That opening — with its portentous thunderclap; the distant speck on the horizon that resolves with impossible swiftness into a Lotus 7 roadster, roaring down the motorway to the pitter-pat of a bongo tattoo and the staccato exchange of guitar and go-go brass; the furious pantomime of Patrick McCoohan storming the offices of what we assume is MI5 and slamming down his letter of resignation — nearly overturning both a tea tray and the pin-striped bureaucrat sitting incredulously behind the mahogany desk…

Well, I won’t even try to explain. If you don’t know it, go watch it now. It’s two of the most thrilling and stylish minutes you’re ever likely to see on television, and an extraordinarily lucid piece of storytelling to boot.

Part spy adventure, part science fiction dystopia, and part counter-culture influenced social critique, The Prisoner was groundbreaking television when it debuted in the fall of 1967. With surreal plots that push the limits of narrative groundlessness, the 17-episode miniseries baffled, seduced, and ultimately enraged its original audience. (Such was the fall out from the maddeningly inconclusive concluding episode that the show’s creator was temporarily forced into hiding.) In look and theme, The Prisoner became an inspiration for a generation of filmmakers, screenwriters, comic book artists, new wave bands, and nerds of every other stripe. From the Super-8 aesthetic of the Dharma Initiative to the watchdog-like white smoke to borderline brain-in-a-vat narratives, the influence of The Prisoner can be seen all over ABC’s time-travel-obsessed Lost.

And now, after decades of speculation and anticipation, of deals struck and scrapped, the British cult classic is about to become the latest pop-cultural institution to submit itself to reinterpretation. On November 15, AMC will debut its own version of The Prisoner staring Jim Caviezel and Ian McKellen. The six-hour miniseries will run for three consecutive nights, starting in the coveted 8 o’clock slot leading up to AMC’s current mega hit, Mad Men — which makes a certain vertiginous sense, because both shows complement each other, the way one end of a telescope complements the other: Mad Men is a meticulous historical reconstruction that uses the veiled tensions and uncertainties of the early 60’s as a touchstone for our current moods; the new Prisoner, on the other hand, aims to pull the 60’s spy genre into the 21st century by replacing the original series’ core of Cold-War paranoia with the brand-new set of anxieties brought on by the War on Terror.

For those of you who’ve never seen The Prisoner, it’s a simple enough story. The series follows the increasingly baroque attempts to deprogram a retired secret agent; it’s James Bond meets Roadrunner, with a light psychedelic twist. Kidnapped by unknown forces, the ex-operative is held captive in a mysterious/kitschy seaside resort, whose strangely tractable residents are referred to not by name but only by number. Using a combination of cajolery, mind games, drugs, and a succession of punch-card, color-wheel, and disco-ball activated computers the functionaries of whatever power controls the Village — the West, the Soviets, or Other — are determined to extract from the prisoner (known only as Number 6) the true reason for his abrupt resignation — a reason, which for motives known only to the enigmatic and nameless hero, he adamantly refuses to reveal. You can watch all the original episodes on AMC’s website.

Exuding an air of cramped paranoia despite its trappings of Swinging London frippery, The Prisoner is a sort of dyspeptic yang to the frothy yin of The Avengers, that other masterwork of pop psychedelia. But while The Avengers is content to luxuriate in its surrealist absurdities, The Prisoner uses them as a satirical weapon. As in Catch-22 (1961) or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) or the movie The King of Hearts (1966), The Prisoner plays out the familiar trope of a mad world where Establishment lunatics are running the asylum and only the mad are free or truly sane.

Patrick McGoohan, the creator and star of The Prisoner, pitched the series when he was stepping down from his role as secret agent John Drake in the hit show Danger Man (shown in the U.S. under the title Secret Agent). Seven seasons of Danger Man had soured McGoohan on the spy genre, and he looked to his new series as a way of not only expanding his range but leveraging his celebrity to vent his irritation with what he saw as the depersonalization of modern life. For McGoohan, cloak-and-dagger intrigue was just the cover for a parable about the foredoomed struggle every committed individual wages against the collective. Stopping short of agitprop, The Prisoner exploits its tensions between spy parody, social satire, and libertarian screed to produce a surreal and captivating spectacle that mirrors the fault lines that fractured the late 60’s.

What gives The Prisoner its remarkable staying power is that it manages to powerfully evoke its time while also transcending it. You don’t have to be a 60’s fetishist to enjoy it. Nonetheless, I was certain as I began to re-watch the series for the first time since PBS reran it during high school days — now sadly many, many years ago — that I would be jettisoned into a Swinging London or a tempestuous Summer of Love. Capturing its historical moment with a wistful but lacerating gaze — like a Kinks’ song that can’t forgive old hidebound England her manifest flaws but cannot quite stop loving her anyway — I thought that I, too, might see with The Prisoner’s gimlet eye. In McGoohan’s portrayal of Number 6, I thought I might catch visions of button-down conservatives who turned on, dropped out, and went rogue — like Timothy Leary or Edd, the father of my college girlfriend, who forsook his job engineering weapons for the military-industrial complex and went to play the banjo and live on a commune instead; perhaps, encapsulated in the psychic assaults of the Village interrogators and the countering mental jujitsu of the indomitable Number 6, I would see shadows of the Yippie freak-outs and Situationist confrontations that counter-cultural warriors staged in the streets, seeking to jolt people out of entrenched habits of thought and into groovy enlightenment.

But time travel is a very slippery customer. It plays havoc with causality, scrambles memory, beggars reason. And it’s damnably hard to control. For all my easy talk in these columns of transportive portals and talismans, there is a mystery at the heart of mental time travel that makes it ultimately unpredictable.

Re-viewing The Prisoner, I didn’t feel as though I were looking back into the 60’s so much as I was looking at today reflected in a funhouse mirror. The Prisoner’s schizoid vision of a world split between mad institutions, which destroy freedom and corrode the spirit, and a few raging and alienated holdouts still speaks to the zeitgeist — but the political poles have flipped since 1967. The pot-smoking, radical hippie has been replaced by the gun-toting, reactionary tea bagger; in place of the Stalinist aphorisms of Mao’s Red Book, we have Manifest Destiny redux in The 5,000 Year Leap, a.k.a. Glenn Beck’s Red Book. Unlike the older generation, today’s rebel dropouts are not inspired by the spiritual restlessness of Hesse’s Siddhartha or Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge. Their motives are economic and punitively moralistic, and their model is John Galt, the libertarian hero of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Seething with resentment that the fruits of their honest labor are used — via the tyranny of taxation — to subsidize their less deserving fellow citizens, they fantasize about dropping out of the system, or in their patois “going Galt.”

The Prisoner reads very differently today than it did even in the Reagan era, when I first watched it, and that fact points out how much and how rapidly things have changed in this country. Over the last eight years we have passed though a very dark time, when the profound unreason of fear and self-righteous anger propelled the ship of state into treacherous straits. The darkness of that period was so palpable — and I speak here as an expert on the Einsteinian physics of time travel — that I have to wonder whether its gravity was so intense that it might have warped the fabric of space-time to the breaking point — opening up a wormhole that led out of our universe and into some uncanny alternative reality. It’s the same physics as time travel, but this time, instead of shunting us to some distant point in our past or future, the wormhole has catapulted us straight out of the time-space continuum.

We seem to have entered a parallel universe where FDR staged a socialist coup in 1932, which caused the Great Depression, and Hitler, the harbinger of political correctness, instigated the Second World War chiefly so he could impose vegetarianism and socialized medicine on a global empire of demoralized welfare slaves. In this topsy-turvy universe, a left-of-center coalition headed by the half-black son of a single mother can sincerely be characterized as a national socialist insurgency; the fractious Democratic party is the party of institutionalized repression; and howling Republicans are the beleaguered champions of free spirits and dissenters.

AMC says that their remake of The Prisoner will deal with contemporary controversies, like state surveillance and extraordinary rendition. But from where I sit, that sounds like a lonely echo from an abandoned arc of history. Those issues, artifacts of the Bush era, are orphaned anachronisms, here in our strange new home. Furthermore — if I may speak of such weighty matters in aesthetic terms — exploring the excesses of the misbegotten War on Terror is a poor fit with the original Prisoner’s tone of wry satire. Carl Rove was called the Mayberry Machiavelli, but the policy he and Dick Cheney built was devoid of even a veneer of Southern charm. We have seen their preferred means of intelligence extraction, and that tool kit does not include sending “high value suspects” to idyllic seaside resorts to ride penny-farthing bicycles and sip lapsang souchong in Italianate gardens. But that’s the oppressively decent way “enhanced interrogation” is practiced in the Village.

Astute surveyors of the political landscape realize that we’re not in Mayberry anymore. The nation is beyond carping about tactical details, like the relevance of habeas corpus or the permissibility of wiretapping or even torture; we’ve moved on to bigger quarry. The question we see playing out on cable news, in blogs, in town-hall meetings, and public demonstrations is “Who do we imagine ourselves to be? What is the soul of America?” As is the case with definitional questions, the answer is typically expressed as a negative: We are defined against the thing that we reject. And, as is the case with family squabbles, the tone is uniformly nasty and ad hominem. Our political lexicon is distended with a list of new terms of invective, Rabelaisian in its length and grotesquerie: We are a nation of wingnuts, moonbats, birthers, FReepers, libtards, Paultards, snow-billies, nObamans, Christianists, liberal fascists….

If Patrick McGoohan, the crusty, misanthropic creator of the original Prisoner, had lived to remake his series, I’m certain he would have recognized this knotted up state of affairs, so ripe for satire — and would have relished jabbing a finger into our aching collective pressure points, sparing the fragile sensibilities of neither right nor left. I imagine him hiring Kiefer Sutherland to reprise the role as Jack Bauer — just as it was an open secret that McGoohan’s Number 6 was a continuation of Danger Man’s John Drake. Bauer — a man who understands more than most that the delicate soufflé of democracy requires the occasional breaking of an egg — would be spirited away to a mysterious resort-spa on a nameless shore, where he would be confronted by a succession of callow but enthusiastic policy wonks, political appointees to some vaguely-alluded-to Truth and Reconciliation Committee. They would offer the rogue spy white tea and cucumber water, and then urge him to make a public confession of his crimes against humanity — tea and sympathy being, as you know, the signature style of Democratic regimes. They just want everyone to play nice and get along with one another. In fact, they insist on it. Und zey haff vays of making you toe zee liberal agenda….

The self-conscious artifice of the original Prisoner and its dream-like logic allowed it to rub up closer to the maladies of the late 60’s than a more subtle and realistic treatment would have. There is opportunity in the remake to examine in cringe-inducing detail the corrosive stereotypes that both the right and left today seem incapable of setting aside. The deadlock between earnest hope mongers of the new left demanding “sunlight” and “transparency” and the dour Cheneyesque figure that accepts torture sites and covert ops as the unsavory but necessary price of freedom would be a perfect microcosm of the unsettled and uncivil moment we’re inhabiting.

But, sometimes reality is more surreal than acid visions or science-fiction allegories. If we are living in universe where political “thinkers” can seriously suggest that viewing pornography turns straight men gay, or that environmentalism is a death cult, or that discrimination is actually a higher form of tolerance (and, sad to say, we are), then perhaps the wormhole has carried us beyond the reach of satire’s salubrious laughter.

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