A Man Called Quinn

Quinn used to work for the same people Cowley works for, and now he's a patient at Repton, a mental hospital, where he's convinced himself the KGB drugged him. One day he walks out. The story of the hour is what a broken agent does with his freedom. The answer, it turns out, is not much that anyone would call freedom.

He rents a room and rearranges it to look like a cell, which tells you everything about where his head is. Then he goes into the woods and digs up his gun. What comes back with the gun is memory: the days when the KGB captured him and brainwashed him into a man who killed four of his own colleagues. He shoots two of them now, one of them fatally, working through the list like a man paying off old debts. The next name on it is Cowley's. Somewhere in all of it is the question of how much of Quinn is left, and how much is the KGB's handiwork.

But Cowley won't run from it. He slips his own protective custody and goes looking for Quinn, and what he wants is a deal with the man. It's a bold choice for a show whose boss usually stays behind the desk, and Gordon Jackson carries it well.

Tony Barwick and Brian Clemens wrote it, Horace Ové directed. Del Henney's Quinn is properly frightening, a man remade by torture into something the system can't account for. Steven Berkoff, the most theatrical menace in British film, plays Krasnov. Bernard Archard's Granger, Peter Howell's Howard, Linal Haft's Jack Canon, Johnny Shannon's Harris and Christopher Ettridge's second interrogator fill out the supporting ranks. Ové directs with a cold, patient eye, which suits the material down to the ground.

It's a bleak little story about what the job does to the men who do it, and the show doesn't flinch. Quinn is the ghost at the feast, the reminder of what Cowley's world does to people it can't use anymore.