Title: Sabotage
Air date: January 16, 1938
Plot summary: The United States Navy is plagued by a series of explosions and ship sinking attributed to sabotage. The sabotage is traced to a shipyard at Sag Island but the authorities can make no further progress on figuring out just who is sabotaging naval vessels.
That makes it a job for The Shadow, who can use his powers of clairvoyance to probe the minds of the 3,000 workers at the shipyard. He finds the guilty party, a ship inspector named Steve Buckler. It turns out that Buckler is in the pay of one "Dr. Arnheim", who has been giving him bombs to hide in U.S. Navy vessels. Steve rejects a warning from The Shadow and accepts One Last Job from Dr. Arnheim, a pipe bomb to be planted in the turbines of a ship. The Shadow, naturally, retrieves the pipe bomb, then follows Bucker to his rendezvous with Dr. Arnheim at Arnheim's headquarters—in a lunatic asylum.
Tropes:
- Artistic License – Law: Muliple references to the Secret Service investigating the sabotage at the shipyard. The Secret Service investigates counterfeiting and protects the President and that's it. Terrorism and sabotage of this nature would be investigated by either the FBI or NCIS.
- Extra! Extra! Read All About It!: A newspaper vendor flogs a paper about the wave of sabotage incidents at Sag Island.
- For the Evulz: Since the episode does not name what country Dr. Arnheim works for or explain why he's planting bombs on U.S. Navy ships, Arnheim's sabotage campaign seems to be motivated by this.
- Getting Crap Past the Radar: American public opinion was pretty anti-Nazi in 1938 but entertainment media was reluctant to directly criticize Hitler's Germany, due to a general sense of isolationism. So that's why this episode has a villain with the obviously Germanic name of "Arnheim", but does not say what country Arnheim is working for or why he's sabotaging U.S. Navy vessels.
- He Knows Too Much: The Shadow warns Steve Buckler that he'll never collect that $50K that Dr. Arnheim is supposedly going to pay him. Sure enough, Dr. Arnheim has his other flunky Rigo kill Buckler after Buckler says he's quitting and demands his money.
- Knockout Gas: A variation. Dr. Arnheim releases a knockout gas into the room with him and The Shadow, not specifically to knock The Shadow out, but to weaken him so that The Shadow will lose his power of invisibility and Dr. Arnheim will be able to shoot him. It turns out not to matter as The Shadow had Margo Lane call the cops, who arrive as Arnheim's office is filling with gas.
- Spy Fiction: The Shadow takes down a sabotage ring that is planting bombs on American naval vessels.
- Vigilante Man: Sometimes The Shadow committed Murder by Inaction or tricked bad guys into killing each other, but in this episode he straight-up kills them. The Shadow takes Buckler's nitroglycerin pipe bomb that he retrieved from the naval vessel, and plants it in Dr. Arnheim's getaway speedboat. The speedboat blows up, killing Arnheim and his sidekick Rigo.
