Dear Regular Joe

Dear Dr. Newt,


My neighbour has been acting suspicious lately. When she first moved in last month, things were fine. She kept largely to herself but seemed nice. But now she's up to something. She's always in my face like she's trying to extract information from me. Things like how am I doing, and what do I think of the weather... Is she some kind of spy? Is she trying to find out all the secrets about my job at the paper company? What should I do? I could resign my job so she'll have nothing to go after but then I fear I'll be drugged and wake up in a brightly coloured village where I'll be forced to watch an octogenarian Patrick McGoohan try to outwit an over-sized condom balloon.


Signed, Regular Joe who lives next door to a hot, evil spy

Is Joe's next door neighbour is up to something?

Episode Annotation: Dear Regular Joe

Patrick McGoohan: British actor Patrick McGoohan was in two significant 1960s series in England. First, he played John Drake in the spy show Danger Man (known as Secret Agent in the States with the hit theme song by Johnny Rivers).

But more importantly, he created and starred in one of the greatest and most confusing television series ever made – The Prisoner. Playing a secret agent who quits his job for some unknown reason, he's drugged and awakes to find him trapped in a strange, brightly-coloured island called The Village. The Village is filled with "retired" spies and other people with classified knowledge. Everyone is assigned numbers (he's number six) and are forced to live out the rest of their lives as brain-washed sheep. Number Two, who changes every episode, runs the island and each one has a special interest in breaking Number Six, specifically to find out why he resigned. Meanwhile, Number Six is determined to escape the island and discover the identity of Number One to find out what government(s) are pulling the strings.

Over-sized condom balloon: To keep people from escaping The Village, Number Two would often deploy Rover, a sort of big white weather balloon which would shoot up from the ocean floor and knock would-be escapers unconscious, sometimes killing them. Although, it sounds pretty cheesy, the sight of Rover suffocating a person was actually pretty horrific.

And Rover fit into the surreal ambiance of the show which featured somewhat fantastical premises to pontificate one's control over his or her own destiny. The final episode is largely incomprehensible from a traditional narrative standpoint and only works symbolically as a representation of his own psyche, which makes him the most important person in his own world – sort of like when Zaphod Beeblebrox came out of the Total Perspective Vortex. But without the fairy cake.