Prisoner (TV series)

:For the 1967 UK television series, starring Patrick McGoohan, see The Prisoner.

Major storylines

The storyline for the opening episodes involved the arrival of two new prisoners, Karen Travers (Peta Toppano) and Lynn Warner (Kerry Armstrong). Travers had been charged for the murder of her husband, and quickly found herself the unwilling recipient of Franky Doyle's affections. Warner was charged with the abduction of a child, a prickly issue with the other inmates. (Prison populations are known for their intolerance torwards criminals who commit offences against children.)

Related Topics:
Peta Toppano - Kerry Armstrong

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Both prisoners quickly found themselves in the midst of a power struggle in the prison — between established Bea Smith who ran the prison's maximum security wing (H Block) and the upstart Frankie Doyle. Their power struggle ends in a prison riot in which officer Meg Jackson is held hostage, and her husband, prison psychiatrist Bill Jackson (Don Barker), is stabbed to death by inmate Chrissie Latham.

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The storylines which drove the series used familiar elements — smuggling, personality clashes between the prisoners, a range of issue-based storylines, court cases and police investigations and escape plots.

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One of the major drivers of the middle years of the series was the personality clash between Bea and Joan 'The Freak' Ferguson. The former was the prison population's benevolent 'Queen Bea', the latter was a corrupt, sadistic lesbian warder who delighted in terrorising the inmates.

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Their conflict peaked in a showdown which brought the prison, literally, to the ground. In episodes 326–327 of the series, Smith decided to finish Ferguson once and for all, so she lured The Freak into a trap by falsely claiming that Ferguson's inciminating diaries had been hidden in isolation by prisoner Barbara Fields (in reality Fields had hidden them in the Governor's office). As a decoy Chrissie Latham was to light a small fire in the prison library. A recalitrant Margo Gaffney had angrily criticised the decoy fire idea as weak and predictable, claiming that for anyone to be fooled it had better be a pretty big fire. She refused to co-operate further with the scheme but as the plan got underway Margo secretly went and set a much larger fire in a storeroom. Unfortunately a large stock of mineral turpentine was being temporarily stored there.

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The fire spread out of control while Bea Smith and Joan Ferguson battled it out in the isolation wing. In the confusion of the prison evacuation, Fields made her way to the Governor's office to retrieve the diaries. The fire overloaded the prison's security system which engaged the riot alarm which casued all the prison gates to automatically slam shut and lock, leaving prisoners and staff trapped in the burning prison. As this end-of-season episode came to a close Fields was overcome by smoke and collapsed in the Governor's office as the flames surrounded her (and the diaries). Mouse Trapp and Paddy Lawson found themselves trapped in the laundry; Paddy attempted to escape through the air ducts while a pannicky Mouse Ran through the corridor trying each door in turn. Ferguson had beaten Smith to an unconscious state but when the gates slammed shut she was trapped in the cell block, with Smith - along with Ferguson's dropped keys - lying just out of reach on the other side of the locked gate. In the final scene of the episode a vengeful Smith regained consciousness, and, realising that having beaten Ferguson she would now be ineligible for parole, vowed she would not pass the key to Ferguson and that the two would die right there in the fire.

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The episodes now rank among the most popular with fans.

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