Tag: the prisoner

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Writing Yourself Out of a Corner

If you were a fan of Friends back in 1998, you’ll remember the hype and speculation around what would happen during Ross and Emily’s wedding.

Coming at the end of Season 4, this had to be a climactic scene. These days, it’s hardly a spoiler to mention that Ross accidentally says Rachel’s name, which feeds into the entirety of Season 5. However, I’ve only learnt in the last week that the writers struggled to think of a proper ending until the actor who played Ross – David Schwimmer – accidentally switched the names during another scene.

This serves as a good example of how even professional writers are rarely bestowed with fully-formed ideas. A story often needs to be written out and figured out along the way, and that process can take years.

Larry Cohen pitched the idea for the film Phone Booth to Alfred Hitchcock in the 1960s, but neither of them could think of a reason to keep the main character in the booth. By the late 1990s, the public was becoming increasingly vigilant to the threat of terrorism, and Cohen played into that as he realised a sniper with a weapon could be a good reason. It was even a plot point that the main character was one of the few people still using a payphone by that point.

I even have a few examples of my own. One particular example was a three-line fragment of poetry I wrote at school before I ever routinely wrote poetry. In 2013, more than ten years after I left school, I finally found a way to work it into a fuller piece. It gained a sequel in 2018, taking a very different tone from the original, chiefly in recognition of how I’d changed in those five years.

But even professional writers miss the mark sometimes. The final episode of The Prisoner was broadcast in 1968. Although its writer Patrick McGoohan was pleased with the result, he was under pressure to deliver it quickly and many viewers were unhappy that it raised more questions than it answered.

And we must mention the ninth season of Dallas, which was entirely written off as a dream to bring back the character of Bobby Ewing.

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How the Story Ends

Although this entry discusses the endings of screenplays and short stories, no spoilers are revealed. We’ll be looking at the craft of bringing a story to an end rather than the specifics.

There’s been some disquiet over the ending of the TV version of Game of Thrones, with the consensus that it had been unsatisfying compared to the action that had gripped viewers earlier in the run. It echoes the rumbles that followed the endings of Lost a decade ago and The Prisoner in the 1960s.

Conflict is at the heart of storytelling across all media and all eras, and it’s by convention that the conflict should rise and rise as the story progresses, then end with a final resolution that ties up every plot point. Unless a writer is exceptionally skilled, it’s difficult to break away from this convention and still hold the audience.

An unsatisfying ending is usually because the writer failed to resolve the conflict, or sometimes because said conflict wasn’t strong enough in the first instance.

Let’s look at The Prisoner. The series begins when a former British intelligence agent known as Number Six is abducted and imprisoned in a coastal village, where absurd rules apply and staff attempt to nudge him into explaining why he abruptly resigned from his job.

Despite this strong initial premise, the series begins to fall into a rut. By the halfway point of the run, each episode sees Number Six attempting either to escape or to win over his captors, but failing each time in a near-predictable manner.

The final episode is consistent with the absurd rules that had been well established, but fails to answer the question posed about why Number Six had left the security services. That revelation could have been one of the greatest moments in TV history. But thanks to the erratic production, the episode instead divided its viewership.

It is entirely possible to end a piece in such an open-ended manner, as is common in some short stories, but this must be carefully done. A few years ago, I had a story published in an anthology whose stories didn’t seem to have proper endings, leaving me with the feeling that each writer was concealing a vital plot point.

However, an open ending is common in The New Yorker and similar publications. In other media, the film Teeth (2007) is a particularly good example of showing how the previous sequence of events might be about to repeat without spelling it out too much.

The bottom line is that a good ending must either indicate that the previous conflict will be resolved in some way, or an audience must have enough information to work out how it might be resolved once the narrative ends.