Sabotage

A small airline is having trouble along one of its routes--its planes keep blowing up! They aren't sure exactly why this is happening, but the editor of a newspaper is trying to stir up trouble--insisting that a fledgling republic is shooting down these planes. Because Drake knows the lady who's running the airline, he approaches her and offers her help. The plan is for him to be hired and behave like a real rogue--hoping that the saboteurs (if there are any) will approach him to work for them. But these folks aren't stupid and decide to test Drake first to see if they can really trust him. He fails the test....so what's next? This is a very interesting episode. I liked who was behind all the problems--it was a nice twist. And, I liked how they got the jerk to reveal who he was at the end of the show--very clever.

These first season "Danger Man" episodes are both predictable and confused: here's another dealing vaguely (and uninterestingly) with Colonialism is some new Far Eastern republic, with Singapore and Papua New Guinea namedropped pointlessly.

The token Oriental bad guy is played by South African actor Bobby Naidoo, and the rest of the cast is nondescript except for transparently "bad girl" stewardess Yvonne Romain. Storyline about blowing up airplanes and smuggling gold is cartoonish, as is Pat going undercover playing drunk quite broadly.

Right from the beginning, the hook for the story was way off-base: not only is the story far, far removed from anything related to Pat being a secret agent working for NATO, but the gimmick that he's just volunteered to help out an old femme pal who inherited the airlines is silly. There's only one suspect for the chief villain, so when it's revealed it's strictly ho-hum. And Pat's bomb-defusing technique, with beverage containers used to hide both gold and bombs, is ludicrous.