"Koroshi" and "Shinda Shima" were the last two episodes of "Secret Agent" produced, and the only two episodes in color. They kicked off what was to have been the program's fourth season (including the first 30-minute series). After completing the two-part story, however, Patrick McGoohan asked to be released from the show to begin work on "The Prisoner."Consequently, "Koroshi" and "Shinda Shima" share a number of distinctions among "Secret Agent" episodes:
- The final episodes produced
- The only color episodes
- The only two-part story
- The only episodes set in Japan
- The only episodes shown in America with the original UK closing title sequence (featuring the spinning wheels spelling out "Danger Man")
The "Koroshi" Compilation
In the UK, "Koroshi" and "Shinda Shima" aired separately as the final two shows of the program. (They aired, incidentally, during a break in the original run of "The Prisoner," partially to give Patrick McGoohan time to complete further episodes of that show.) In the US, they were spliced together into a two-hour TV movie called "Koroshi," with minor changes in content and editing to weave the two stories together.
The following summary of differences between the two versions is adapted from a posting to alt.tv.prisoner by William H. Lonergan. Note: While not really containing "spoilers," it does reveal a number of plot elements.
Basically, there are two scenes in the compilation not found in the individual episodes. The compilation is also missing some material that is present in the episodes.
The differences between them are:
Koroshi (47mins 10secs)
- Pre-credit sequence: Japanese woman runs down the street, enters house and is gassed by flower.
- Compilation Version: orange/yellow Japanese-font-style credits over this sequence.
- Episode Version: no credits here.
- Title sequence
- Episode Version: standard Danger Man title sequence here.
- Compilation Version: no title sequence.
- Opening credits
- Episode Version: standard "High Wire" harpsichord theme is heard over standard red-tinted series credits. Notable differences: credits say "based on the series created by Raplh Smart" and two directors are credited (Michael Truman and Peter Yates). Drake’s plane arrives, he walks past a line of white blossoms and enters the concourse.
- Compilation Version: Starts with Drake walking through the concourse. The shots of the plane and Drake passing the white blossoms are missing. No music or credits.
- When Drake visits Rosemary: the shots of him noticing the keyhole before looking at the flowers and of Rosemary holding the phone switch down as she speaks are in the Episode Version; however, they are not in the Compilation Version. This omission changes the meaning of the scene slightly.
- After Drake leaves Rosemary’s apartment, he listens to a monitoring device hidden in a matchbox as Rosemary reports to her boss. This scene is present in the Episode Version, but is not found in the Compilation. This also changes the meaning of the scene slightly. Both versions are identical from here until the end of the episode.
- End of "Koroshi"
- Compilation Version: After Sanders' plane crashes, Drake is attacked by Tanaka (the chauffeur) with a sword. Drake knocks him out, finds the brotherhood insignia and then looks at the plane as it burns.
- Episode Version: Tanaka’s attack is not present; Drake simply walks away from the burning plane. The episode ends with Drake waiting for his plane as Tanaka asks him: "Sandwich, magazine, Japanese phrasebook?" There is some additional dialogue and then Drake departs the concourse. This scene makes "Koroshi" a self-contained episode and changes the plot slightly.
- Closing credits
- Episode Version: standard closing credits with the scrambled letters "Danger Man."
- Compilation Version: No closing credits here.
Shinda Shima (49mins 42secs)
- Pre-credit sequence
- Episode Version: Beach establishing shots, diver is attacked near coral reef.
- Compilation Version: This scene is moved to after Drake’s meeting with the woman in the Two-Tailed Dragon Bar.
- Title sequence
- Episode Version: standard Danger Man title sequence, same as"Koroshi."
- Compilation Version: No title sequence here.
- Opening credits
- Episode Version: standard "High Wire" theme is played over establishing shots of Japan (people crossing streets) and yellow-tinted credits. Only Peter Yates is credited as director.
- Compilation Version: None of this is in the Compilation Version.
- Opening scene
- Compilation Version: There is an extra scene with Drake in Yamada’s office discussing Mr. Sharpe’s arrival. (This establishes the new storyline.) This is not in the Episode Version.
- Episode Version: begins with Sharpe’s arrival and detention in the concourse. Drake doesn’t appear until he receives the package and searches Sharpe’s suitcase (humming "The Twelve Days of Christmas"). Both versions are identical from here to the end credits.
- End credits
- Episode Version: end credits similar to "Koroshi."
- Compilation Version: "High Wire" theme is played over Japanese-font-style credits. Various Japanese watercolor designs are shown beside the credits.
Note: The compilation version currently is unavailable on tape. The episodes are shown separately in syndication (in the US, most recently on Encore's Mystery Channel, with the Johnny Rivers "Secret Agent" theme song and US opening credits.)
Critical Comments on the Color Episodes
"Koroshi" and "Shinda Shima" did more than simply add color to "Secret Agent." They represented a departure in style and tone for the series.
Prior to the worldwide success of the James Bond movie franchise, most spy/PI yarns were cast in the mold of classic film noir. Enigmatic heroes shuffled among shadow-streaked backdrops, filmed through a haze of cigarette smoke. World-weary and street-smart, they bit off ragged scraps of hard-boiled dialogue in a world populated by charismatic villains and morally ambiguous femmes fatale. Classic good vs. evil conflicts took interesting side trips down dramatically murky paths. Bullets were fired, and mud was slung.
Enter Bond...James Bond. Ian Fleming's suave secret agent transformed the genre. The archetypical noir protagonist - the rumpled Everyman with the permanent five o'clock shadow - gave way to a groomed, pressed, spit-and-polished hero in Savile Row suits. Arch bon mots and witty epigrams replaced tough, spare dialogue. The stories abandoned the wharves and back alleys of the world for the larger than life setting of the global Cold War landscape. Whereas old-school action heroes drew their motivation from a kind of bent-but-not-broken morality, Bond and his ilk confidently swung an ideological truncheon based on unassailable East vs. West stereotypes. From a dramatic standpoint, the focus switched from resolution to triumph, from bundling up loose ends to slicing them cleanly with a high-powered laser.
"Secret Agent" represented a middle ground between the two styles. John Drake was a Bondian character with noir sensibility. Sophisticated in appearance and outfitted with all the flashiest Cold War gadgetry, he nonetheless had the soul of an earlier PI - darker and more complex than the cardboard good guys who took on the world in the post-Bond era. More significantly, "Secret Agent" had the look of classic film noir. The program was gorgeously filmed in black and white, with atmospheric lighting and clever, evocative camera work. It was in many respects the antithesis of the new Cold War entertainments, with their flat, in-your-face color and hyper editing.
With the switch to color, "Secret Agent" inevitably lost much of its distinctive look. (Consistently achieving realistic depth and shadow in color would elude most television programs until the Seventies.) "Koroshi" and "Shinda Shima" suffered in the transition. While viewers could now see for themselves the blue eyes so frequently praised by Drake's female admirers, it was now also possible to notice the stagey quality of the sets and the artificial backdrops masquerading as exotic locales. Strangely, except for a few scenes (such as those in the kabuki theatre), the episodes fail to take advantage of the new colorful palette at their disposal. Drake spends most of "Koroshi" in a gray suit, and much of "Shinda Shima" is set in a drab cave, peopled by villains dressed in black and white. In short, the richness of monochrome - which was used so artfully as to become a narrative device in previous seasons - was lost, and the possibilities of full color went largely untapped.
In addition, the aborted fourth season seems to have been moving the show in a new direction...or trying to. Who was responsible for the changes isn't clear, but the fact remains that some of the emerging dramatic themes worked and some didn't. For example, in the tradition of the broad comic relief of the Bond films and their successors, "Koroshi" reintroduces us to Potter, Drake's fellow agent. A rather hapless buffoon, Potter had been featured in a couple of early episodes, then discarded. Now he's back, apparently to be a humorous bureaucratic thorn in Drake's side. To be sure, "Secret Agent" had employed comic relief before (most often personified by character actors Aubrey Morris and Ronald Radd), but the broadly drawn characters also served the important function of moving the plot along as they interacted with Drake. Potter's puffed-up preening in "Koroshi" seems forced in his (mercifully brief) scene. (Aside: Potter turns up again in the Prisoner episode "The Girl Who Was Death," which had its origins in an unused "Secret Agent" script and suggests that the plan was to have been to make him a more regular character.)
The gadgetry in the show also seemed to be growing more pervasive and at the same time less credible. Drake always had his gadgets - typewriters that became cameras, microphones concealed in walking sticks - but the color episodes ratchet up their use considerably. "Shinda Shima" relies less on hardware than on Drake's ingenuity, but in "Koroshi" we see the explosive cufflinks, the matchbox listening device, the bomb-detecting wristwatch, and of course the poisonous-gas-shooting flower arrangement. The entertainment world was enamored of Cold War spy-tech in the Sixties, and "Secret Agent" apparently was slated to jump on the bandwagon. Unfortunately, Drake (like most fictional spies) was at his best when improvising and relying on his own wits; introducing all the flashy gadgets only serves to homogenize the character.
Yet another change to the color episodes is the style of fighting. Spectacular hand-to-hand combat is a hallmark of "Secret Agent." As a spy who eschews weapons whenever possible, Drake was regularly called on to attack or defend with his fists. As a result, the show's fight scenes are uniformly well-choreographed and actually quite brutal; Patrick McGoohan issued no matinee-idol prohibitions against showing his character with unsightly cuts and bruises. In the color episodes, however, the fight action, like most of the action, becomes showier and more cartoonlike. While the scene in which Drake is attacked among the kabuki mannequins is inventive, other scenes suffer. With these episodes set in Japan, there clearly was an effort to emphasize martial arts-style fighting, which by its nature is more stylized than traditional fisticuffs. But there is little authentic martial artistry on display, only broad mimickry by obviously untrained combatants. More emphasis is placed on holding fights in interesting settings (in front of a burning airplane, in an underground lair) than on choreographing effective scenes. The underwater murder that opens "Shinda Shima" is an exciting exception, but one suspects that future episodes, had they been made, would have emphasized the frequency of such set pieces rather than their quality.
One final shift in tone deserves mention. In the color episodes we begin to see hints of evolution in Drake's character. In some ways, McGoohan's portrayal of the character is closer to the man we come to know as Number 6 in "The Prisoner" than to the dashing spy he had been playing off and on since 1960. Drake had always been a champion of the underdog and a defender of the individual. In the final two episodes of "Secret Agent," however, we see shades of the social crusader as well. This is particularly true in the "Shinda Shima" segment, as Drake rallies the scared Japanese fishers to retake their island and reclaim their livelihood. There are, of course, abundant historical parallels to this action (the CIA's arming of South American contras during the Cold War is only one example), which lends the episode verisimilitude as well as showing Drake's crusading side. We later see the same tendency in Number 6 - particularly in episodes like "It's Your Funeral" - which seems to indicate that this was a dimension McGoohan himself wanted to develop further in the character, albeit with a change of scenery from what he felt was the growing staleness of John Drake and "Secret Agent."
©1999, Theresa Donia.