Television Review: The Girl Who Was Death (The Prisoner, S1X15, 1968)

The Girl Who Was Death (S01E15)

Airdate: January 18th 1968

Written by: Terence Feely
Directed by: David Tomblin

Running Time: 50 minutes

Towards the close of its singular run, The Prisoner exhibited signs of a creative wellspring running dry. The final episodes, rather than building upon the series’ profound existential and political inquiries, often appeared to drift into gimmickry, their connection to the core themes tenuous at best. Airing after a two-week hiatus at the start of 1968, The Girl Who Was Death is the most overt example of this creative exhaustion. It delivers what can be interpreted less as a continuation of the show’s intellectual project and more as a piece of self-parody—or, more precisely, a parodic send-up of the very 1960s spy-fi genre from which The Prisoner was expected to have evolved.

The episode opens with a delightfully absurd and surreal tableau: a cricket match where one participant, anachronistically attired and mannered as if from a bygone century, meets his end when the ball he strikes detonates a miniature explosive. This spectacle is witnessed by a mysterious woman, Sonia (Justine Lord). The action then shifts to the streets of London, where Number Six is approached by British intelligence operative Potter (Christopher Benjamin). Potter informs him that the victim, a man known only as “The Colonel,” had been tracking Professor Schnipps, a deranged scientist who has constructed a bomb with which he intends to destroy London. Number Six is tasked with taking over the investigation and avoiding his predecessor’s fate.

This proves exceptionally difficult, as Sonia—who later theatrically introduces herself as “Death” and reveals herself to be Schnipps’ daughter—seems preternaturally adept at anticipating Number Six’s every move. She lays a series of elaborate and deadly traps involving poisons, explosives, and bizarre contraptions. With a combination of luck, wit, and physical prowess, Number Six narrowly escapes each one, much to Sonia’s evident amusement. She ultimately leads him to a final ambush in an abandoned village, where he must survive a small-scale war involving machine guns, hand grenades, and even a portable anti-tank missile launcher. Believing him killed in the onslaught, Sonia departs, but Number Six survives and tracks her to a remote lighthouse. There, Professor Schnipps (Kenneth Griffin) is revealed to be a Napoleon-obsessed madman who has assembled a small army of self-styled “marshals” and converted the lighthouse into a functional missile. In a climactic sequence, Number Six thwarts their plans, resulting in the destruction of the missile-lighthouse in a cataclysmic explosion.

These entire, outlandish events are framed as chapters from a children’s picture book. In a final, deflating twist, it is revealed that Number Six has been reading this very story to the children of The Village as a bedtime tale. Schnipps and Sonia are unveiled as the new Number Two and his assistant, respectively, and the entire storytelling exercise is presented as a psychological ploy to lull Number Six into lowering his guard, with the hope of extracting valuable information. The plan, predictably, fails utterly. In the final shot, a fully aware Number Six glances directly into the omnipresent camera and wishes his unseen watchers a sardonic “good night.”

The episode’s production was notably impacted by star Patrick McGoohan’s simultaneous involvement in Ice Station Zebra, which kept him largely absent from the set. Consequently, for extended sequences, Number Six is portrayed by stunt doubles or is concealed within bizarre costumes—most memorably a full Sherlock Holmes outfit—to mask McGoohan’s non-participation. This logistical compromise contributes to the episode’s occasionally cheap aesthetic.

Tonally, The Girl Who Was Death is arguably the series’ most James Bond-like installment to that point. It features all the requisite tropes: the exotic and deadly femme fatale, the megalomaniacal villain in a secret lair, a private army of henchmen, and a succession of fistfights and gun battles. Yet, it is filtered through a distinct lens of Swinging Sixties psychedelia, a quality amplified by Kenneth Griffin’s wonderfully unhinged, Napoleon-obsessed performance, delivered with great gusto. The episode further cements this pastiche feel with a score by Albert Elms that is brilliantly Bond-like and immensely likeable on its own terms.

An intriguing piece of intertextuality arises with Christopher Benjamin’s appearance as Potter, a character he played identically in McGoohan’s earlier series, Danger Man. This casting choice has long fueled fan speculation that the two series share a fictional universe, strongly implying that Number Six is, in fact, Danger Man’s John Drake. While never officially confirmed, it is a compelling and knowingly winking nod to the audience.

However, for all its surface-level charm and energetic set-pieces, the episode ultimately feels gimmicky and insubstantial. Its greatest weakness is the contrived necessity of justifying its existence within The Prisoner’s overarching narrative. Terence Feely’s script provides a disappointingly cheap and unimaginative solution: the children’s storybook framing device. This deus ex machina not only robs the preceding adventure of any genuine stakes but reduces it to a shallow, manipulative fiction within the fiction. It feels like a narrative trapdoor, a lazy way to snap the audience back to The Village without earning the return. The jarring artificiality of this conclusion likely confirmed McGoohan’s own growing disillusionment with the series’ direction, perhaps convincing him to draw the experiment to a close after only two more episodes. The Girl Who Was Death thus can be interpreted as a curiously entertaining yet deeply flawed artifact—a colourful, action-packed diversion that, in its final moments, inadvertently exposes the creative strain at the heart of The Village’s final days.

RATING: 6/10 (++)

Blog in Croatian https://draxblog.com
Blog in English https://draxreview.wordpress.com/
InLeo blog https://inleo.io/@drax.leo

InLeo: https://inleo.io/signup?referral=drax.leo
Leodex: https://leodex.io/?ref=drax
Hiveonboard: https://hiveonboard.com?ref=drax
Rising Star game: https://www.risingstargame.com?referrer=drax
1Inch: https://1inch.exchange/#/r/0x83823d8CCB74F828148258BB4457642124b1328e

BTC donations: 1EWxiMiP6iiG9rger3NuUSd6HByaxQWafG
ETH donations: 0xB305F144323b99e6f8b1d66f5D7DE78B498C32A7
BCH donations: qpvxw0jax79lhmvlgcldkzpqanf03r9cjv8y6gtmk9