Colony Three

A man named Fuller who is about to defect to Russia is detained by M9, and Dake takes Fuller's identity. When he gets behind the curtain, he is sent to a replica of an English town, where Russians spies are trained to be perfect Englishmen.

Colony Three is one of the best episodes of the series. The story idea obviously inspired The Prisoner. Patrick McGoohan is excellent as always, and the guest cast was fantastic. An excellent example of the series.

Somewhere behind the Iron Curtain, there's a top-secret installation called "Colony Three", a perfect reproduction in every detail of an ordinary English village. Spies from all over the Communist bloc are sent here to take a three-year graduate course, before they're dispatched to do their nefarious work in Great Britain.

For total verisimilitude, the trainers hire actual Britishers (under false pretenses) for townspeople, to run the local government and businesses. This gives John Drake (Patrick McGoohan) his chance to infiltrate the place. The problem is, once you've arrived, there's only one way Drake's class of "employee" leaves the Colony: dead.

Drake's assignment: surreptitiously photograph the spies-in-training, and somehow get himself and the photos out of the Colony, without tipping off the authorities.

If some of this sounds familiar, it's a tantalizing fact that McGoohan would later work with this same director (Don Chaffey) in several episodes of "The Prisoner". I can't help but think "Colony Three", with its placid facade of everyday life in a small village concealing the workings of a sinister elite, may have been a partial inspiration -- or possibly a prototype -- of a major element of the later series.

It's certainly true that "The Prisoner" referenced the earlier "Danger Man" series in numerous ways. (The photograph that's X-d out in the title sequence of "The Prisoner" is a publicity shot of Drake used for this series.) But besides its inherent interest for fans of "The Prisoner", this episode stands quite well on its own, with a nicely paranoid atmosphere seeping around the edges of the idealized village, and solid supporting performances from the likes of Niall MacGinnis.

Highly recommended.

An early pinnacle in this premier 1960s spy series, the elaborate artifice and ominous atmosphere don't just distinguish "Colony Three" but provide a full-dress rehearsal for Patrick McGoohan's subsequent series "The Prisoner." Like that landmark series, this setting for John Drake's "Danger Man" is a bucolic "village" that features much more sinister machinations beneath the surface--and from which it is exceedingly difficult to leave once someone has arrived. Donald Jonson's engrossing script keeps the overall framework vague but emphasizes the sense of quiet oppression that director Don Chaffey (who directed four "Prisoner" episodes) exploits to strong effect.

John le Carré's "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" also shades "Colony Three" as Drake poses as Robert Fuller, a British defector, and journeys behind the Iron Curtain to an isolated village that resembles an English village named Hamden. It's an induction center for enemy spies trying to infiltrate Britain, featuring actual Brits as villagers to help the spies assimilate, either like electrician Ed Randall (Glyn Owen), an English communist discontented by the West, or young librarian Janet Wells (Katherine Woodville), who came East to rejoin a putative lover. (Incidentally, Alec Leaman, the protagonist in le Carré's novel, took a lover who was a librarian and a member of the British Communist Party.)

Drake's unassuming clerk persona enables him to surreptitiously catalog the potential infiltrators although he soon encounters friction with his roommate Randall, who grows suspicious of Drake even as he becomes disillusioned with "the other side." Meanwhile, Drake's seemingly upbeat handler "John Richardson" (Peter Arne) also becomes wary of Drake, pushing the agent into danger in the remote, unknown village.

A seemingly far-fetched premise exhibits chilling plausibility as "Colony Three" explores the interpersonal psychology of the inhabitants (another "Prisoner" trademark), including the poignant denouement for Wells, a captive of love who becomes a victim of Cold War ideological fanaticism, rather than the mechanics of subterfuge that underpin village operations--and security.

Building to a tense climax, "Colony Three" ratchets up the suspense while previewing the deception, regimentation, and oppression that McGoohan would later explore in "The Prisoner" while Drake's final scene with the Admiral (Peter Madden) underscores the cruel zero-sum game espionage and covert operations plays with human lives; as war criminal Henry Kissinger, upon betraying the Kurds to Iraq in the 1970s, blithely remarked, "Covert action should not be confused with missionary work."

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?

The idea for "Colony Three" is one that was so good that I am pretty sure it inspired a great episode of the American TV show "Mission: Impossible" ("The Carriers"). Regardless, I'd recommend you watch both of them, as both are among the best shows in each respective series.

The show begins with a man being detained by the British secret service. The detainee is bound for some place behind the Iron Curtain--but where and why is unknown. Since Drake bears a very strong similarity to the guy*, he goes on the mission instead. Once there, he finds that the Soviets have built an exact duplicate of a British town in which they train agents to blend in seamlessly once they are deployed there. Drake must learn who these agents are (so they can be arrested or tracked once they in the UK) as well as get out successfully. The first part is relatively easy once he constructs his own UNUSUAL camera. The second,...well, you'll need to see that for yourself.

An exciting plot, plenty of action and uniqueness all make this a great episode of "Secret Agent". Well worth seeing and if you don't like this one, you'll probably not enjoy the series.