Was intrigued (if not completely satisfied) by the new Prisoner miniseries, which finished a three-night run on AMC Tuesday. It was well produced and exquisitely acted, even though the ending explained too much. (I won’t spoil it for you future BitTorrent DVD viewers.)

The old show mixed Swinging London iconography with Cold War politics, 007-esque spying with Big Brother paranoia.

The new show mixed Matrix psycho-techno-babble with corporate oppression, social-gaming fantasies with the suffocating terror that is Reagan-Bush era “family values.”

And it was fun to hear the Brian Wilson music samples. Because most of those were from Smile, which had been composed at the time of the original Prisoner series but not finished until 2004, they added a time/space distortion field that perfectly fit the story’s psycho-consciousness distortion field.