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2 Once Upon A Time As the series is now older than fifty years in production terms, naturally more and more of the cast involved have sadly passed away. Patrick McGoohan himself died in January 2009, aged 80, making Once Upon A Time the first episode with no surviving cast members.      The...

4 The Schizoid Man The Prisoner wasn't broadcast in a conventional manner, instead being aired in different orders around each ITV region, sometimes weeks apart. As a result obtaining accurate viewing figures was even more difficult than usual, and estimate audience figures had to be assembled...

7 Arrival As an opening episode, Arrival is terrific television. The Prisoner is fundamentally a silly show, of course, featuring a group conducting covert surveillance on an experienced spy by following him around with revolving statues with glowing eyes. Many aspects of the series are...

9 Living in Harmony The number of planned Prisoner episodes varies from account to account, largely due to fading memories. In The Prisoner Puzzle, a 1977 interview with Warner Troyer, McGoohan stated that he wanted just seven episodes, with Lew Grade asking for 26 to appease American backers...

11 Free For All Free For All was the first of five episodes to be officially directed by McGoohan, albeit two under a pseudonym, followed by: Many Happy Returns, A Change Of Mind, Once Upon A Time and Fall Out. More significantly, it's the first of three to be officially written by the star...

13 It's Your Funeral The most charming episode on this first page of rankings, It's Your Funeral does once again suffer from being heavily "mocked up" in the studio, with over 7 minutes of footage taking place on sets as "exterior" shots of Portmerion. As with A Change Of Mind, second unit...

15 Hammer Into Anvil Hammer Into Anvil is traditionally a very popular episode among fans of the series; indeed, at date of writing it's the highest-rated on the Internet Movie Database, its 8.8/10 rating just slightly ahead of four episodes scoring 8.7. Yet here at the Anorak Zone it's never...

2 A Question Of Priorities → No change Very few series have so enjoyed torturing their lead character as much as UFO. It's possible to feel sympathy for Straker, given that his son only had an accident due to both his ex-wife Mary's insistence that he should leave without saying goodbye to...

4 Mindbender ↑ Down 1 Place When an alien rock gives the inhabitants of Moonbase hallucinations, one of the Interceptor pilots goes insane and believes he's in a Western, fighting Mexican bandits. It's a wild, out-there plot, that many other series would have mined for broad laughs. However...

6 Sub-Smash ↓ Up 9 Places Preconceptions can play a part when watching a TV series. Gerry Anderson will always be known first and foremost as a maker of children's puppet serials, which, while an admirable profession, can be a distracting mindset to take into a series like UFO, which utilised...

8 Confetti Check A-O.K. ↑ Down 2 Places There's suggestions that, had a second season of UFO been made, it would have featured less "domestic", Earth-bound episodes, as these were less popular in America where it was originally a hit. It's a shame, because it means most of the higher-rated...

10 Identified ↓ Up 7 Places A very high number of television series have issues with their opening episodes, and UFO is no exception. Although it is, in retrospect, a lot better when you're used to the series, and finally scrapes into the top ten here, it's not a particularly striking...

12 The Sound Of Silence ↑ Down 2 Places The curious part of reviewing a series is, of course, personal expectations. Sometimes a favourite episode won't contain much rewatch value, whereas a duller, more run-of-the-mill story might have more to enjoy the second or third time around. While The...

14 Reflections In The Water ↑ Down 2 Places Previously highly-ranked, a fresh take on these episodes sees Reflections In The Water drop a couple of places. Often with the Pinewood episodes, they're better directed, but can be more narratively sparse. As a result, the already underplayed...

16 Court Martial → No change The concept of a main character on trial is not a unique one in TV sci-fi. It had happened in multiple episodes of various Star Treks (including an episode actually titled "Court Martial", which aired four years before this one), as well as numerous other genre...

18 Computer Affair ↓ Up 6 Places Computer Affair is one of a couple of UFO episodes that touches on racial tolerance. While well-meaning and earnest, such topics can often come over as ham-fisted when dealt with on television, and UFO is certainly no exception. In another episode (Survival)...

20 The Cat With Ten Lives ↑ Down 11 Places By some way the hardest episode of UFO to rank, The Cat With Ten Lives is objectively better than several entries ranked above it, but also is impossible to regard as part of the same series.       It guest stars Alexis Kanner, giving a typically...

22 The Responsibility Seat → No change It's hard to dislike an episode as idiotic as The Responsibility Seat, a nonsense mess of a story with logic almost as haphazard as its lacklustre editing. Key scene has to be where the usually intuitive and intelligent Ed Straker has to get voice...

24 E.S.P. ↑ Down 13 Places The one intriguing thing about UFO is the question of what the aliens actually want. Their motivations appear to change in some episodes, and it's hard to draw any real conclusions when they can't communicate. It's one thing that makes the series so alluring...

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