TVSquad

In every episode of The Prisoner, the heroic Number SIx would shout, "I am not a number. I am a free man!" Thanks to AMC's booth promoting the new updated Prisoner, everyone at Comic-Con can be a number.

Convention visitors can visit AMC's costumed staffers to obtain their own fictional identity and join the world of The Prisoner.

Fans become official residents of The Village (the show's mysterious city) and receive a photo ID badge identifying them by number only.

AMC has done pretty well for itself of late with the critically acclaimed series Broken Trail, Mad Men and Breaking Bad. I'm also hopefully optimistic that they will do a good job with their mini-series remake of The Prisoner. Because of this established pedigree, I am incredibly excited to hear that AMC is developing a series based on Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars novel. With Terry Goodkind's The Sword of Truth series already coming to television, it looks like someone in TV land has been raiding my library. Oh there are so many more good sci-fi and fantasy series to develop. Feel free to stop by any time!

The article indicates the series is based on Robinson's 1992 novel of the same name, but I hope they take it a step further and look to his expanded Mars trilogy. That way they can have several seasons of stories to tell. I guess, though, with the bigger story covering a couple of centuries there could be some casting problems. Hell, overhaul the entire cast every few seasons. ER does it and it's been on the air for almost fifteen years.

I'm not the kind of person who gets her panties in a twist over a favorite book being brought to the screen, a movie being turned into a television series or Shakespeare getting a modern revamp. Different mediums. Different stories. Different times. In the hands of the right artist, you get an equally exciting cultural product to hug, love, squeeze and call "George." Even crappy re-tellings don't have to denigrate the original. They're not necessary - High Fidelity didn't need to be a Broadway musical; Gus Van Sant didn't need to remake Psycho shot-for-shot; and no one needs to see The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. But, for the most part, these things come and go. They haven't bothered me any... until now.

(S04E05) Maybe I have some kind of chemical imbalance, or I just wasn't in a comedy kind of mood, but I didn't think this episode was that great. Normally I love this show, but this episode just kind of left me cold.

Fans might recall that in the first season there was a two-part episode where some officials from Home Land Security came to Reno to teach the deputies about terrorist training. It turns out they were actually con artists and they wound up stealing a bunch of stuff from the evidence lockers. In this episode, one of the con artists, "Spanish Mike" Alvarez, is placed in custody in the Reno jail where he tries to get inside the heads of each of the deputies. My favorite scene was with Junior, who he convinces to hand over his gun, but little does he know that Junior took the bullets out of the gun first. Junior taunts him: "Now who's in whose head?" That was pretty funny.