Shaped like a large weather balloon, the Rover (with a sound like a lion's roar and a gale force wind) hunted down any person who attempted escape from the secret seaside resort known as the Village.When the Rover caught an escapee, it enveloped their body, suffocating them temporarily or permanently.

The Rover traveled on both land and sea to catch its prey especially Number Six (Patrick McGoohan) an unwilling guest of this strange environment whose continual attempts at escape were thwarted by the ubiquitous white patrolman.

On the episode No. 5 "Schizoid Man," a man looking like Number Six tried to convince real Number Six that he was not who he thought he was. In the end, the double was killed by Rover. This was the episode that first identified the guardian with a name. When it killed the double (because he panicked and ran), Number Six telephoned Number Two and said "Rover got him."

Originally, the script for the series envisioned a driverless Volkswagen with a blue light as the Rover. Fortunately, this idea was abandoned for the more mysterious, nebulous rolling security device.

In an interview in Toronto in 1977 Patrick McGoohan told TV host Warner Troyer:

"We had this marvelous piece of machinery that was being built which was gonna be "Rover" and this thing was like a hovercraft and it would go underwater, come up on the beach, climb walls; it could do anything. The was our original Rover. By the first day of shooting, unfortunately, the engineers, mechanics and scientific geniuses hadn't quite completed it to perfection. And the first day of shooting, Rover was supposed to go down off the beach into the water, do a couple of signals and a couple of wheel spins and come back up. But it went down into the water and stayed down, permanently."

The show's Producer Manger Bernard Williams and star Patrick McGoohan soon after noticed a meteorological balloon floating overhead and thus was born "Rover."

According to the book "The Official Prisoner Companion" (Warner Books, 1988) the "Rover" symbolized "repression and the guardianship of corrupt authority, which when corruption is finally overcome, disintegrates." The Rovers were the "sheep dogs of the allegory...when people asked too many questions or assert their individuality, the Rovers acted as a stifling force. If one began to stray from the herd, Rovers were sent to bring them back." 

TRIVIA NOTE: Female kangaroos are "Rovers." 

External Links

• The Prisoner (IMDb)
• An Interviw with Partick McGoohan (Cult TV)

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