Mission: Impossible definitely ranks among the top spy shows of all time. It’s also one of the shows that established a formula early on and found numerous creative ways to move and operate within that structure, all across 171 episodes.
We’re trucking through the first season now, my friends. The train is moving and we have to hop on or it’s going to abandon us in the yard.
1.) You Have Awakened Me but the Nightmare Still Exists
“Elena” originally broadcast on December 10, 1966. Directed by Marc Daniels and written by Ellis Marcus, the episode finds the IMF investigating the sudden erratic behavior of one of their Latin American agents. What makes this mission impossible is that unless they can figure out what’s wrong with the agent, and fix her in time, the agent is going to be unceremoniously assassinated.
Even more than the casino episode, even more than the episode that riffed on On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, this mission feels the most indebted to James Bond thus far. Perhaps it’s because Rollin Hand is the only IMF agent send into the field; Cinnamon Carter, Barney, and Willy don’t appear onscreen at all, while Briggs bows out after the mission debriefing. (This psychiatrist guy does tag along, for plot purposes, but he disappears by the end of the second act.) Perhaps it’s because this is more of a mystery than a caper, a borderline psychological thriller. Perhaps it’s because Rollin Hand ends up doing whatever he can to make out with the titular Elena. Or perhaps it’s because “Elena” flirts with hypnotism, mental illness, and psychological disorders with an understanding straight out of the pulps.
Like the haunted house episode, “Elena” is a Mission trying to define itself. Ellis Marcus and Marc Daniels don’t broach other genres this time around, but pull back, slim down, try to see what they can get away with — or rather how little they can get away with. (Marcus also wrote “A Spool There Was,” a mission which only had Cinnamon Carter and Rollin Hand take part.) And while “Elena” is a fun episode, it doesn’t feel like Mission: Impossible. It’s missing the teamwork, the meticulous methodical plans, the haywire caper that could go wrong at any moment.
By and large, it’s also missing any gravitas in the production. Scenes play out with characters sitting still and talking to each other in tight close ups. They rarely move around the sets, rarely feel like they exist within the space. The camera stays level and centered. It’s only when Elena’s crazy sets in that Daniels turns subjective, gives us flashes of Lake Titicaca, flocks of condors, and the Incan god Viracocha. He goes Vertigo and that’s when “Elena” is at its most engaging.
If anything, “Elena” proves that not all spy stories are the same, and something that might work for one type of intelligence story, flounders and flattens when it’s put in another.
2.) Always a Role to Play
“The Short Tail Spy” originally broadcast on December 17, 1966. Directed by Leonard J. Horn and written by Julian Barry, the episode finds the IMF attempting to sabotage an assassination. What makes this mission impossible is that there are two foreign espionage agencies competing for the job, one controlled by the usual, understood enemy, while the other is lead by a new breed of secret agent. In addition to thwarting the assassination plot, the IMF must also discredit this new, unpredictable branch of foreign intelligence.
A short tail spy, we’re told, is an agent without any ties. No family. No real friends. No place to settle down. If the previous episode felt like a Bond adventure, this one essentially casts James Bond as its central antagonist. Andrei Fetyukov is a new breed of agent, suave, handsome, sophisticated, unpredictable, and cold. He’s at odds with Colonel Shtemenko, a representative of the old guard, military-trained, who saw dignity and honor in their intelligence work. Both have been sent to kill this scientist who defected to the United States, and both are present at a symposium the scientist is speaking at to put in a bid for the job.
Continued belowFetyukov is too smart, too clever for the usual tricks and schemes. Briggs concludes that the only way they’re going to pull this mission off is by using his own confidence and ego against him. Cinnamon Carter is tasked with starting a relationship with Andrei, the cheese to Briggs’s trap. “The only plan I’m sure I can handle is the one I provide him,” Dan says.
What “The Short Tail Spy” wants to do is make us question our confidence in Cinnamon Carter. Julian Barry and Leonard J. Horn steer the episode so we believe Cinnamon Carter’s actually fallen for the handsome assassin. Many of their excursions feel like they’ve been cut from Audrey Hepburn movies. At one point, Briggs pulls her to the side, fearful that she’s gone too deep into the role and lost sight of the mission.
This makes for an interesting companion with the previous episode, “Elena.” At the end of that, Elena tells Rollin Hand that the problem with intelligence work is that you can’t keep any friends you make. These agents are people who, by their very nature, have to live lonely lives, full of secrets and deceit, most of it known only to their teammates. Real relationships, genuine feelings, don’t develop frequently and sometimes that desperation often overwhelms the performance.
At no point, however, did anyone question Rollin Hand’s integrity. His episode didn’t even give him room for doubt on his loyalties.
Like Fetyukov, Dan Briggs underestimates Cinnamon Carter. He can’t see through the charade he set up for her. Only Barney believes in her integrity, trusts her implicitly.
Near the end, Cinnamon’s forlorn and clearly upset. I think the original intent was to imply she had developed feelings for her target, that there was a certain need he fulfilled she hadn’t been able to find elsewhere. Despite, you know, that closeness between her and Rollin Hand. But I think it was more because Briggs cast doubt on her. Look at the satisfaction and confidence she has when Fetyukov realizes she’s duped him. Barbara Bain plays her like she knows she’s thinking three steps ahead. She’s prepared to deal with Fetyukov’s inherent misogyny, but when it comes from Dan, it stings harder, it’s more insidious. And that’s where the episode ends.
3.) The Treasure in the Brown Account
“The Legacy” originally broadcast on January 7, 1967. Directed by Michael O’Herlihy and written by William Read Woodfield and Allan Balter (who were really churning these out), the episode finds the IMF tracking down Adolf Hitler’s lost fortune. What makes this mission impossible is that the IMF must find this treasure before a group of neo-Nazis, descendants of former top Nazi officials, who want to use the money to launch the Fourth Reich.
Here is an episode steeped in the pulps. Instead of nebulous villains and muddied motivations, instead of secrets and double-crosses and layers upon layers of identities, the IMF are pitted against an out-and-out genuine and objective evil: the fucking Nazis. And “The Legacy” is full of all sorts of Sunday afternoon serial tropes: hidden gold, secret codes, scraps of maps, and shrouded messages. It serves as a callback to a more understandable type of villain. There’s even a gunfight at the end, which was odd because I think it’s the first shootout we’ve seen on the show and it was maybe the only time an element from the adventure/treasure hunt genre didn’t gel with Mission.
What Mission: Impossible realizes here is that with all the ever-shifting definitions of the enemy or whatever, we sometimes need to see the worst of the worst get what’s coming to them. Because Nazis are evil and awful, the bottom-feeders of humanity. And it’s easy to cheer for the IMF taking them down.
For the first time in a long while, we get to see the entire team back together. It felt like another season had aired since we last saw Peter Lupus. Not only are they back together, but they’re given the opportunity to work as a team again, all of them playing a part to keep the numerous pieces moving and in place. They infiltrate the Nazi group. They stage an elaborate party — “Cinnamon, you’ve suddenly become royalty,” Briggs says, as if there was ever any doubt — to trick a bank manager into giving up an account number. They kidnap and impersonate and pickpocket and misdirect. “The Legacy” is filled with a series of smaller capers that come together to execute the ultimate job.
Continued belowAnd, up until that gunfight at the end, O’Herlihy pulls it off with a riveting flourish. He’s Rollin Hand behind the scenes, layering story elements and genre conventions on top of each other, and delivering them in a way that fills bigger and more cinematic than TV. It might be because this episode was the first one that aired after a winter hiatus, and CBS wanted people to remember what made this show such a classic. To be fair, the gunfight isn’t staged badly, though yes, it’s a ’60s-style shootout where the characters duck behind something and shoot their revolvers until empty. It’s more that it’s such an unimaginative and boorish way to conclude an episode. Mission: Impossible, like all great capers, thrives on its cleverness, its tricks and turns, its playfulness.
That being said, we do get to see multiple Nazis get punched in the face, which is always a good thing.
4.) Gone Home
“The Reluctant Dragon” originally broadcast on January 14, 1967. Directed by Leonard J. Horn and written by Chester Krumholz, the episode finds the IMF trying to help a rocket scientist defect to the west. What makes this mission impossible is that since his wife died, the scientist has been under close scrutiny. Authorities are so convinced he’s about to escape they have the usual secret channels well guarded. Also, the scientist is not too interested in defecting in the first place.
The IMF follow their usual MO here, with Rollin Hand going undercover and Barney running everything from behind the scenes. It’s kind of funny Martin Landau pretended to be a Nazi and a Communist in the same calendar month. After last week, where the whole team was together, this episode feels like a major quality drop, especially without Cinnamon Carter or Willy Armitage. Everything is smaller and more contained, too. Characters run between sets, some of which we’ve seen before in previous episodes. “The Reluctant Dragon” doesn’t do much with these limitations. It’s an episode that struggles to generate adrenaline, even with a fist fight at a sports stadium. (Admittedly, this is a visually invigorating set piece. Cinematographer Gert Anderson finds some great images contrasting the brawl against the rigid, rectilinear bench lines.)
It’s also one of the most nakedly propagandistic, anti-Communist Missions I’ve seen in a hot minute. Because the rocket scientist doesn’t see a reason to defect — he consistently refers to himself as a “loyal citizen,” even with the authorities demeaning him any chance they get and following him everywhere because they’re certain he’s going to defect like his wife — and only wants his government to let him finish his work, a weapons guidance system of some sort the Americans would prefer to possess. “If everyone runs, who will make things better?” he asks. Therefore, the IMF have to convince him to want to leave before they help him cross the border.
This comes in the way of locking him up with some other political prisoners. Only then, watching these great minds now confined to a cell, pushing brooms around, does he change his mind. It’s a scene meant to remind the audience why Cold War Communism was such a threat, though I’s so ham-fisted and broad I almost expected Dan Briggs was about to step out from behind the curtain. Now, keep in mind it’s not the scientist’s wife who motivates him to escape, but this idea of his work.
The other propagantastic moment that sticks with me comes between Rollin and this girl he’s flirting with. There’s some business about needing special passport papers, like magnetic sheets of paper, and when Rollin tries to flinch them off some dudes, he finds someone already beat him to it. He quickly figures out it’s the girl he’s been macking on and when he confronts her about it, in desperation, she says, “Things are so bad at home.” It’s a throwaway line, meant to be quickly forgotten, a silent nudge of how badly off people in Communist countries were and how content Western audiences should be, comfortable at home on a Saturday night.
For all the anti-Communist rhetoric throughout “The Reluctant Dragon,” I think it’s also interesting that the only reason the IMF are staging this operation is because the United States wants the plans for the weapons guidance system. The government doesn’t give two shits about the people behind it, and are quick to use the scientist’s wife to try to help lure him away. These targets aren’t being saved from a corrupt or tyrannical government, they’re only being plucked because of the information they possess. A fall out of the IMF’s good intentions, I guess.
Continued below5.) And Error
“The Trial” originally broadcast on January 28. 1967. Directed by Lewis Allen and written by Laurence Hearth, the episode finds the IMF sabotaging an attempt by the chief of the secret police to condemn America and seize power. What makes this mission impossible is that the target is trying to simultaneously turn the Cold War hot and wants to use an innocent American to do so.
Basically, “The Trial” is 50 minutes of the IMF fucking with their target. The story here wasn’t really enough to sustain the running time, so Lewis Allen and Laurence Heath manufacture these obstacles that we know the IMF have already predicted and planned to overcome. The tension here doesn’t come from whether or not they can pull this mission off (like in the previous episode, “The Frame”), but how all the pieces they’ve provided are going to fit into place.
It’s more comical than anything, like the Mission: Impossible version of a Roadrunner cartoon. As an audience, we know the secret police chief, played by Carroll O’Conner, plays directly into their hands at every turn, so we’re left waiting for the moment he goes plunging off the cliff. I don’t understand how he didn’t notice the evidence against the Americans was too convenient, too neat. It’s equally cartoonish he never pauses and considers how the whole situation is perfectly set for him.
What “The Trial” does have going for it, though, are the mask gags. Masks are ubiquitous with the Mission franchise and a good mask pull can be more satisfying than the story’s final revelations. There are two big moments this evening. The first involves Rollin Hand playing Briggs, making the secret police think he’s at the scene of their stakeout. Rollin-as-Briggs gets to jump out the window onto a truck, which is always a fun stunt. The second is during the finale, when the seasoned government official pretends to be Rollin Hand because the secret police keep attempting to assassinate him. Gasps all around when he pulls off his face. We can see the gag coming the moment Martin Landau enters the courtroom with a gait and a hunch he never possessed before, but it nevertheless is a great beat.
One thing I’ve started to notice: how often the IMF are sent to dispose of a new, frequently younger organization vying for power. We’ve talked a great deal about American interference in foreign affairs and I think it’s also worth noting how much effort the United States puts into keeping the powers they’re familiar with in charge. The foreign powers they know how to deal with. The country has always wanted to maintain the status quo, whether it’s from social norms or foreign affairs.
Mission: accomplished.
