A Question of Loyalty
‘Are you drinking Coke - or vinegar?’

A Polish defector fails to show. Perhaps he’s merely spooked and is waiting in his flat? Mike learns the man has been arrested, thanks to his clay-footed colleagues. Mutual accusations result.

Meanwhile, Burnside learns he a potential defector of his own: an agent on station in Stockholm.

Ghosts
While discussing Burnside, Wheatley asks Peele, ‘Wasn't he engaged to that girl in the Special Section?’, referring to Laura Dickens. (There was nothing in Laura's episodes to suggest she and Burnside were engaged to be married, so Wheatley may have heard an exaggerated rumor, or exaggerated it himself.) Peele responds, ‘A girl Sandbagger - the first and last.’

Later, Willie says to Burnside, ‘I wonder how much of you died in Berlin a year ago.’ Burnside confesses he hates Karen ‘because she's alive.’

This dramatic coda reveals both the extent of and explanation for Burnside's contempt for Karen Milner. It is also consistent with the way Burnside feels about defectors.

Commentary
Easily a favourite episode. The sheer scale of this story belies its simple beginnings. We don’t see the tendrils snaking from Moscow, Norway, America and even Canada, but they are present. It exemplifies the show's fundamental theme: lying and trust between allies and enemies.

This is an enjoyable episode in which Burnside and Peele have some terrific arguments, with the latter showing amazing integrity. Mike Wallace gets a lot to do; Willie provides comic relief (‘Do you mean Jeff Ross or do you mean his shapely assistant?’) and Jeff Ross achieves new levels of crudeness.

The Actor’s Art
Watch the actor meeting Mike in the hotel room. The long rehearsals given to the actors really shines here. The actor playing Len Shepherd walks on and just sells the role of a middle-aged civil servant and espionage officer.

The Thing
While on station in Poland, Mike and his colleagues speak very freely. Presumably the were not worried about The Thing. In 1946, a carved copy of the Seal of the United States was presented to US Ambassador Averell Harriman. It hung in the office of the ambassadorial residence until 1952 when a flaw in the surface of the seal was discovered.

The orament was disassembled and a microphone was discovered. However, the extremly simple contraption to which it was attahced stymied engineers until a team of Britsh researchers determined that 'the thing' only became active as a bug when pelted by radio waves. The Soviet Bugging Crisis at the United Nations as public domain film footage now shows.