It’s the 3rd of November 2025. Fifty-eight years ago today, ITV broadcast The General, the sixth episode of The Prisoner to be screened, adn the one where Number Six defeats the Village’s indoctrinating supercomputer with a simple three letter question that it can’t answer:
W-H-Y-?
But there’s another unanswerable question posed by The Prisoner:
Why Did Number Six Resign?
There have been plenty of theories put forward over the years, but they have all been general rather than specific.
All that is about to change with the release, today, of my latest non-fiction book, detailing my Resignation Theory, which reveals the solution to the biggest mystery in Patrick McGoohan’s TV masterpiece, a solution that has been hidden in plain sight all the time…
I was one and a half when The Prisoner was first broadcast, so when Channel 4 repeated the show in 1983, it was the first chance for people my age to see what all the fuss was about. All we knew was that the show was about a retired spy trapped in a village he couldn’t escape from, and it had an infamous final episode. As the weeks went by, this 17 year old Doctor Who fan quickly became a fan of The Prisoner.
Back then, there were no DVDs so unless you taped it on your home VHS recorder, there was no opportunity to go back and look at each episode again for things you might have missed. With the arrival of the DVD, detailed examination of every episode was possible. And that’s when we all discovered there was much more to The Prisoner than we first thought.
When it came to the question of why Six resigned, there was a moment in one of the episodes written by Patrick McGoohan that. watching it again, seemed to me to be a possible clue. Wondering if I had stumbled onto the truth, I went back through the rest of the episodes and, over time, formulated my Resignation Theory based on what I discovered.
When viewed through the lens of the Resignation Theory, all the pieces of the Prisoner puzzle finally make sense.
Why did Six resign?
There are only two possible explanations:
1] he resigned over something he didn’t want to do.
2] he resigned over something he did.
Number Two has his file. They have his resignation letter. But they don’t know why he resigned. Why not? Why didn’t he tell them the reason why?
The answer is that he resigned because of something he did. Something that either was, or led to…
The Inciting Incident.
Something happened before his resignation, an event so devastating that it forced him to question everything. His superiors covered it up, shattering his loyalty.
He needed peace of mind, and there was only one way to get it. He had to resign. And when he did, he killed his career and his future with Janet Portland.
But what was it that drove him to resign?
I believe Patrick McGoohan knew the answer, or at least had an idea of what it might be, but kept it hidden, creating television’s most enduring mystery. But the clues are there if you know what to look for. And when Leo McKern’s Number Two asks him one last time why he resigned, Six simply says that he’s been told. But what has Six told him?
I believe the answer has been hidden in plain sight all this time, ticked away in an episode written by McGoohan himself. Taking that moment as my starting point, I discovered there were other clues scattered clues throughout all 17 episodes: fragments of dialogue, psychological tells and symbolic moments that reveal the truth about why Number Six resigned.
The Resignation Theory collects the clues and constructs the psychological profile of a man trapped, not by The Village, but by his own conscience.
He was telling the truth all along. He really did resign for peace of mind. And he resigned over something he did
Find out what it was and why Six resigned in The Secret of Number Six. Available now from Bryan Mack Books.
Be seeing you.
BRYANMACKBOOKS.COM 