonel departs by helicopter, seemingly a free man. In a final, delicious twist, Number Six reveals that Seltzman engineered the reversal so that he, the professor, now occupies the Colonel’s body, thereby achieving a posthumous escape from the Village’s clutches.

Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling was reportedly disliked by the production staff and has since been often maligned by purist fans who deem it insufficiently representative of the ‘true’ Prisoner. The central reason for this disfavour lies in the conspicuous absence of Patrick McGoohan. His temporary departure to film the Hollywood feature Ice Station Zebra meant that Number Six, as audiences knew him, is scarcely present. The production compensated for this lack with arguably unnecessary stock footage from earlier episodes like Arrival and Free for All, further emphasising the lead actor's missing presence.

Yet, this very absence yields one of the episode’s principal strengths. Nigel Stock, a dependable character actor, delivers more than mere impersonation. Having studiously observed McGoohan’s precise mannerisms—the deliberate gait, the piercing gaze, the controlled gestures—he embodies the essence of Number Six within another’s form. Director Pat Jackson clearly relishes the conceptual play, cleverly reconstructing the iconic opening-title sequence with Stock’s Colonel/Number Six stepping through the now-familiar door.

The episode is also a rare beast in the series for providing concrete, if fragmentary, answers about the protagonist’s past: his career, his fiancée, his relationship with his superior. It furthermore contains his only genuine love scene and on-screen kiss. Casting Stock proved a fortuitous workaround for McGoohan, a devout Catholic who refused to kiss any woman other than his wife on camera, thereby allowing a narrative beat that would otherwise have been impossible.

Admittedly, the use of stock footage and somewhat clunky rear-projection for European locales lends the episode a slightly cheaper veneer than its peers. Moreover, the mind-swapping conceit was hardly original even in 1967. However, its execution is generally deft. Hugo Schuster, a veteran German octogenarian, brings a convincing blend of weary genius and moral ambivalence to Seltzman. Intriguingly, there are brief, tantalising hints that the Village’s shadowy operations may have historical links to, or dealings with, Nazi elements—a dark implication left provocatively unexplored.

Ultimately, the concluding twist is superbly executed, a classic piece of Prisoner misdirection that allows Number Six a subtle, intellectual victory. While Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling might have been a stronger episode with McGoohan’s full participation, it remains a satisfying instalment. It achieves this not merely by letting the protagonist win again, but by offering a refreshing change of setting and narrative mechanics, proving that even the Village’s most rigid formula could accommodate—and benefit from—a daring experiment. It stands as a compelling ‘what-if’, a testament to how necessity mothered invention in one of television’s most idiosyncratic creations.

RATING: 7/10 (+++)

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