More on Prisoners of Conscience

At the end of the last post I started to discuss Payne. The first time we see him, he's watching the building where Antonio is reading his poetry to Waldo's class. Since we don't know who he is, and he is wearing a heavy coat and has white hair, he actually looks like McCall (and during the confrontation between McCall and Payne at the end, Payne asserts that he and McCall are alike--more about this later).

Next we see of Payne in Antonio's cell. He is a grandfatherly looking man dressed in black who claims in a soft voice to be Antonio's "friend" but carries a cattle prod. Then we see Antonio in shadow being tortured with the cattle prod. As the scenes in the cell continue, the young man is wearing fewer and fewer clothes, his protection from Payne being symbolically stripped away. Scene by scene, Payne comes physically closer and closer to Antonio. He reads Antonio's poetry to him, before slipping on rubber gloves to continue the torture. Finally, Payne holds an almost naked Antonio in his arms in a pieta-like pose, caressing and kissing him, and telling him if he reveals the names, Payne will give him an easy death.

At the end of the episode, McCall confronts Payne, whom McCall spent half his life seeking. Payne contends that what McCall has found is an old man with only enough strength to keep fighting anarchy; McCall says what he has found is a murderer. Payne goes on to tell McCall his side of McCall's father's murder: They were friends (remember his was a friend to Antonio, too), but the father was a man of Victorian honor who came to tell Payne that he would be pressing charges against Payne's group, then turned his back to leave. Payne "tried to give him a fighting chance" by telling him to turn around, but the father believed that Payne would not shoot him in the back and kept going. This Payne calls "committing suicide".

Calling him a bastard, McCall aims his gun at Payne. While McCall decides whether to kill him, Payne contends that McCall is more like Payne than his father, implying that McCall will pull the trigger (or maybe saving his own life by forcing McCall to rely on the honor system of his father?). Instead of shooting Payne, McCall shoots the wall next to him. The older man says: You're just like him after all." Tears in his eyes, McCall smiles and says, "yes."

As I've mentioned before, an ongoing theme in EQ is the clash between morality and immorality in politics (in the broadest sense) as represented in the intelligence community. This could be posed in different terms, as a clash between Good and Evil, or the clash between good people and evil people. Through the show's four years, McCall fights his personal battle on this front: is he a good person or an evil person? If he does enough good deeds now, can he redeem himself for the evil he did before? Does doing evil make a person Evil, or does doing good make a person Good?

It seems that neither McCall nor those around him know who he really is. Is he still the ruthless "hired gun" he used to be, even if he now uses the gun to help people? Or has he changed after recognizing the evil that he did in his past? Scott asks him why he still carries a gun if he's left his earlier life "Prelude"; the assassin Zahndt believes he and McCall are the same, they are "A Community of Civilized Men", and when the daughter in that episode asks McCall is he is really like Zandt, he says "I don't know." Philippe Marceau tells McCall that Manon said this about him. In "Lady Cop" McCall tells Control that the evil (Evil?) is still in him, and in "Nightscape", after killing the three rapists, he tells his woman friend that his profession is "killing people." There are many more examples. (Control's response to this and other comments McCall makes on the subject is worthy of a completely new discussion, so I will save it for later.)

Prisoners of Conscience presents the viewers with an example of true Evil, and allows McCall to finally understand himself better. The Oxford Dictionary definition of Evil is: "Adj: deeply immoral and malevolent; noun: extreme wickedness and depravity," and this is a definition of Payne. He rejects McCall Sr.'s "Victorian code of honor" but replaces it with nothing but saving his own skin. He makes his living torturing people in what he calls "battling anarchy" but the torture scenes make the statement that he loves torture for torture's sake, even in a sexual way -- caressing the victim's almost naked body, kissing him on the cheek (I won't go into the Christian symbolism...) Going back to the definition of Evil, this scene could define the word depravity. Watching it 20 years after it was first aired, I am surprised that it was allowed to be aired, such is the malevolence that emanates from Payne. Payne is Mephistopheles, cajoling, finding people's weakest points, tempting them, on the outside mild and pleasant but still the Devil.

In Prisoners of Conscience, which was the 6th to the last episode of the series,McCall seems to find answers. As such, it would have made a wonderful LAST episode. Viewers see in Payne a man who is truly Evil, and McCall recognizes in his confrontation with Payne that he is NOT like Payne. Like his father, he has a substantial moral code. Perhaps he can find peace with himself.