Good morning, Mr. Smith. The man you are looking at is Bruce Geller. Geller was the creator of the Mission: Impossible TV series that eventually spawned an eight-movie franchise. He doesn't have any plans as, unfortunately, he died in a plane crash in 1978.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to review an episode from the second season of the original television show. As always, should you or any of your blogging force be caught or killed, Hayley Atwell will disavow any knowledge of your actions.
Please destroy this message in the usual manner. Good luck, Stephen.
The original Mission: Impossible is available on Amazon Video, which is rather like a video store in a way with an eclectic collision of movies and shows from as far back as the 1930s. There's the good, the bad and the just-plain-odd; some free with a Prime membership, some available for a relatively small fee.
The show, produced originally by Desilu until its acquisition by Paramount, ran on CBS from 1966 to 1973 and revolved around the Impossible Missions Force, an American covert operations unit that was tasked each week with a dangerous mission to bring down a hostile force planning to do something against the interests of the free world. Those forces could be a leader trying to rig an election, a secret police chief trying to bring down his leader, or a criminal syndicate that's fixing horse races. Sometimes these missions would take place in the USA, other times in (mostly fictional) foreign countries.
The IMF, not to be confused with the International Monetary Fund, would use gadgetry, disguises and general psychological manipulation to ensure the baddies were dealt with - frequently permanently. Shooting the villains was not the done thing - oh, no. No, the trick was to get the villain shot by another villain, often by framing the former as a traitor or genuinely exposing him as such. The team are highly competent at their jobs and have little personal life seen outside their work.
There's a formula to all this that was fairly rigidly followed:
- The title sequence showing flash frames of the action coming up in the episode - something copied in the film series.
- The tape scene: Jim Phelps (from Season 2 onwards) listens to a tape in an isolated location, the tape then self-destructing or having to be thrown in a fire, acid bath etc.
- The dossier scene: Jim picks his personnel via selecting a series of large photographs of them from a black folder. The cast largely stays the same between episodes, although occasionally an outsider would be brought in.
- The briefing scene: The personnel discuss some of the aspects of the mission and show off a gadget that they're going to use, generally while some of them smoke cigarettes.
- Then onto the mission itself. Gadgets, safecracking under tension, holding your cover when things go sideways... and more smoking of cigarettes. There is a lot of smoking in this show, including while assembling the gadgets.
- The mission concluding and the team driving off just as things go distinctly south for their target.
In "The Astrologer", first broadcast 3 December 1967, the IMF are tasked with rescuing a revolutionary from the Eastern European country of Vesca before he can be returned there by secret police chief Stahl and also retrieving a piece of microfilm containing the names of people who supporting him.
(For the Gen Z readers here, a microfilm is basically like taking a photograph of a document with a camera phone, but with an actual film camera, then using the film itself as the storage medium. You can conceal the film in lots of places, but make sure you don't put the trousers in the wash with the film still in it.)
To do this, they make their way to Orly Airport in Paris, where Cinnamon Carter (Barbara Bain) pretends to be a famous French astrologer, getting close to the Deputy Chancellor of Vesca, who "predicts" the death of the Chancellor... which then they then save... by having an IMF agent pretend to be the Chancellor.
The agent in question is Rollin Hand (Martin Landau, then married to Bain[1]) a master of disguise. We've not yet gotten to the magical face masks associated with the film franchise.... disguise here involves time-consuming facial prosthetics to make Rollin look like the man he's impersonating. But not here... Landau just operates on the end of a telephone, with effects literally added with a tape player by Barney Collier (Greg Morris). Barney is a black tech millionaire and from this white man's possibly incorrect POV, an even better case of representation than Uhura from Star Trek, literally made on the same studio lot. However, he does end up frequently stuck in the van because in most countries, a black man would stick out; if he has to do an in-field role, it usually involves a questionable accent, of which there are a few.
Fans of Leverage can see him as a 1960s Hardison... and the whole thing can come across as an analogue version of the show. We've got computers with lights indicating status instead of VDUs, a surprisingly lax attitude to airport security, a full-sized telephone literally carried to a table in a VIP lounge, ashtrays on planes with the "no smoking" light being off when in the air[2] and astrology via use of a reference almanac accompanied with a "manual computer" i.e. two bits of card/plastic attached by a pin[3].
You also got a lot of "assembling" sequences, where someone drills holes, solders etc. accompanied by the late Lalo Schriffin's distinctive score, one of the most memorable bits of the whole franchise. This can get rather tedious.
The action then takes us to a Vescian government plane, which looks like a Lockheed DC-4, but feel free to correct me on that. This basically involves Carter distracting the two officials with horoscopes so Rollin and Barney, snuck on via a steamer trunk, can swap the revolutionary for a dummy (who is then removed from the equation in a clever way) and the microfilm for a substitute containing the names of the Deputy Chancellor and some other officials who are actually loyal to the junta. The implication is that Stahl will end up getting himself killed when he tries to arrest all these people, but we don't see it, unlike in other episodes. The whole thing is fairly pedestrian in a way; and we don't even see any bumpiness during take-off or landing, when Rollin and Barney are free to move around.
Then the episode ends with Jim Phelps and team muscle Willie Armitage (Peter Lupus, a genuinely big chap who was also a bodybuilder) picking up Carter in the guise of two military officers[4], with the revolutionary rescued and the real microfilm safely destroyed.
Then the credits roll. Mission completed, although they still need to leave the country, something occurring off-screen. It's actually a fairly easy one too; none of the team is in any serious peril during this.
Conclusion
Like the team itself, this is competent, but unspectacular.
7/10
[1]Juliet Landau was a product of this union; best known for playing Drusilla in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
[2]We should also mention "Gellerese", the Eastern-European style language designed to be understandable to an audience who can't read Cyrillic or most Slavic languages. One example here being "Belten Atachin", which should be self-explanatory.
[3]I have an astronomical example from the 1990s used for working out what stars are visible in the sky and versions are still used in aviation as a backup.
[4]Soviet-style uniforms feature a lot in this show.
