The Prisoner, Star Trek, and the Purpose of Fanfiction

[are_youready]

 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.

Comments

[entanglingbriars]

At a guess, I'd say it's probably the worlds; the world of The Prisoner is limited and circumscribed; TOS is essentially an open world and that creates a lot more narrative freedom. But I'm not a big fanfic reader, so not sure.

[are_youready]

Honestly I feel like you may be right; I might also be overstating how tolerable non-Spock characters are in TOS fic, because now that I think about it Kirk is always too human. God your thing about Kirk is always right really cuts deep...

[khronos_keeper]

I love the Prisoner. It's so surreal, but in that Cold War '60s "it's a metaphor" way.

>if the point of the canon is that nothing is real and people are archetypes, then how can transformative fiction function?

This is an interesting question, and the way I tend to resolve this is to determine if the archetypes are meant to reflect on the wider social fabric that they're being presented in. In case of the Prisoner, archetypes are echoes of the old world of European imperialism, the new surge of nationalism from WW1 and WW2 and how that has effected engagement with political and social discourse, and also Everyone Is a Commie Except Patrick.

[are_youready]

But the thing is... TOS is also about imperialism. It's about Cold War style imperialism, sure, but there's a whole episode about Kirk basically doing Vietnam. Star Trek, in all its iterations (or at least the ones I've analyzed deeply - that is, TOS/TNG/DS9), is an apologetic meditation on imperialism.

Like, Trek and The Prisoner are grappling with the same issues from different perspectives. Maybe it's the necessarily independent nature of Number Six? But hell, Kirk is this hyperindependent American Hero type. He would actually fit right into Number Six's role, though, due to the fact that he isn't so catholic, he'd do a lot more fucking.

[jazzypizzaz]

I don't really read TOS fic NOR have I watched The Prisoner, but.... I would expect the answer is that other people DO see the crew as actual characters. They take those archetypes and flesh them out into stories about people -- they reapproach the plots on a character-level (what does this plot point mean for McCoy?, etc) rather than the allegorical reasons that actually drove why the plots were written as they were. I mean... I still have no idea why why people latch onto TOS characters and not ones from The Prisoner... but with a quick perusal of the Wiki page lol, does The Prisoner have little humorous moments? little glimpses into daily life? Those campy aspects of TOS, how it shifts in tone from funny to dramatic, goofy to inspiring, I think does a lot for making it more real -- or at least, a heightened reality that is compelling to envision as real. I find in media in general that that type of tonal shift does A LOT to drive people to try to make sense of the more surreal aspects through transformative fiction.

[are_youready]

You may be right, the claustrophobic surrealism of the Village may contribute to this feeling. Also the lack of recurring characters, maybe.

But I feel like it may also just be, well, Spock, since I'm thinking about it and every fanfiction I've ever read has given me incorrect vibes about Kirk, I just didn't care. A lot of time I get a few paragraphs in, go "is this AOS????," figure out that it's not and that it was published before AOS even happened, and sigh.

[pegasuswrites]

I'm not sure how a person would approach Prisoner fic straight on, but I could totally see someone incorporating the Prisoner into a fusion fic. It's such a unique setting!

[are_youready]

yeah hmm i can imagine that working in theory, but i haven't seen enough examples to know whether it would work in practice. tbh now i want jim kirk vs the village fic.

[pegasuswrites]

THAT WOULD WORK SO WELL OMG.

[acorn_squash]

Hmm. I haven't watched The Prisoner or Star Trek (although I have read a decent amount of Star Trek fic; it's unavoidable if you spend enough time on AO3), but here's my take.

When I first got into fanfic, what I wanted, ultimately, was canon, but more of it. Same style, same characterization, but original plots. An extra book, or an extra episode, or an extra movie.

Now, a perfect pastiche is extraordinarily hard to write and most writers are uninterested in doing so. I've read hundreds of Sherlock Holmes pastiches, and none have read like they were written by Doyle. (Thank God. He wasn't actually a great writer, or if he was, then the Sherlock Holmes series certainly wasn't his best work.) For the most part I don't bother looking for pastiches anymore.

But I think that maybe, in a fandom like The Prisoner, pastiches could succeed where other forms of fanfiction couldn't. That, or an attempt to disrupt the allegory by introducing crossover characters, or adapting plots into a different genre, or some such. Does that make any sense?