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I've been thinking about The Prisoner lately. Got reminded of it today because I was scrolling my read page and somebody was filling a bingo, one of whose squares was titled "Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling." I have no idea what the prompt means; however, that is the title of an episode of The Prisoner.
I keep thinking about the purpose of fandom, as I see it, because I cannot for the life of me imagine a narrative transformative work for The Prisoner that could possibly be good, and I'm trying to tease out exactly why that is. I think it's because the prisoner is fundamentally surreal and allegorical; it has no reality. The people inside it are not people and they were never meant to be. The purpose of transformative fiction - as I see it - is to flesh out the bare bones we see on television and on the page, fill in gaps the author left, intentionally or not. However, in a surrealist work, that fails because it's, well, all gap. Transformative fiction hangs itself on the skeleton established by the canon, in terms of world and of character - if the point of the canon is that nothing is real and people are archetypes, then how can transformative fiction function?
This poses another question as well, which is, barring the obvious exception of Spock, who is very much a person, the characters in Star Trek: The Original Series are just as archetypal as the ones in The Prisoner, the world is nearly as surreal, and the plots are just as if not more allegorical. In fact, I would consider Star Trek and The Prisoner to be kindred shows in many respects. But Star Trek feels more real to me, and I don't think this is just because it has thirteen movies and six spinoff series aggressively de-surrealizing it. This seems like a stupid question with an obvious answer but I'm having trouble putting it into words: why does Star Trek (TOS) fanfiction work?
Also, I do sometimes come across TOS fic that falls flat to me because it fails to respect the nature of the work in the same way any attempt to write fic of The Prisoner would, but this is only a subset of TOS fic, so what the hell? Caveat: I have not read TOS fic in three years.
I keep thinking about the purpose of fandom, as I see it, because I cannot for the life of me imagine a narrative transformative work for The Prisoner that could possibly be good, and I'm trying to tease out exactly why that is. I think it's because the prisoner is fundamentally surreal and allegorical; it has no reality. The people inside it are not people and they were never meant to be. The purpose of transformative fiction - as I see it - is to flesh out the bare bones we see on television and on the page, fill in gaps the author left, intentionally or not. However, in a surrealist work, that fails because it's, well, all gap. Transformative fiction hangs itself on the skeleton established by the canon, in terms of world and of character - if the point of the canon is that nothing is real and people are archetypes, then how can transformative fiction function?
This poses another question as well, which is, barring the obvious exception of Spock, who is very much a person, the characters in Star Trek: The Original Series are just as archetypal as the ones in The Prisoner, the world is nearly as surreal, and the plots are just as if not more allegorical. In fact, I would consider Star Trek and The Prisoner to be kindred shows in many respects. But Star Trek feels more real to me, and I don't think this is just because it has thirteen movies and six spinoff series aggressively de-surrealizing it. This seems like a stupid question with an obvious answer but I'm having trouble putting it into words: why does Star Trek (TOS) fanfiction work?
Also, I do sometimes come across TOS fic that falls flat to me because it fails to respect the nature of the work in the same way any attempt to write fic of The Prisoner would, but this is only a subset of TOS fic, so what the hell? Caveat: I have not read TOS fic in three years.
