User Reviews

"The Professionals" is the second episode of the rebooted "Danger Man" series, now called "Secret Agent". It's interesting because unlike many of the episodes with fictional Eastern Bloc nations, this one is set in a real nation--Czechoslovakia.

A British embassy employee, Desmond, has disappeared and his wife is worried. Drake is brought in to investigate and poses as an embassy employee with a history of alcoholism. A 'nice guy', Milos Kaldor, instantly befriends Drake and gets him connected with the local social scene. It's obvious that they are trying to set up Drake and they hook him up with a hot woman and begin plying him with drinks. He seems to have wandered into the same ring who set up Desmond. Where Desmond is and how to get him out of this country are two big problems.

While it looks like the outdoor scenes were shot somewhere around the Lake District of England, the setting is a nice substitute for the Czech countryside. This outdoor setting gives this episode a less claustrophobic feel than you find in some episodes of the series. This combined with a very good script make this one worth seeing.

Desmond Pearson (Jerry Stovin), an employee at the British embassy at Czechoslovakia, disappears. As he is really an M9 agent, Drake is sent to investigate.

The Professionals is a step down from Yesterday's Enemies, but it's still a good yarn. The Czechoslovakia setting is interesting, as I can recall no other ITC show being set there. Jerry Stovin is good as the rather reprehensible Pearson.

"Danger Man" steps behind the Iron Curtain as M9 agent John Drake travels to Prague to search for missing M9 agent Desmond Pearson (Jerry Stovin) in "The Professionals," which maintains limited suspense within a shaky narrative.

Writers Wilfred Greatorex, also the series' script editor, and Louis Marks inject their characters with distinctive traits, and their script puts them into suitably compromising positions, but their overall premise lacks conviction, relying too much on personal color at the expense of compelling reasons to produce that color, while the corresponding action seems stretched to fill the story's running time.

Masquerading as tippling embassy functionary Terrence Stewart, Drake is quickly assigned the task of finding Pearson, his own cover that of a businessman, after his frantic wife Joan (Helen Cherry) finally convinces the embassy that his disappearance, hardly his first unexplained absence, isn't simply another of his indiscretions.

At an embassy party, Drake soon attracts the attention of local Milos Kaldor (Alex Scott), who runs a honeytrap that includes vivacious, voluptuous Ira (Nadja Regin), who had a relationship with Desmond and, at Kaldor's insistence, dallies with Drake. When Drake is drugged at one of Kaldor's parties, he finds himself arrested and charged with vehicular assault, a contrived plot point that ultimately comes to nothing as Drake is soon urging Joan Desmond to flee the country with her children as he closes in on Desmond's whereabouts.

His Drake needing to maintain his alias, McGoohan displays versatility to carry "The Professionals" to the border, with Scott generally resisting the temptation to overplay his unsavory Czech character as Cherry does what she can in a catalyst role.

The wasted opportunity is Stovin's character Desmond, who only appears in the last half and is essentially passive ballast for Drake's resourcefulness. Left unspoken is any hint that his previous disappearances might have been his actual espionage work, and what that work had entailed, under the guise of doing business. This would have justified Drake's having to sneak behind the Iron Curtain to exfiltrate him and his family.

Director Michael Truman draws out the closing escape sequence to fill the running time, and although it avoids cliché chases and shootouts it dilutes the danger and excitement. Ironically, the thin narrative of "The Professionals" seems more suited to "Danger Man"'s previous half-hour format instead.

REVIEWER'S NOTE: What makes a review "helpful"? Every reader of course decides that for themselves. For me, a review is helpful if it explains why the reviewer liked or disliked the work or why they thought it was good or not good. Whether I agree with the reviewer's conclusion is irrelevant. "Helpful" reviews tell me how and why the reviewer came to their conclusion, not what that conclusion may be. Differences of opinion are inevitable. I don't need "confirmation bias" for my own conclusions. Do you?