Mission: Impossible isn’t an easy series to binge. Less a TV series than a collection of mini-movies, the show is about the moments and the payoffs rather than the character development or overarching stories. It makes for a great hour of TV, though taking too many in a row can reveal the form and beats Bruce Geller likes to hit. It’s a show not only designed to be viewed weekly but I don’t think the producers imagined it ever being anything different.
That being said, there are 28 episodes in Mission’s first season, and if we’re going to get through them, we’re going to have to start sweeping.
1.) So It’s Blackmail, Then
“The Ransom” originally broadcast on November 5, 1966. Directed by Harry Harries and written by William Read Woodfield and Allan Balter, the episode finds the IMF attempting to break a man out of house arrest. What makes this mission impossible is that the man is a key witness about to face the Grand Jury, and it’s not the IMF who’ve sent Briggs out, but the gangster the witness is testifying against. The gangster has kidnapped one of Briggs’s friend’s daughters and plans to kill her coldly if Briggs does not comply.
There were a few things I appreciated about this episode. In the recent string of stories, Briggs has started to have a far more active and prominent role. The writers don’t just have him watching and plotting, but actively running around and playing his own part. We also get to see him go darker for this episode: wielding a pistol and threatening other people in his drive to complete the mission. Like Tom Cruise in the film series, he’s willing to do whatever it takes to win. I also appreciated how the plan doesn’t go as plotted, which compromises the IMF and forces them to think on their feet, always the best part of the show. And the filmmaking in “The Ransom” is top-notch, from how Gert Andersen shoots the nighttime exteriors, a bunch of floating lights hovering against the black city backdrop, to Paul Krasny’s sharp cuts, especially leading between scenes.
“The Ransom” flirts with the IMF working for the bad guys. Yes, it’s through coercion and blackmail, but for once, the team is definitely not on the “good” side. Don’t forget, the whole reason Geller made them secret agents was because he wanted to pull Topkapi-level capers and have the story’s heroes actually get away with it. Censorship laws in the ’60s would never let the criminals escape, and in those old heist movies, there’s always a long denouement where justice and fate catch up to them.
One thing that lingered with me, though, was how the gangster knew Briggs was the only person who could pull off this mission. And if he knew that, how did he not know Briggs would come up with a way to save the kidnapped girl and still put him in front of the Grand Jury? But also, how secret is the IMF anyway? Weren’t they a shadow organization? How did the gangster know to exploit Briggs? Is he exploiting something about Briggs we don’t know, some hidden past? I guess with all that knowledge, it’s a good thing that gangster is on his way to prison.
2.) A Romantic Getaway
“A Spool There Was” originally broadcast November 12, 1966. Directed by Bernard L. Kowalski and written by Ellis Marcus, the episode finds the IMF attempting to recover a recording about a chemical war project left by a different IMF agent killed in the field. What makes this mission impossible is that no one knows where the courier dropped the tape before he was gunned down, and all the secret police and other top officials of this rogue nation desperately are racing to get to it first.
Cinnamon Carter and Rollin Hand are the only two team members dispatched for this mission. The idea was them to not bring attention to themselves, yet the secret police and desperate officials are so paranoid and neurotic they notice everything.
“A Spool There Was” is much more action heavy than previous Mission episodes. There’s a foot chase, a long fist fight, and a shootout. Kowalski and editor Robert Watts draw out some incredibly tense moments. Although there is this scene that takes place at night that’s filmed so darkly I couldn’t make out a single thing that was happening. Nevertheless, cinematographer Charles Straumer does pull of some neat photographic tricks that are far more ambitious than most other series of the time. Maybe more ambitious than most series of today.
Continued belowThis episode is probably most memorable for having only Rollin Hand and Cinnamon Carter complete the mission. To get extra-textual, Martin Landau and Barbara Bain were married at the time and their chemistry, their concern for each other, seeps to the screen, gives the episode something close to heart. We were never supposed to know more about the individual IMF agents, but these traits and personality quirks come through on occasion, and it makes the show all the more special.
3.) The Plague Doctors
“The Carriers” originally broadcast November 19, 1966. Directed by Sherman Marks and written by William Read Woodfield and Allan Balter, the episode finds the IMF attempting to infiltrate a spy ring to figure out their plot against America. What makes this mission impossible is that this operation is a radical experiment from a foreign government, and therefore under strict surveillance. Many people have gone in, including another IMF agent, but no one has come out.
Here’s an episode seeped in Cold War paranoia. The IMF’s enemy, we learn, are attempting to launch a biological terrorist attack on the United States, using sleeper agents passing as Americans to deliver the virus through heavily populated areas. So much of “The Carriers” features segments where the vaguely Eastern European government trains their residents to act like Americans with the most broad Americanisms imaginable. From tossing a football in the streets to strip clubs to trying to understand baseball. Matin Landau, especially, has a lot of fun pretending to be a foreign operative pretending to be American.
The episode guest stars George Takei, a welcome sight, because Takei could get it then, as a scientist specializing in pathogens and biotoxins. There’s a moment where he talks about what it would be like if a virus spread throughout the United States, how quickly it would cover the country and infect everybody, and it’s another moment where the show is accidentally topical.
“The Carriers” does get carried away with the whole they could be walking amongst us fear mongering. It’s an episode that preys upon some shrouded Cold War unease and therefore, more than any other episode yet, actively feels propagandistic. Sherman Marks also doesn’t make the fake American town weird enough or odd enough to sell the effect. It never comes to life, never hits that level of neurotic dread it wants, and never generates that tension or drama. It’s such a product of its time, it’s out of time.
What I did appreciate about this episode was that the IMF used old school tactics to pull it off. Simple stuff like switching the numbers on street doors (a trick, by the way, used in Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol, the best of the Mission films) or using a basic bait-and-switch to get someone to hand over a key. For as complicated as these plots can get, the least complicated methods often make them successful.
One more thing: by my reckoning, this is the first time we hear that the message will self-destruct in five seconds. Spoiler alert, it doesn’t carry through throughout the next couple episodes, but the groundwork’s been laid. The traits and conventions and catchphrases we associate with the show are slowly coming into being.
4.) In Other Worlds
“Zubrovnik’s Ghost” originally broadcast November 26, 1966. Directed by Leonard J. Horn and written by Richard Lewin, the episode finds the IMF trying to stop a recently widowed scientist from defecting behind the Iron Curtain. What makes this mission impossible is that the person telling her to defect is the ghost of her dead husband.
It’s only Barney and Rollin of the usual team for this one. They’re accompanied by a new character, a psychic named Ariana, whose costume makes her look like Kermit the Frog. The absence of Cinnamon Carter is most definitely felt. Anyway, they find Dr. Martha Richard Zubrovnik, a scientist who used to send reports back to the United States, in mourning after her husband burned to death in a lab accident a year previously. They also find, she is being guided by a crock medium named Poljac, who, through his séances, is trying to get her to finish her work on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
Continued below“Zubrovnik’s Ghost” is an odd episode, an attempt at supernatural horror. “I’m always serious about the supernatural,” Ariana says, though Rollin and Barney aren’t buying it. Leonard Horn stages these great Gothic sequences, complete with constant lightning-storm flashes and thunderous booms. There’s secret rooms and possessed animals. It does that thing where it flirts with the legitimacy of the unknown, but also believes that the real magic is science. Like how Barney jerry-rigs a makeshift magnet so they can escape from a locked room. I will say the best moment of the night comes when Barney plugs a projector into the wall so they can fake an appearance of Dr. Martha’s dead husband. And then doesn’t bother to cover the outlet.
Apart from Barney’s science whiz, not much works in this episode. While it’s admirable the producers were trying to figure out what they could do with Mission: Impossible, they took it too far in a direction that’s not at all Mission. If anything, “Zubrovnik’s Ghost” feels like a crossover with another show, one where the IMF agents are making a special appearance.
But to be honest, without Cinnamon Carter, this episode was already at a significant disadvantage.
5.) Drug Runners
“Fakeout” originally broadcast December 3, 1966. Directed by Bernard L. Kowalski and written by Leigh Chapman, the episode finds the IMF trying to lure a drug kingpin into a country with an extradition treaty so the authorities can arrest him. What makes this mission impossible is that the IMF cannot simply kidnap this drug lord, because it would be “too embarrassing politically,” so they must trick him into crossing the border of his own volition.
The whole setup for this mission doesn’t make a lot of sense. Maybe the idea of being “embarrassed politically” is this outdated notion, eroded away by the GOP and Trump administration. It could be that by grabbing this drug lord, the United States is violating a sanctuary, an exile? Because, I mean, I don’t know when that has ever stopped the US before, so OK.
Once again, only part of the team has come along: Barney, who might one day feature in an episode worthy of him, Briggs, and Cinnamon Carter, whose mere presence already elevates “Fakeout” over the previous episode.
Up till this point, Mission’s targets tended to be Eastern European Communists or corrupt governments or some random terrorist. I got this feeling the producers weren’t confident the average viewing public would immediately latch on to the drug lord, Anastas Poltroni’s, villainy. In 1966, while recreational drug use was on the rise, and the United States claimed that narcotics had a direct correlation to a rise in violent crimes, we were still a few years from Richard Nixon’s War on Drugs. So, the writers approach Poltroni with a moral perspective. Chapman and Kowalski spend a lot of time showing us how much of an asshole this guy is. He’s introduced yelling at a hotel employee for allegedly scratching his car. He snatches a book right out of Cinnamon Carter’s hand as she walks by. He believes “males and females are enemies.” He steals from the hotel staff just because he can. He’s a basic white guy. And there’s a level of satisfaction we get at seeing him captured.
I’m always happy to see Kowalski’s name at the top of these. I think he pushes the boundaries of TV staging, isn’t afraid to move the camera or lift it off the tripod. He has people move around the sets, has a strong sense of momentum from scene to scene. Even in a below average/not bad episode like “Fallout” (or “A Spool There Was”), he captures you in the moment. And Mission, above all, is about those moments. It’s a shame that “Fakeout” was the last episode he directed of the entire series.
Mission: accomplished.
