Christopher L. Bennett's Blog, page 66

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 1989 Season Overview

While the first season of the Mission: Impossible revival felt surprisingly like a typical season of the original series — mostly following the classic formula with only a little more flexibility or innovation than the original generally had — the second season experimented and departed more. In the first half or so of the season, this worked pretty well, giving us a run of mostly solid episodes with a good amount of legitimate suspense and personal stakes for the team members. In some ways I was reminded of my favorite season, year 5 of the original, in terms of the frequency with which Jim’s plans hit snags and dangers and the team was forced to improvise.

But then, in the latter portion of the season, things began to fall apart. In four of the last five episodes, the intricate advance stratagems that had always been the trademark of M:I vanished, and the team’s strategies were mainly reduced to going into an unclear situation, trying to find stuff out, getting in trouble that they weren’t prepared for, and having to improvise solutions. (This also happened in “Target Earth” in the first half of the season.) Maybe this was at network request to create more of a sense of suspense and danger — something that, admittedly, the original series generally lacked when the team’s plans usually played out like clockwork — but it was a fundamental change in the premise and character of the series. As I’ve remarked multiple times, Mission: Impossible wasn’t really a spy series at heart; it was a caper series in the spirit of Topkapi or The Sting, or the more recent Leverage. The spy stuff was just an excuse to make the heroes’ con games and elaborate thefts and other crimes seem patriotic and heroic. What defined M:I was the intricacy of the team’s stratagems and cons; it was a show about people who triumphed with their wits and their skill rather than their fists or their guns. But this season increasingly departed from that approach in favor of a more conventional action formula where the heroes were reactive and unprepared, making things up one step at a time rather than plotting out a whole game in advance. It made the show feel simpler, less intelligent. The writers didn’t have to work as hard to come up with intricate strategies while concealing their specifics from the audience. It seemed that the writers got lazier, and that made it feel like Jim Phelps was losing his touch. Although that didn’t explain the rest of the team losing their basic competence in episodes like “The Assassin” where they broke cover right under the watching villain’s nose. And it wasn’t just the plotting that got lazier. A lot of the episodes in the back half of the season are extremely dumb and poorly thought out, often inconsistently plotted, and tending toward lazy stereotypes of other cultures just as badly as the previous season, and perhaps even worse.

As a result, the season feels split in two. The first half is stronger overall than the previous season, with only one episode I’d rate below average (“Command Performance”). But of the final eight episodes, only one was excellent, three were decent, and the other four were weak to horrible. So while I’d call the first half of the 1989 season one of the strongest runs in the franchise, the second half was, overall, the weakest in the television franchise’s history. It’s an unfortunate way for the series to go out, especially after such a promising start.

Despite the writers’ strike being long over, this season has two stories that seem loosely inspired by original episodes, borrowing their setups if not their details: “Command Performance” has a similar premise to the 1966 season’s “Old Man Out,” while “The Assassin” has nearly the same setup as season 6′s “Mindbend.” There are no actual remakes this year, though.

The strongest episodes this year were “Countdown” and “The Fuehrer’s Children,” both of which created a strong sense of danger and had effective stories. These were followed closely by “For Art’s Sake” and “The Princess,” both solid capers, if imperfect ones. “The Gunslinger” is almost as effective, if a bit sillier in premise. “The Golden Serpent” and “Target Earth” were pretty entertaining, albeit more as action thrillers than standard M:I capers; “The Golden Serpent” in particular feels like an over-the-top ’80s action movie that occasionally pays lip service to being M:I, and is enjoyable largely for its extravagance, which is unmatched by the rest of the season. In a lot of ways, it feels like a test run for the feature films (particularly since the second film was also shot in and around Sydney and made extensive use of its scenery). “War Games,” “Deadly Harvest,” and “Church Bells in Bogota” are reasonably entertaining if unremarkable. “Command Performance” is mediocre and pales in comparison to the original episode it resembles, and “The Sands of Seth” is not exactly awful, but quite fanciful and ridiculous in premise, feeling like the kind of story you’d see in a Saturday morning cartoon version of M:I. “Banshee” and “The Assassin” are badly written and incoherent, and “Cargo Cult” is a disaster, nonsensical and deeply racist, probably the worst episode in the entire franchise.

Cast-wise, Phil Morris continued to be the breakout star, showing great talent, charisma, and versatility. In a more ideal, colorblind Hollywood, I could’ve easily seen Morris taking over the lead role if the series had continued long enough for Graves to retire from it — or even becoming the lead of the movie franchise. Jane Badler was pretty impressive too, charming and sexy and confident, conveying a lot of strength and competence despite the producers’ insistence on putting her through the Perils of Pauline on an ongoing basis. (But then, Pauline in the original 1914 silent serial was a pretty competent action heroine herself, not the helpless damsel we’ve subsequently come to associate with the name.) Peter Graves was his usual stalwart, avuncular self, playing up his kinder side as the emphasis on team bonding increased, and took the occasional opportunity to show off his skills in horse riding, quick drawing, and the like. Tony Hamilton didn’t seem to have as much to do this season, but continued to be effective when he did. And Thaao Penghlis was consistently adequate, managing to do a few more accents this season than last, though American still eluded him. Still, he remains perhaps the least versatile “master of disguise” I’ve ever seen.

The season expands on some of the characteristic elements of the previous season. There’s a lot more of the team out of character, discussing plans and problems — often with the usual roleplay/scam elements diminished to near nothing. We see more of the team’s friendships and affinities, particularly all the men’s warm feelings for Shannon — which gets a little tired when the episodes constantly put Shannon in danger to create anxiety among her teammates. We also continue to get a number of episodes where the team skips Jim’s apartment and assembles at a “command post” on site — although it’s only five out of the fifteen distinct stories, fewer than I’d thought (“The Golden Serpent,” “Banshee,” “For Art’s Sake,” “The Assassin,” and “The Sands of Seth”). Four of those five are in the latter half of the season, though.

Last season, the focus was somewhat split between espionage and organized-crime missions, but here there’s a far stronger emphasis on international intrigue, terrorism, and politics. The criminal cases all involve greater international-scale threats: the international drug triad in “The Golden Serpent” includes the prince of a foreign nation, the arms dealers in “Banshee” threaten to reawaken a religious war, the art thief in “For Art’s Sake” is working to create an international incident, and the drug lord in “Church Bells in Bogota” threatens to overthrow the Colombian government. So essentially every episode has political stakes, making this perhaps the only M:I season without a purely crime-oriented caper. By contrast, the percentage of episodes featuring supernatural-themed cons is close to what it was in the previous season, though “War Games” only dabbles with playing on the villain’s astrological obsession, and “Cargo Cult” uses supernatural illusions to fool the “primitive villagers” and turn them against their exploiter rather than the usual trope of playing on the villains’ superstitions. “Banshee” is perhaps the crudest example of said trope, with a caricatured villain who goes into a cartoonish panic over any superstition, even one he’s never heard of before. And “The Sands of Seth,” like “Cargo Cult,” features a villain who is himself using supernatural deceptions, so it’s fighting fire with fire.

Beyond the opening 2-parter, which for the first time shows us a second IMF team operating independently of Jim’s, we get no further insights into the IMF as an organization. Indeed, the season is unique in having not a single episode in which the core team was joined from the start by a supplemental agent. The only episodes where anyone assisted the core team were the 2-parter “The Golden Serpent,” where Barney Collier worked with Jim’s team after having previously been assigned to another, unnamed IMF agent’s team, and “Command Performance,” where the rescued priest Father Thomas Vallis (Ivar Kants) assisted in his own rescue. So despite the variations in story structure, in some ways this is the most formulaic season ever: Essentially no variation in team composition, no off-book missions, no briefing discs without the “Secretary will disavow” line.

Location-wise, Europe was the site of five episodes and the teaser of a sixth, with most of the locations this season being fictional: the Monaco-like Valence in “The Princess,” a nameless Baltic state in “Command Performance,” the Eastern European lands of Sardavia and Bucaraine in “War Games,” and the fictional Irish town of Bally-na-Gragh in “Banshee.” The only real European locations were Hamburg (or nearby) in “The Fuehrer’s Children” and Geneva in the teaser of “The Assassin.” America was the focus in “For Art’s Sake” (NYC), “The Assassin” (Boston), and “The Gunfighter” (the fictional Pontiac, NV), though “Fuehrer’s” began in Oregon, “Deadly Harvest” was partly in Kansas, and “Target Earth” featured scenes at NORAD. Australia was the site of two stories, “The Golden Serpent” (Sydney) and “Target Earth” (the Outback), while “Cargo Cult” was on the fictional island of New Belgium in the Southwest Pacific. “Deadly Harvest” and “The Sands of Seth” were in the Mideast, the former in the fictitious terrorist state of Orambaq and the latter in some alternate-reality cartoon version of Cairo, Egypt. Only “Countdown” was set in Asia, in the fictional land of Kangji, and only “Church Bells in Bogota” was in Latin America — do I even need to say where? Oh, and “Target Earth” was the first and only M:I episode to take place partly in Earth orbit.

Musically, there is very little to say. Every episode was credited to John E. Davis, though IMDb lists Neil Argo as an uncredited additional composer throughout the season. The music was generally unremarkable and often cliched, nothing to write home (or blog) about. It’s quite a letdown from the original series, where music was so important. I wonder why the producers chose to go with the bland Davis over the more talented and interesting Lalo Schifrin and Ron Jones from the ’88 season. But then, a lot about the new series lacks the stylistic sophistication of the original, in terms of directing and cinematography, and in this season the plotting got a lot less sophisticated toward the end. Its visual effects were far more ambitious than the original’s, but usually quite crude in execution. The revival just didn’t quite have the class of the original. The one thing it consistently did better was location work, featuring lavish and varied locales in contrast to the backlot-bound feel the original generally had. But then, that’s one thing that Australian and New Zealand productions are known for — the lush, spectacular scenery.

In sum, the ninth and final season of Mission: Impossible started off strong and ambitious, improving on its predecessor and coming close to rivalling the best of the original — but toward the end, its weaknesses came to the fore and it became downright sloppy, stumbling its way toward what by that point was an inevitable cancellation. I wonder if the producers saw that cancellation coming well in advance and just stopped trying. If so, it’s a shame. If only they’d kept up the quality of the first half or so of this season and gotten at least one more year at that level, this revival could have been a really impressive addition to the franchise. As it is, I’d say it’s still worth checking out, even just for Phil Morris and Jane Badler, who are two of the best IMF team members we’ve ever had. And it’s still a legitimate continuation of the original — mixed in quality, but then, so was its predecessor. If nothing else, it gave us the continued adventures of Jim Phelps and the IMF as we knew it from the original… a last look at the familiar incarnation of M:I before it moved to the big screen and transformed into something radically different. Even several different somethings. But we’ll get to that.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE (’89) Reviews: “Church Bells in Bogota”/”The Sands of Seth” (spoilers)

And now, the final two:

“Church Bells in Bogota”: The second episode by Frank Abatemarco, who previously did “The Fuehrer’s Children.” After Esteban Magdalena (Henri Szeps), the “Godfather” of the Colombian drug cartel, assassinates a kidnapped federal judge by dropping him from the helicopter that’s supposed to be returning him to his family, Jim gets the mission at an auto racetrack: Bring Magdalena to justice before he overthrows the Colombian government. Jim’s cover is a disgruntled former government contractor with secrets to sell, Max is a mercenary, and Shannon, yet again, goes in as a singer for the nightclub Magdalena owns. A point is made about the ironclad cover story they’ve prepared for Shannon, and about Shannon apparently having a fear of small planes like the one she’ll be taking to Colombia from the Hollywood talent agency where she’ll be recruited.

At said agency, Shannon is hired by Magdalena’s nephew Luis (Tony Xauet), who doesn’t even audition her first, since he’s in a hurry to get back to Colombia, even though there’s a storm brewing. Maybe it’s also supposed to be because he’s attracted to her, but that doesn’t come across in the scene. They subsequently bond over her fear of flying, and of course the plane is struck by lightning and goes down. The plane/storm footage, while obviously miniature work, is a damn sight better than the usual amateurish video effects on this show, so I assume it’s stock footage from some other production. Mercenary Max (coming soon to a toy store near you), who’s training Magdalena’s men in the use of a rocket launcher and having no luck getting past his supervisor Sanchez (Michael Long) to meet Mags himself, hears that Luis and some singer went down in a plane crash and are in the hospital. Jim sneaks in to see her as a doctor, and she doesn’t recognize him as anything else. Gasp — she has… amnesia!

Before long, Luis pressures the real doctor into releasing Shannon into his care, so she’s taken into the Magdalenas’ fortress-like compound. Now the team has two objectives: get Mags and rescue Shannon. But as usual lately, they don’t have any advance plan in place for getting Mags — they’re just trying to track him down. Defense contractor Jim, hoping to get into the compound to find Shannon, instead gets taken to a run-down safehouse where he’s faced with a drug-lord version of To Tell the Truth with a panel of ski-masked men, one of whom is Magdalena — but unlike in the game show, he doesn’t get to pick out the real one. He makes his spiel and convinces Mags to let him install a heat-seeking missile defense system in the compound. Plan B is to get to Mags when he sneaks out to his nightclub, where Shannon surprises Luis by singing “Someone to Watch Over Me.” A watching Grant and Nicholas are surprised when the lights go out and Magdalena appears as if by magic, evidently through some secret passage. There’s no getting him out that way either. And they’re even more surprised to see the whirlwind romance blooming between Luis and the amnesiac Shannon.

Once Jim gets into the compound, he has Max create a diversion for Sanchez (arranging for the expensive launcher to jam) so Jim can slip into Shannon’s room as the doctor she remembers from the hospital. He’s brought along a couple of highly specialized gadgets Grant apparently just had lying around, the first of which is a remote medical sensor developed by NASA for diagnosing astronauts in space (perhaps on Mars missions, since Grant says it could diagnose them from “millions of miles away”). This lets Grant remotely determine that Shannon has classic soap-opera amnesia, with no brain damage, presumably from the psychological trauma of her fear of flying, though that’s a totally lame explanation. The second device is a pair of video goggles, sort of a proto-Oculus Rift, that plays home videos of the team celebrating her birthday in Jim’s apartment (though it’s unclear who shot the video). It only takes about 20 seconds of this for her complete memory to return, an implausibly easy fix, and she feels pretty bummed about falling in love with a drug kingpin’s heir — particularly since he’s already proposed to her! Jim realizes that a wedding would be the perfect way to lure Magdalena out of hiding, but then has second thoughts, concerned for Shannon’s feelings. But she agrees to go through with it because they’re awful people. (Umm, the drug lords, not the IMF team.)

So then Grant and Nicholas carjack a priest and steal his clothes. Better rethink that awful people thing. Okay, it’s not as awful as it sounds, since the priest seems to have a pretty good idea of who they’re after and blesses their endeavor. (In that case, why didn’t they just ask?) It’s implausibly easy for them to get past the compound’s security to get ready, and when Magdalena comes up to Shannon’s room prefatory to giving away the bride, priest Nick arrives and trank-darts him, and for some reason nobody is patrolling that side of the house at all as Grant lowers them all down a rope to the ground. And the gate guards are totally unconcerned when Jim and Grant drive out in a florist’s truck with the others and Mags in the back. Why is this compound so impenetrable again? But Luis has figured out that they’ve taken his girl and his uncle, so he calls out pursuit, but Max finally uses that rocket launcher on Mags’s helicopter, and thus the team is able to get to the airport and steal Mags’s inexplicably unguarded replacement Lear jet. Luis shows up just as they take off and screams for his lost love, and Shannon mopes about betraying the murderous drug lord she knew for two days and who totally took advantage of her at her most vulnerable.

Okay, so it’s an implausible scenario in a lot of ways, and it’s got a number of problems, but it’s not bad overall. I’m still not loving this looser investigate-then-improvise approach that seems to have replaced the intricate capers that used to define M:I as a series, but seeing the team humanized by concern for one of their own isn’t bad in principle, as long as it isn’t handled as ineptly as it was in “The Assassin.” At this point my expectations have been lowered, and this is an adequately entertaining story. Even the music’s a bit more interesting than usual, since John E. Davis uses more Latin sounds (which don’t sound as cliched to me as some of his other attempts at regional music like Irish and cowboy stuff) and more romantic-drama-style music than we usually get. Also Jane Badler performs two songs, “Someone to Watch Over Me” by George and Ira Gershwin and “Tangerine” by Victor Shertzinger and Johnny Mercer. (Apparently Badler pursued a professional singing career after this series ended.)

—

“The Sands of Seth”: The series finale, and the last M:I television episode to date, is written by executive producer Jeffrey M. Hayes. It opens in Cairo with an Egyptian museum director, Horus Selim (Tim Elliott — and IMDb misspells it as “Horace”), warning an Egyptian government official that the old ways will rise again and Egypt must return to its ancient greatness yada yada yada, which the official pooh-poohs. Then a mummy shows up and strangles him. It took this episode less than 90 seconds to evoke the first “Seriously?” from me.

Perhaps fittingly for the series finale, Jim goes to an animatronic dinosaur exhibit and trades code phrases about extinction with the latest and last of the improbably pretty women who keep getting these assignments this season. (She says the dinosaurs lived for over 200 million years, which is off by about 35 million unless you count birds as dinosaurs, which I totally do.) His mission is to find out if Selim is behind the murders of four prominent Egyptian officials whose deaths threaten to destabilize the tenuous Mideast peace process, and if so, to stop him. The team’s command post, seriously, is a tomb that’s just behind the Sphinx but that apparently was only discovered the year before.

Nicholas plays an Egyptian secret police officer who accosts Selim’s second-in-command and mummy-impersonating assassin, who is actually named Karnak (Gerard Kennedy, who was the main villain in “Holograms” in season 1). He offers Karnak a set of envelopes to hold to his forehead and divine the answers to the questions inside… no, sorry, that was Carnac. What he actually does is to hint that the authorities suspect Selim of the murders and offer Karnak a chance to break with him to save himself. But Karnak is loyal. Meanwhile, Shannon arranges to meet Selim at the museum and let him know that her archaeologist father (Jim) has unearthed a find related to Seth, the god of death that Selim worships and is obsessed with. That gets him out to the tomb, where they show him a fake Scroll of Seth and also set up Max as a not-very-gruntled employee of Jim’s. Selim really wants the scroll, but Jim won’t part with it, so when Max offers to bring it to him, he’s interested. At their arranged meeting at an outdoor cafe, a bunch of Selim’s cultists show up dressed in black and abduct Max, who doesn’t go without a fight. Somehow this does not attract the attention of any kind of police. Oh, did I mention that Selim has his own cultists? Yup, they gather in a secret underground tomb with a huge statue of Seth in it, and I don’t mean the guy from Robot Chicken. Basically their pillars of faith are “Kill, kill, chant a lot, and kill.”

So once Max hands over the scroll and lets on that he’s a Sethophile himself, he hears Selim order Karnak to deal with Jim and Shannon, but he can’t warn them because he lost his communicator in the fight. Shannon gets her requisite dose of distress for the week when Mummy Karnak almost strangles her, but it’s a lure to draw out Jim to be knocked out so they can both be trapped in the tomb, which the team has set up with fake Sethaphrenalia for Selim to plunder. Max can only watch helplessly — even though he’s the last guy to leave and could easily have just pulled the door back open a crack to give them some air. So Jim and Shannon are trapped there in this tomb with only a couple of hours of air, and can’t call out because the walls are too thick. Remember: they’re trapped in a room the team spent hours setting up. It didn’t occur to them to install some oxygen canisters, like the one we saw Grant put in the fake sarcophagus earlier? Or, like, an interior door handle?

In that fake sarcophagus is Nicholas as a mummy, who arises and terrifies Karnak, because Shannon mentioned earlier that there’s a curse on the tomb entailing the usual dead-rising stuff. Consider, Gentle Readers: Karnak has committed several murders while dressed as a mummy. Now a guy dressed as a mummy is coming after him, and Karnak accepts it as entirely real. I guess you can kid a kidder. Nick knocks Karnak out, and the henchman wakes up in the desert, where Grant is dressed as a Nubian shaman or whatever and intones that Karnak must renounce Seth and stop Selim’s planned mass murder of Egyptian officials if he wishes to save his soul. This is supported with mystical images holographically projected in a pool, images that are obviously from old movies but that Karnak, again, accepts as entirely real. It’s stupid as hell, but what saves it is Phil Morris’s performance, which lets him show off the superb, mellow voice he’s made such excellent use of in animation roles in the ensuing quarter-century. I’ve never heard him deepen his voice this much, almost into James Earl Jones territory, and it’s thrilling to listen to.

So Karnak tries to turn Selim’s followers, but just gets a garotting for his troubles and is dumped into the sand pit that swallows the cult’s victims. The team slipped a tracker onto Karnak to follow him to the temple, and find it by the expedient of Shannon falling through a buried skylight, whereupon they find themselves inside the head of the Seth statue. By the way, Nicholas has been captured and brought before the cult, but fortunately Selim assigns Max to kill him as his initiation, so they fake Nick’s death together. By an astonishing coincidence, the head of the statue contains a sun reflector, and now that the skylight is open, the morning sun (conveniently at the correct position in the sky) will shine beams through the eyes in just a few minutes, letting Jim time the payoff of the plan. The rigged scroll reveals a “faded” part of the text speaking of a curse, and then self-immolates. Nicholas magically springs back to life, restored by the rays from Seth’s eyes. Grant rigs his communicator to resonate with the stone columns of the buried temple and bring it all crashing down, once the cultists have turned on Selim and dumped him into the sand pit. The team climbs out and watches as the lost temple collapses and millions of archaeologists cry out in protest and are suddenly silenced.

And Peter Graves delivers his final words in the role of Jim Phelps: “Present-day evil has joined ancient evil. Both of them lost in the sands of time.” He deserved better. Although I guess it’s not as bad as what the character of Phelps has coming for him in the movie — but that’s for a later post.

Oh, wow, so many, many things wrong with this episode. First off, the portrayal of Egypt. The extent of Hayes’s research seemed to be watching some old movies. Okay, granted, the age of the pharaohs was pretty much the last time prior to the modern age when Egypt was an independent nation, rather than a portion of someone else’s empire (whether Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Ottoman, or British), so maybe it’s not completely out of the question that a rabid Egyptian nationalist would look back to those times for inspiration, rather than to Egypt’s more recent, 1400-year-long history as an Islamic society. But the three named characters, supposedly living in modern, majority-Arab Egypt, are named Horus, Serapis, and Karnak, after two ancient Egyptian gods and an ancient temple site. Hayes didn’t even bother to give them names that residents of present-day Egypt might actually have. And here’s a fun fact: The population of Egypt is about 90-91 percent Muslim and 9-10 percent Christian, mostly Coptic Orthodox. There’s also a smattering of Baha’ists and Jews. A nationalist looking to mobilize the Egyptian people to reclaim their greatness as a world power wouldn’t win a lot of support by invoking an ancient faith that pretty much nobody in Egypt actually follows anymore. Maybe one deluded museum director who got too buried in his work (no pun intended) might end up with such an obsession, but I doubt he’d be able to gather an army of Seth-worshipping murder cultists.

Also, painting Set/Seth as a “god of evil” and murder is just the usual propaganda that Christendom has used to demonize other religions. Set was a god associated with chaos, violence, and storms (also the desert and foreigners), but played an important positive role in Egyptian religion as well; though he had killed his brother Horus, that was part of the necessary cycle of death and resurrection, and both gods functioned as counterparts in a cosmic balance like the yin and yang. Now, I will grant that the episode ended with the team convincing the cultists that Selim’s portrayal of Seth as a murder god was slanted and incomplete. But that was just a ploy, and Jim was pretty adamant about Seth being pure evil. So I can’t really give the episode credit for that.

It’s not a completely awful episode, just a silly one with a lazy, cartoony view of a foreign culture. Like “The Gunslinger,” it seemed to be motivated by a desire to do a genre pastiche, this time of mummy movies and Indiana Jones ancient-cult stuff. That gave it a fanciful quality rather far removed from what we generally think of as Mission: Impossible. But I’ll give it this: It finally breaks the trend of episodes where the team has no advance plan beyond “get in and wander around trying to find stuff out.” Yes, the plan has a number of contrived setbacks and improvisations, but there’s also a strategy being played out from the beginning, with the fake tomb and the scroll and the roles the team adopts. Although it’s a little unclear what the original endgame was planned to be, and contrived that the team’s advanced preparations meshed so neatly with random happenstance. Oh, and Davis’s music is back to cliche, with the same old “Egyptian” sound we’ve heard in a thousand movies and cartoons.

—

The one last thing on the DVD box set, aside from promos for a few of the episodes, is a Holiday Promo. Santa Claus rides up to his North-Pole home in his sleigh and finds a disc-player box in his mail basket, or something. He opens it up without needing a thumbprint scan — well, he is Santa Claus, after all — and the screen displays an image of the team wishing the viewers a merry Christmas. Santa walks away, but the disc does not self-destruct. I guess Santa already knows what his mission is.

—

Overview to follow!

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE (’89) Reviews: “The Assassin”/”The Gunslinger” (Spoilers)

“The Assassin”: Written by Cliff Green, this episode is a loose remake of season 6′s “Mindbend.” In Geneva, a prominent politician is gunned down by a man who’s triggered to do so by a musical alarm on his wristwatch — basically the same as the watch-alarm trigger in the original. But instead of shooting himself in the head afterward, he aims his gun at the police and commits suicide by gendarme. Where the original episode cut away discreetly at the first gunshot, here we see both violent killings on camera. Yay, progress, I guess. Afterward, there’s a closeup of a bad video effect of a red glow under the skin of the victim’s neck, presumably a computer chip self-immolating.

Jim goes to a carnival and exchanges code phrases with a blonde shooting-gallery attendant who’s so sexy (though not much of an actress) that Jim’s “I’m aiming for a prize of a different kind” plays more like he’s trying to solicit a prostitute than get directed to a secret videodisc. But anyway, the mission differs from the original in that the assassins are people close to the targets (to circumvent security) and the Voice doesn’t provide any information about who the suspected mastermind is. That’s left to Grant’s research, as we find when the team convenes on a ship in Boston Harbor (or a Down-Under facsimile thereof). He’s linked all the assassins to the stress relief clinic run by Philip Westerly (Peter Curtin), who’s also been caught on video as a face in the crowd at several of the murder scenes because he couldn’t resist traveling around the world to watch them all personally. Umm, isn’t that enough evidence that the police could investigate and find some link? Is this really so insoluble that the IMF is needed? At least the mastermind in “Mindbend” kept his distance from the brainwashing doctor and his subjects, and the subjects were criminals with no public record of ever having encountered the doctor. The IMF in that episode apparently picked up underworld rumors and needed to prove them. But here, Westerly is so reckless in attending the murder scenes that it’s hard to believe the case requires extraordinary measures to crack.

At the Westerly Clinic, the eponymous doctor is holding a video auction for six bidders whom only he can see on his wall screens, but they’re evidently leaders of Communist countries or military regimes and the like. The guy in the top left looks a bit like Vladimir Putin, but it’s a coincidence; Putin was years away from becoming a world figure when this was made, and the guy turns out to be implicitly South African anyway. Grant taps the phone lines just at the tail end of the auction, so they know a hit is imminent but they don’t know the target or the assassin. So they arrange to go in two ways: First, Shannon and Max play a rich married couple with stress issues, meeting Westerly at what I think is the same race track used in “The Cattle King” last season; and second, Nicholas just shows up at the clinic as a drunken journalist in despair about being reassigned from the international news beat to celebrity reporting in Boston. Westerly falls readily for Nick’s cover story, and betrays all principles of doctor-patient privilege in describing him to Shannon and Max just as a script cheat so they’ll know he’s successfully inside. Westerly instantly starts neuro-chipping and brainwashing Nicholas, using video footage of a lion stalking a gazelle with “jungle drums” playing. It’s unclear why he picks Nicholas for this. In “Mindbend,” the team already knew the intended assassin and substituted Barney, with pharmaceutical defenses against conditioning (though those failed him). Here, it’s like they have no plan beyond “go in and look around,” and Nicholas just randomly got chosen as the brainwashee.

So the next day, Shannon and Max are at the pool when Nicholas shows up, and they’re puzzled by his aloof behavior, and by the new murder-trigger watch that Westerly gave him. When he resists their enquiries and gets angry, they…

Oh…

They break cover. In public. Right where Westerly can watch from his window. They loudly call him “Nicholas,” right there at the public pool, and try to get through to him, with Max in particular browbeating him until the lion-hunting footage replaying in Nicholas’s mind (believe me, we’re going to see an awful lot of that footage) drives him to snap and knock Max into the pool. The fracas gets Max and Shannon booted out of the clinic before they can learn anything. This was a rank amateur move that I can’t believe these experienced agents would’ve made.

So they’re stuck with following Nicholas when Westerly drives him to the racetrack and seemingly aims him at an important Arab sheikh. The team knocks out Nick and takes him back to the boat, but Westerly slips away, and Jim isn’t convinced the sheikh was the real target. Indeed, back at the boat, Nicholas awakes and goes all Terminator, knocking Shannon’s stunt double (who I’m pretty sure is a guy) over a desk. (At first I thought the stuntman was wearing a lot of shoulder padding to give him protection and a feminine shape, but then I realized that was just ’80s fashion.) Nicholas almost strangles Shannon — since of course we can’t go an episode without having the woman placed in danger — and ultimately knocks her down a flight of steps, leaving her unconscious. Then he takes a gun and the mask-making unit to the zoo and snaps photos of a zookeeper which he feeds into the unit. (It’s our best look ever at how the mask-maker operates.) Fortunately, Grant has gotten past Westerly’s nonexistent security and stolen the brainwashing tape (since Westerly doesn’t have the good sense to destroy the evidence like his “Mindbend” counterpart), letting him discover subliminal frames revealing that the target is the anti-apartheid ruler of the “Republic of West Africa.” They rush to the zoo and intercept Nicholas just in time, though not before we’ve been forced to endure the lion-hunt footage several more times. Then Jim’s entire master stratagem for bringing Westerly to justice is “Grant! Get Westerly!” Which leads to Westerly tripping over a coil of poetic justice and falling into the lion enclosure, and we have to suffer through the stock footage one more time before the biochip melts and Nicholas is back to normal.

Wow, this was just bad. Everyone here was far dumber than they should be in an M:I episode. The bad guy should not have been that hard to catch, and the team was basically just flailing around, with no sign of the usual chess game planned out a dozen moves in advance. This isn’t even really an M:I story, more just a standard action plot. Which is weird given that it’s directly inspired by an episode of the original. True, “Mindbend” had the team in the dark about the assassination target and forced to contend with a team member’s brainwashing, but still they had a plan playing out, a plan that succeeded in entrapping the villains despite the setbacks. There was nothing like that here. The team was mostly reactive throughout, aside from the initial impersonations that didn’t seem to have much of a goal behind them.

Even worse, the story contradicts itself. Its big change from the original premise, spelled out in the disc scene, is supposedly that the assassins are people close to their victims, enabling them to get past security because they’re trusted and allowed access. But then Westerly goes and turns this drunken journalist he’s just met into an assassin for a complete stranger. Why even establish that change if it wasn’t going to factor into the story, if indeed it directly contradicted the intended storyline? Like so much else here, it makes no sense. Nothing here is as awful as the atrocious racism of “Cargo Cult,” but the plot is even more incoherent and nonsensical. And it’s the second episode in a row that hasn’t revolved around an intricate plan at all. Sadly, it will not be the last.

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“The Gunslinger”: Or just “Gunslinger,” per the DVD set. Teleplay by Ted Roberts, story by Dan Roberts.

We open in what seems like an Old West saloon, but a man in modern clothes is playing poker with Ian McClintock (Michael Greene), who confronts him about being an FBI agent spying on McClintock’s operation. McClintock has his right-hand thug Slade (Patrick Ward) take the agent out to be shot. Slade tosses him a six-shooter to give him a fightin’ chance Old West-style, but the panicky FBI agent seems to have skipped the firearms training at Quantico, and is Boot Hill bound within seconds.

At a skateboard park with a noisy metal ramp, Jim learns that McClintock is a former senator who founded Pontiac, Nevada, an Old West resort, and who still wields much political influence from there. He’s suspected of dealing with terrorists, but investigating him is politically sensitive — so at last we get a mission that makes sense for the IMF. The assignment is to find out whether he’s guilty and bring him to justice if he is. The apartment briefing establishes only that McClintock is obsessed with the Old West (or rather a TV/movie fantasy image thereof, though the episode doesn’t distinguish) and that he cheats at cards — but, says Jim, “two can play at that game.”

Shannon has no trouble embedding herself as a sexy barmaid, while the three younger men convince Slade to take them on as ranch hands. Jim faces McClintock as a fellow gambler and engages him in debate to size him up; he’s a pretty one-dimensional tough guy who has no patience for the bleeding hearts of today and yearns for the rugged macho ideal he imagines to have existed in the past. Jim hardly seems to be roleplaying at all as he questions McClintock’s values, although he allows himself to lose at cards. But the guys are having a harder time getting anywhere with Slade, who’s calling Grant “boy” a lot — so he’s a racist as well as a murdering thug — and Grant has to prove himself by riding a bucking bronco. And… he rides the bronco. Just toughs it out. Where’s the tranquilizing-needle ring, Grant? Where’s the electro-whammy hoozitsinator to calm down the horse? Even the losers from Galactica 1980 were shrewd enough to pull that off. This team’s advance preparation has been terrible lately. (Also, Slade was suspicious of the boys because one of them lacked calluses on his hands. Why didn’t Jim think of that? Also, is it plausible that even drama teacher Nicholas would lack calluses after all the fighting and climbing and gadget-deploying and other hands-on stuff he’s had to do over the past two years?)

Anyway, Shannon overhears a bar patron mention something creeping him out in the mines, which puzzles the team, since they thought the mines were just for show. Turns out there’s a secret chamber and McClintock and Slade are forcing people to dig for something. Nicholas and Grant take a sample of the ore and find nothing but shale and salt. At this point I already figured out what it was they were digging for. Can you, Gentle Reader?

Grant and Nicholas go down into the mines to search for answers, and find Slade threatening to kill a worker. They follow, deciding they need to rescue the guy, but only find the blank wall where the hidden door must be, then hear a shot from the other side. Grant swipes some survey maps to try to figure out where the fake wall leads and what the mine might be for, but all he can determine is that they’re tunneling in the direction of government land whose contents are classified above even IMF clearance.

Max’s role in the game consists mainly of sexually harrassing Shannon, so that she can turn for help to Slade’s henchman Carter (Andrew Clarke), the weak link in the operation. (No wonder. He’s a henchman to a henchman. He’s a henchsquared.) She drugs his drink and gets him to take her home with him, but the next morning he wakes up in a haystack with her and she tells him they had a memorable night in which he told him all his secrets. He insists that if she breathes a word about the burial vault or the rods, he’ll kill her. This, combined with the rest, lets Grant deduce that they’re digging for spent nuclear fuel rods stored in the Nevada salt beds.

Now, up to now, this has been like the previous two (awful) episodes in that it’s just been about the team going in undercover and trying to discover something, which doesn’t really follow the M:I formula of carrying out intricate, multistage plans. But now that Jim knows what’s what, the game is properly on. Literally a game, a no-limit poker game between Jim and McClintock, using one of the niftiest IMF gadgets this show has produced: a deck of blank cards coated with LCD laminate that Grant can control with his computer to display the face of any card he wants. But the other bit of tech Jim has Grant prepare is a set of trank-dart bullets; it looks like he’s expecting to get into a gunfight with McClintock, and he’s practicing his quick draw. And the director does a neat thing here. At first, the angle cuts away from Jim’s face to a close-up on the quick draw, leading us to assume there’s a double faking it — but then we see another quick draw and the camera tilts up to show that, yes, Peter Graves really did it himself. He does it a couple more times in the scene just to drive it home. It’s a reminder that Peter Graves was the younger brother of Matt Dillon himself, Gunsmoke‘s James Arness, and was a regular on a couple of Westerns (Fury and Whiplash) years before he did M:I. (Their birth names were James and Peter Aurness, with a U.)

So Nicholas and Max sneak into the mine, where the workers are bringing out the excavated nuclear fuel rods in containment units, and they use fluorescent dye to fake a radiation leak (because the workers are gullible enough to think that radioactive material glows in the dark — or maybe the writers are) so the workers will evacuate, and then they rig the mine to blow. Meanwhile Jim is cleaning McClintock out, and when they play the final hand, he lets McC discover he’s been cheating, so that the Western-happy ex-Senator will call him out for a gunfight. Just then, the mine blows, and Jim drops character and tells him his plan has been foiled. But McClintock’s ego won’t let him back down even now, although he has Slade do his gunfighting for him. Shannon has drugged Slade’s drink so he won’t be much of a threat, and Jim “kills” him with a trank dart, to McC’s shock — and Jim maneuvers him into confessing that he’s killed people too, in front of witnesses. McClintock tries to draw on Jim, and he hasn’t been drugged — it’s purely a contest of skill. And Jim shoots first. Shannon says she’s called in the FBI to arrest the unconscious villains, and the team rides off on horseback (though not into the sunset, alas).

Well, this threatened to be another episode that didn’t feel like M:I, but it rallied toward the end. It was kind of a self-indulgent exercise, a contrived scenario to let Graves dust off his old Western skills, but on the other hand the ex-senator’s influence and the sensitivity of the mission made it more justifiable as an IMF case than many. The villains were too broadly, exaggeratedly awful, but it was kind of nice to see Jim confronting the villain almost openly rather than from a distance. So while there are a number of things about the episode that are imperfect, the good parts outweigh them. Or maybe I’m just being generous because the last two were so horrible. Either way, this was a satisfying one.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE (’89) Reviews: “Deadly Harvest”/”Cargo Cult” (spoilers)

“Deadly Harvest”: Written by Jan Sardi. We open in Kansas, where a vaguely Middle Eastern scientist named Jared (Nick Carrafa) is irradiating some seeds with “Danger: Laser Radiation,” and is then interrupted by Laurel, a beautiful blond woman he’s clearly romantically involved with. He gets a call from someone named Jouseff, and once he thinks he’s alone, he tells the man that he’s perfected the virus, which Jouseff wants deployed immediately. But Laurel is listening in on the extension, and he catches her. They have a rather clumsy fight, but she gives a good showing for a while; their fight starts a fire in the lab and he eventually impales her on something, but with her dying breath she traps him inside the “Danger: Laser Radiation” chamber and his image goes all wavery as he screams. Cut from the fire in the lab to the match at the start of the titles.

Then we’re not in Kansas anymore, because Jim is at the San Francisco Zoo (allegedly) to get the disc from a zookeeper who’s really beautiful but a really bad actress. I was distracted by the polar bears behind Jim as he listened, but the gist of it is that Jouseff  (Ritchie Singer) is a minister from a country called Orandaq and also a terrorist; Jared developed a “genetic virus” that would wipe out a nation’s entire wheat crop, and only the fire postponed its release in the US. Jared survived with horrible scarring and needed plastic surgery for his face — which should be convenient for Nicholas, I’m guessing at this point. The mission is to stop the virus, of course. Oh, look, it’s a poly bear!

We’re back to Jim’s apartment again, and it’s another old-school type of briefing where the team already knows the plan. Turns out Laurel’s death has been covered up so Shannon can take her place. Jouseff (weird spelling, but that’s what the captions say  – and his full name is  inexplicably “Jouseff K.”) is coming to the US to retrieve Jared, and of course Nicholas is hidden under the bandages, with Grant as the doctor explaining the extensive facial reconstruction to Jouseff after Max sneaks out the real Jared. Jouseff insists on taking “Jared” back home right away, and Nicholas insists on bringing “Laurel” (Shannon) with him. Once they get there and the bandages come off, Jouseff is initially suspicious of the “changed” face underneath, but Nick and Shannon sell it. Nicholas is wearing fake fingerprints to help convince Jouseff. Later, he and Shannon take a walk through Jouseff’s compound, and his glasses have a microcamera and LCD display so Grant can see what Nicholas sees and text him instructions. This intel gives Grant an idea for breaking himself and Max into the compound so Max can find a way to destroy the deadly wheat crop. It involves hiding Max in a truck full of wheat with a rebreather, something Grant quips “goes totally against your grain.”

Grant also swipes a personnel file so he can text Nicholas data on Jared’s coworkers — one of whom, Isfahan, turns out to be an old flame who resents Shannon. Once Shannon’s alone in the lab, she swaps out the deadly seeds for fakes, but hides inside the laser chamber when Isfahan comes back, and Isfahan closes the door and traps Shannon in there by accident, rendering the whole jealousy beat rather pointless. Shannon has her walkie and calls Jim and Grant, who text Nicholas, who has to contrive a way to save Shannon without letting anyone know she’s in danger, so he has to cut it really close.

Then Nicholas and Shannon erase Jared’s research, which Isfahan discovers, leading to their arrest. This was part of the plan. Max puts gasoline in the sprinkler system to immolate the wheat crop, but he gets in a fight with a guard and his timing device is destroyed — so Jim tells him via communicator how to construct an old-school timer, a bucket hung from the sprinkler with a slow trickle of gasoline falling into it, and tied to a light fixture so that when it gives way, it will pull out the fixture and create sparks to ignite the gasoline. Meanwhile, the speedy and corrupt Orandaq justice system puts Nicholas on trial for sabotaging the plan to give the country a superweapon (with Shannon as a witness for the prosecution), but Jim finally deals himself into the game as an Amnesty International attorney sent to represent Shannon and, upon learning she’s just a witness, offers to represent “Jared” instead. In so doing, he rather heavy-handedly turns suspicion against Jouseff as the saboteur, which would never fly in a legitimate court of law, but the presiding general is basically the “I’m going to allow this” judge from Futurama, okay with every bit of irregular procedure. Maybe he’s so paranoid that it primes him to assume the worst of Jouseff, or maybe he just wants to punish Jouseff for his failure (like Jouseff laser-executed Isfahan earlier for failing to keep the files from being erased). But Nicholas plays along and “confesses” that, yes, he sabotaged the project, but did so under Jouseff’s orders. Once the lab blows up, the general orders the guards to take Jouseff away for execution and take Nicholas and Shannon to prison, but the guards on the latter are Max and Grant in keffiyehs, so the team walks away intact.

A workmanlike episode, a pretty solid M:I caper with a couple of legitimate setbacks for the heroes to overcome, though nothing too serious. Aside from the usual tendency to make Shannon a damsel in distress, and the use of the Arab-terrorist stereotype which was already a tired cliche even back in January 1990 when this debuted, the main drawback is the weakness of Jim’s strategy to turn suspicion against Jouseff in the trial. But as I said, that could perhaps be justified in a guilty-until-proven-innocent system like this one.

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“Cargo Cult”: Written by Dale Duguid. At a gold mine in a place called New Belgium, we meet — holy cow, it’s Crais from Farscape! Lani John Tupu plays Michael Otagi, the commissioner of the territory, and his henchman shows him a truck full of corpses, whose disposal they have to put off because there’s a territorial health inspector on site. The inspector hugely overacts his outrage at finding cyanide in use at the gold mine, poisoning the indigenous population, but Crais saves us from any more painful overacting by forcing the inspector to drink his own cyanide sample.

At a church supposedly in San Francisco, Jim trades code phrases with an organist playing Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, which, as every TV/film viewer knows, is the one and only piece of pipe organ music ever composed by anyone, ever. The mission is to stop the poisoning of the “simple hill folk” of New Belgium, one of the last surviving Stone Age populations, from the deadly mining practices the corrupt New Belgium government turns a blind eye to. At Jim’s apartment, he and Grant are briefing Nicholas and Shannon: Crais — err, Otagi — has been building a bridge that will let him get heavy machinery across to the mine, but Max, who’s already been embedded in the mining camp, has been unable to find a way across the temporary  wooden bridge to find out what’s on the other side, because apparently security is really tight. Remember this, folks.

Jim takes the place of a currency broker that the IMF has arranged for Interpol to arrest, with Grant as his bodyguard. The miners are paid in gold, and they’re there to swap it for negotiable currency. There’s a bit of business about Crais’s henchman — who’s actually called Bull — being upset that Jim and Grant are gouging them on the exchange rate. Then Nicholas and Shannon show up as vulcanologists, with permission from the government to go across the bridge to study the volcano, which the Stone Age hill people worship as a god. Somehow it didn’t occur to Jim until this moment that Shannon could be in trouble coming into a camp full of men who haven’t seen a woman in months. He orders Max to get Shannon out of there quickly, but somehow this entails starting a fistfight with Bull, and Shannon nearly gets molested in the resulting melee until Grant fires his Uzi to calm things down. Crais — err, Otagi — approves the order to let Nicholas and Shannon across the bridge, and when Max raises an objection to make it look good, Otagi orders Max to go with them. Jim mutters to Grant that this is too easy.

No sooner does our trio cross the bridge that they’re surrounded by spear-carrying, chalk-covered tribesmen and imprisoned in the village, where they discover Regehr (Adrian Wright), a crashed aviator who’s gotten the villagers to worship him as a cargo-cult-style deity and is working with Otagi to exploit the villagers as slave labor. We’re supposed to be outraged at the racist exploitation of a noble indigenous people, but the villagers are portrayed as the worst kind of television cliche of mindless, bloodthirsty, chanting primitives. Before long, when Regehr complains to Otagi about how quickly his villagers are dying off, Otagi suggests appeasing them with a sacrifice of their captives — though Regehr intends to keep Shannon and make her his goddess wife. He doesn’t consider her consent to be an issue, as we see when he paws at her inside the crashed plane where he lives. It’s unclear why she doesn’t just kick his ass right then and there.

So Jim and Grant are worried when the others don’t report in — for the first time, as far as I recall, their mini-walkie-talkies are named onscreen as “communicators” — and Grant manages to get across the supposedly impassable bridge quite easily by hiding in the truck when Otagi and Bull bring over some more cyanide. He finds the others and then goes to their abandoned truck, where he retrieves a tranquilizer-dart rifle which he uses to knock out some of the villagers, with Nick and Max playing along to make it look like they’re doing it with their supernatural power. Once the men are reunited, they cross the supposedly impassable bridge twice between scenes to pick up Jim and bring him across. They need a plan to rescue Shannon, since now that Regehr has lost face, Otagi suggests he blame his setback on the “witch” Shannon and have her sacrificed to appease the volcano god.

Now, Jim says the key is to turn the villagers against Regehr and Otagi. But heaven forbid that should involve actually engaging with them as people and helping them take responsibility for solving their own problems. Of course not. They’re subhuman primitives too stupid to reason, so the solution is to manipulate and trick them the same way the bad guys are.

So Jim and the others then go back across the supposedly impassable bridge to the camp to get some explosives to fake a volcanic eruption, then the younger men go back across again. Grant goes to get a laser projector out of the same compartment where the dart gun was, even though it manifestly wasn’t there before. It’s magic! He’s somehow able to modify it into a hologram generator even though it apparently wasn’t designed for that.

Then Jim convinces Otagi to take him across the bridge (though why he’d need to when it’s so damn easy is unclear). Otagi takes him prisoner, though, and intends to throw him into the sacrifice as a sorcerer. So now Jim and Shannon are surrounded by spear-carrying tribesmen. But conveniently, the darts Grant used only knock people out for exactly four hours to the second, independent of individual body mass or metabolism, so Jim is able to wave his hand over the “dead” tribesmen and return them to life. And then they blow the dynamite in the volcano crater — causing all the miners to evacuate the camp, leaving Max free to rig the cyanide shed to blow up — and Grant projects an image of his face onto the smoke (makes more sense than their usual hologram-in-midair tricks) while Nicholas uses Regehr’s PA equipment (which he used to fake volcanic rumblings from the displeased god) to play his voice telling the tribesmen to let the prisoners go and turn against Regehr. So the team gets away, and then Regehr and Otagi get away in their truck, which just happens to be going across the bridge when the explosion goes off, and in a mix of bad bluescreen shots and a mediocre miniature shot, the bad guys fall to their fiery doom. (Not to worry — Grant says the explosion will “ionize the cyanide to 2000 degrees,” turning it into harmless smoke. Although I think this is completely untrue: “Sodium cyanide is not combustible itself, but contact with acids releases highly flammable hydrogen cyanide gas. Fire may produce irritating or poisonous gases. Runoff from fire control water may give off poisonous gases.” This is supposed to make things better for the locals??) Jim is pleased that the hill people will again be “untouched by man.” So, um, they don’t qualify as “man”?

Ohh, this one was painful. First off, let’s be clear about one thing: The portrayal here of a “cargo cult” as a bunch of foolish, superstitious primitives worshipping white men and the products of their civilization as  divine because they’re so incomprehensibly advanced, and thus reduced to hapless pawns of any white or civilized person with an agenda, is grotesquely wrong. Cargo cults were founded by members of Melanesian cultures as a way of co-opting the material wealth of colonizing civilizations as a symbol for reasserting their own cultural autonomy and agency; as Wikipedia puts it, “Since the modern manufacturing process is unknown to them, members, leaders, and prophets of the cults maintain that the manufactured goods of the non-native culture have been created by spiritual means, such as through their deities and ancestors. These goods are intended for the local indigenous people, but the foreigners have unfairly gained control of these objects through malice or mistake.” So far from being blind submission to superior outsiders, it’s a reaction against their material superiority, an attempt to claim their goods and symbols for indigenous use and restore the traditional social order that contact has disrupted.

Now, the horrible racial condescension, the thoughtless dehumanization of the people who were supposedly being saved and protected, was bad enough — and only slightly mollified by the fact that the mastermind of their exploitation was played by a part-Samoan actor. And the treatment of Shannon made it even worse. I’ve talked about how often she’s cast as the damsel in distress, but she’s never spent the majority of an episode under the ongoing threat of rape before. But the rest of the episode doesn’t work either. It mostly ceases to be an M:I episode after the first act, becoming more of a cliched action plot out of a B-movie. Going through all the usual ritual to set up the team’s plan seems rather pointless when the plan is scuttled so early on; maybe they should’ve taken a cue from the fifth-season episodes that started in medias res with the plan already underway. And so much about the story is inconsistent — first the bridge is impassable and what’s happening on the other side is a total mystery, but as soon as the audience is let in on the secret, the commute across the bridge becomes effortless. Also, Regehr and Otagi’s men are able to command the villagers in English, yet at other points, the team members are able to carry on conversations in English without the adjacent villagers knowing what they’re saying. The villagers are props rather than people, so their ability to comprehend is at the convenience of the writer. This is a bad episode on every level, but the racism is enough to unseat “The Devils” and earn “Cargo Cult” the title of worst episode ever.

At least, I hope this is as bad as it gets. Four more to go…

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE (’89) Reviews: “Banshee”/”For Art’s Sake” (spoilers)

“Banshee”: Writer Ted Roberts takes us to the land of Irish stereotypes and fake accents, Bally-Na-Gragh in Northern Ireland, where jaunty, cliched Irish music plays and tweedy Mr. O’Rourke (Rob Steele) actually says “Top o’ the mornin’ to ye” when greeting a young woman leading various old people–from both sides of the historic Protestant-Catholic conflict–on a trip in a tour bus. O’Rourke gives her a crate full of beers, but one of them has a bomb in it.  He seems cheerful about this at the time, but later, when he hooks up with his boss Brian McCarron (Peter Adams) to watch the pensioners go to their reward, he laments that there’s no luck in harmin’ old people, whereupon McCarron tells him he’s a superstitious fool, and already I can practically sense Jim’s team warming up their hologram generators.

At a model train yard (the big kind), Jim gets the disc and learns that the bombing has rekindled sectarian tensions (which this 1989 episode optimistically suggested had been mostly resolved already), with the sides blaming each other for the act of terrorism, and that McCarron is an arms dealer suspected of staging the bombing to bolster his business. Jim’s mission is to “bring McCarron to justice, end his trade in arms, and bring the warring factions of Bally-Na-Gragh to the conference table.” Anything else while you’re at it?

The team sets up what Nicholas calls a “command post” in an automated lighthouse before the briefing scene, which introduces two young firebrands, Skelton and Carney, who represent the rival sides in microcosm — it doesn’t matter which is which, and their role is fairly token. They even clash in McCarron’s pub and are warned by O’Rourke to stay on opposite sides of a line — yes, there’s an actual line down the middle. Shannon in the pub as a singer, and is the only team member faking an Irish accent, which I’d say isn’t very good if it weren’t for the fact that none of them are, with Adams’s accent as McCarron being the worst of all. Nicholas is her manager, but that doesn’t really matter since it’s just to get him in the door. Jim and Max show up and offer a wager for anyone who wants to fight Max, and Grant comes in as a surly sailor and takes the bet. The fight is a distraction for Nicholas to spy on McCarron as he takes one of the two token firebrands to the cellar to sell him guns, which he’s already done for the other guy. What elaborate, clever IMF spy technique does Nicholas use to spy on the meeting? He peeks through the cellar window. After he sees how McCarron locks his hidden cache, Nick moves in to sabotage all the guns. Surprising that Nicholas is doing the “Barney” work while Grant is doing the “Rollin” work, an inversion of their original roles. More evidence that the producers were recognizing Phil Morris as the MVP of the show. But Shannon’s also using the distraction to plant speakers and other gimmicks in the tavern.

So afterward, Jim lets drop to McCarron that he deals in arms, and McC takes the bait readily, while Shannon regales the superstitious O’Rourke with tales of how if old people are murdered, being so close to death as it is, they’re given “the key” to come back and haunt people. It’s a weird idea, that being near death anyway would make it more outrageous to be killed — not that I think anyone’s life is worth less than anyone else’s, of course, but if someone did believe some lives were worth more, you’d think they’d favor people who had more life expectancy to be deprived of. But that’s beside the point here, since O’Rourke is basically a suggestible idiot who’ll believe any superstition even if it’s one he’s never heard before. Case in point: When Grant rejects Jim and McCarron’s offer to go into the arms business and storms off, McC says he knows too much, and when Jim sends Max out to fake-kill Grant, McC orders O’Rourke along to finish the job, preparing to shoot him a second time after Max has fake-shot him once. So, to prevent that, Max improvises a superstition that “It’s bad luck to kill a black man.” Really, Max? You went there? Anyway, O’Rourke swallows this invented superstition hook, line, and sinker, and lets Max deliver the second (fake) shot. That night, the team regales O’Rourke with holograms of Shannon as a banshee, and he completely falls apart and begs for mercy. This cowardly idiot is the easiest mark the IMF has ever taken on. McCarron comes down to see what O’Rourke is blathering about and doesn’t believe him.

Later, Max and Nicholas convince both the firebrands to come to the lighthouse to buy arms, and Shannon tips McC off, prompting him to arrange with O’R to go kill them both. The team knocks the firebrands out and handcuffs them together to a table, telling them they can either fight or talk. They also arrange for McCarron’s car to break down near an old church, and hurl the banshee illusion at him and O’Rourke, though where the projectors are hidden is unrevealed. O’Rourke breaks easily and runs off, loudly and stiltedly declaring his intention to warn the firebrands, which just gets him a shotgun blast in the back. But McC turns out to be just as superstitious all of a sudden, since the banshee illusion, plus a recording of the song the old folks were singing when they died (how did the team know what song they were singing, and how did they get a recording of it?), drives him to the old church, where he pleads for sanctuary. Jim shows up as the driver of the carriage of the dead and prompts McC to confess that he killed the pensioners to sell arms, a confession that the firebrands are shown live on video, leading them to instantly set aside generations of grudges and agree to talk, after they’ve taken care of McCarron.

Wow, this was bad. It was broad and caricatured, the marks were too easy, the accents and music were too stereotyped, and the video effects were staggeringly awful, especially a matte shot of the lighthouse at night with a stormy sky roughly matted in and an animated yellow lighthouse beam that looked kind of like a War of the Worlds heat ray.

There’s some disagreement over the music credit; the episode itself credits Davis as usual, but IMDb credits Neil Argo, also giving him an “additional music – uncredited” listing for 16 episodes of the series. I don’t know what to make of that. Aside from the hokey “Irish” music, the score doesn’t sound any different from the usual, using Davis’s truncated version of “The Plot.” Perhaps Argo was Davis’s orchestrator or assistant, and on this one he did the bulk of the work himself?

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“For Art’s Sake”: At a New York gallery, a ninja-attired art thief descends on a rope and uses infrared goggles to see the lasers protecting a painting — your standard TV/movie laser grid designed with nice big gaps that thieves can get through, instead of something sensible like motion detectors covering the whole space in front of the painting — and he uses a fancy cane with an extending knife blade to cut the painting out of its frame (somehow he only has to cut the sides and not the top and bottom). A guard interrupts, and he uses the knife cane as a spear to kill the guard. Then he takes off the mask, and it’s Alex Cord — the first actor to play Dylan Hunt in Gene Roddenberry’s Genesis II pilot movie, which I’ve reviewed on this site. As it happens, this episode’s writer John Whelpley would later write several episodes for the later incarnation of Dylan Hunt in Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda. Anyway, Cord flips his black ninja jacket (ninjacket?) around to become a white tuxedo jacket, hides the rolled-up painting in his cane, and goes downstairs to the party that’s already underway in the gallery. Wait a minute — if he was already a guest at the party and could freely come and go, why did he need to do the ninja-break-in thing? (Mainly so we’d recognize him in ninja gear later in the episode, I suppose, but it’s still awkward.)

At a ballet class, Jim does the code phrase exchange with an instructor played by Chelsea Brown, who was the first murdered IMF veteran in last season’s “Reprisal.” (By the way, the IMDb entry for this episode misspells her name as “Shelsea Brown,” so that Chelsea Brown is not credited for this appearance on her own page. If anyone reading this has IMDb editing privileges, could you please fix this?) Turns out Cord’s character is a hotelier named Travers, who’s believed to have made his fortune through art thievery. He’s colluding with Ocha (David Bradshaw), the minister of culture (read: propaganda) of the Latin American country of San Marcos; the stolen painting is their national treasure, a painting of their namesake patron saint, and their president wants it destroyed while on display in America so the US will be embarrassed. The mission is to get it back and bring Travers to justice.

Doing the briefing in the “command post” instead of Jim’s apartment seems to be a steady thing now, but for once it’s a traditional briefing scene where the team already knows most of the basics and they’re just touching base, clarifying details, and showing off Collier gadgetry whose purpose the audience doesn’t yet know. Shannon goes in as an art buyer who catches Travers’s eye (she’s got bigger ’80s hair than usual, but it looks good on her), letting him outbid her on a painting but making it costly to beat her. That gets him interested, among other things (though for once she’s not leading with her cleavage). Meanwhile, Max and Grant break into Travers’s penthouse by climbing up on top of an elevator to reach his private level, and seeing Grant climbing in an elevator shaft felt kind of like old times with Barney, though it was brief. They bug his computer and download the memory of his fax machine (interesting), but find no stash of art, so they have to try another scheme.

While entertaining Shannon at the museum, Travers encounters Ocha and takes him aside, threatening to renege on his deal unless the San Marcos president gives him coastal land for a hotel. Travers spots Shannon eavesdropping and threatens her, until she talks herself out of it.  She lets him figure out that she’s a fence, and having learned that he’s totally obsessed with Edgar Degas, she lets on that she knows the whereabouts of an unknown Degas. The purpose of Grant’s gadget, a “simulator,” is to use a computer program to extrapolate the essentials of Degas’s style and use a, err, paint-jet printer to create a convincing Degas pastiche to tempt Travers.

Jim, playing the painting’s owner, meets with Travers and Shannon in a faked Central Park, with an impressionistic rendering of the Manhattan skyline matted in over the far side of a lake — more resembling the view of the skyline from somewhere in New Jersey than Central Park (and way on the right, I think they’ve put the Empire State Building right next to the World Trade Center). And in nearer reverse-angle shots, there’s a row of low houses beyond the edge of the park.

And I fixed the aspect ratio this time!

Anyway, Travers is convinced enough by the painting to call in a discreet appraiser to confirm it, but Jim holds out for an unreasonably high price, forcing Travers to steal it later on — coming upon Shannon in the bubble bath and apparently stabbing her to death, though she had a knife-proof vest and blood packs on under the bubbles. The faux Degas has a tracking device, and the team follows Travers down into the maintenance levels under his hotel in hopes of finding his secret gallery. Amazingly, John E. Davis uses nearly the complete melody of Schifrin’s “The Plot” to score this portion, leaving off only the last three bars. I think it’s the first time he’s ever used that much of it. But the team loses the signal when Travers enters his vault-like gallery. A new plan is needed!

So NYPD captain Jim and Interpol agent Max go to Ocha, telling him the painting has been recovered. An angered Ocha calls Travers, who assures him that he still has the original and whatever’s been found must be a forgery, inviting Ocha to come see for himself. The team uses an entertaining bit of slapstick to deal with Ocha: dog-walker Shannon tangles his legs in her leashes, so he falls down behind Grant’s hot dog stand, which opens up to reveal Nicholas disguised as Ocha, who trank-darts him and swaps places with him in seconds, all under his unwitting chauffeur’s nose. So Travers shows his private gallery to Nicholas instead. (And Bradshaw is another actor who’s well cast as someone Nicholas is impersonating, having a similar facial structure.) Nick takes photos of everything with his lapel-pin camera, but Travers won’t let him take the St. Marcos painting without a signed document giving him the coastal land. And without Travers’s palmprint, nobody can get to the painting without a booby trap exploding. Another new plan is needed!

So Grant and Max break into the gallery when Travers isn’t there (Nick caught the access code), Grant planting flame bars and hologram generators while Max recovers the stolen art and replaces them with hastily printed copies. Jim and Nicholas release the real Ocha, telling him he hit his head on the sidewalk when he fell, and unleash him on Travers. When he arrives, they start the fake fire and set off the vault alarm, leading Travers and Ocha down to find the gallery seemingly burning. Ocha sees that Travers cares most about the Degas, so he threatens to destroy it unless he gets the St. Marcos painting. Travers gives hims that painting, and Ocha, who wants it destroyed, conveniently tosses it into the holographic fire (lucky break that he didn’t aim for one of the real fires). Travers kills him with the knife-cane, and the team assembles before him to gloat and adds insult to injury by igniting the fake Degas before leaving him for the cops to find.

This is a fun episode, one of the most entertaining of the season, with an intricate plot, some interesting setbacks requiring readjustment on Jim’s part, some pleasantly old-school M:I touches, and a nicely sexy turn by Shannon (although she still gets damsel-in-distressed a bit more than I like). But my main problem with it arises from something that I was wondering about from the start and that was actually spelled out in dialogue in the episode. When Ocha calls Travers after the Interpol scam, he says that if the American government recovers the painting rather than losing it, then San Marcos will fail to score its propaganda points and the plan will be ruined. Okay, so in that case, why is the American government using an IMF team whose involvement will be disavowed if it’s discovered? As with “The Haunting” last season, this is a case where you’d think the government would want its involvement openly known. So this is one of those cases that doesn’t really make sense as an IMF mission — especially with the disavowal disclaimer included in the briefing, something that the original series usually skipped in episodes dealing with domestic criminal cases.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE (’89) Reviews: “Target Earth”/”The Fuehrer’s Children” (Spoilers)

“Target Earth” is an oddly sci-fi name for an episode of this series, but it’s written by former Star Trek scribe Stephen Kandel — also the only writer other than Walter Brough to contribute to both the original and revival series, having been the seventh season’s story editor and scripting the excellent “The Deal” and “The Question” as well as the more disappointing “Incarnate” and “The Fountain,” plus the okay “Movie” and “The Fighter.”

We’re back in Australia again, at what’s supposedly the Outback launch site of the first privately built and operated space shuttle — although the private shuttle looks exactly like the American one so they can use the stock footage. There’s a weird shot panning down what looks like a life-sized wall mural of the shuttle (visibly 2-D) to where a blonde woman, Alina (Gosia Dobrowolska), is dragging an unconscious man under the shuttle’s rockets. Alina then goes to Mission Control, where they’re puzzled that the pilot is missing this important test firing, and she cheerfully orders the rocket ignition that vaporizes that very pilot.

Jim’s briefing today is by Robert Louis Stevenson, or at least that’s where he finds it shelved once a librarian directs him there. The shuttle, called Frontier One and operated by the Eurospace Consortium (whose initials are ESS for some reason), is carrying a powerful laser for destroying orbital debris, taking mineral samples, and nice stuff like that, but the IMF suspects that the disappearance and suspected murder of the pilot was part of a plan to take over the shuttle for terrorist purposes. They don’t know of a specific group or individual behind this, they’re just speculating, but they’re still sending in Jim’s team to find out, an oddly nebulous mission profile for them. And I hope the self-destructing disc didn’t start a fire in the book stacks.

The apartment scene establishes that Jim has done something I’ve often thought would be a good idea: Instead of having everyone just show up on the same day, he’s already had Grant and Shannon embedded at the ESS center for three weeks by the time he briefs Nicholas and Max — Grant as one of the scientists, Shannon as one of the two candidates for replacement pilot, with Grant coaching her through her radio earring. Jim goes in as a NASA observer, Max as a technician, and Nicholas as a doctor (or something) who’ll approve the winning candidate. Shannon has her hair pulled back in a severe bun to play a cool, competent professional, and I’ll be damned if it isn’t one of her sexiest looks yet. Anyway, her main competition is Rhine (Lewis Fitz-Gerald), and for some reason they’re competing in a piloting simulation in the actual shuttle cockpit, with Grant helping Shannon cheat to win. The simulation involves dodging asteroids, a situation that any space shuttle pilot would have little chance of ever encountering. It’s really unclear what the plan was going to be once they got Shannon the job; evidently they had no intention of having her actually fly the thing into space. Because they’re all shocked when Alina takes control and remotely launches the shuttle — which for some reason was fully fueled and powered up for launch even though it was just a simulation. Shannon Reed becomes the first IMF agent in space (that we know of!), and Rhine turns out to be a traitor, working for Robard (Eli Danker), a beret-wearing, chain-smoking revolutionary of unspecified origin whose band of soldiers storms in and takes over the command center. Robard is mad that Alina sent Shannon up with Rhine. She explains she figured Shannon was useful for her (cover identity’s) laser expertise, but Robard still kills Alina for taking initiative without clearing it with him.

Rhine uses the laser to blow up a communication satellite drifting past the shuttle’s viewports, even though those orbit 22,000 miles higher than any shuttle has ever gone. Robard threatens the world on TV, saying he’ll blow up all communications satellites unless America cedes control of a weapons satellite he intends to use to defend the borders of his own nation, which he doesn’t bother to identify. Cut to NORAD, where a general who’s poorly hiding his Australian accent orders a missile strike on the space center if they can’t resolve the problem otherwise.

Grant communicates with Shannon to get her to sabotage the laser, and she has to find ways to respond without tipping Rhine off that she’s talking to someone. (I remember when I first saw this episode, I had the idea that if I ever wrote an undercover agent in that kind of a situation, I’d have her, or him, establish a habit of muttering to herself under her breath, so that it wouldn’t seem suspicious when the need to communicate arose. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten around to using that idea, but it’s interesting what you remember after so long.) Anyway, the sabotage works, so Rhine makes her spacewalk to fix it — something her cover identity is trained in, but Shannon isn’t. Jim says Shannon is “gutsy enough,” as if that alone were sufficient qualification for performing an EVA. But her “spacewalk” consists of tiptoeing slowly across the set of the top of the shuttle — I guess it’s the old magnetic-boots dodge — and then standing next to the laser to fix it. After which her tether gets snagged (I guess it didn’t get the memo about guts equalling competence) so she has to unhook it, whereupon Rhine swings the laser around to knock into her (dude, you’re just gonna break it again!), and she goes spinning off into space like Sandra Bullock in Gravity. Except that when we come back from commercial, she’s suddenly stabilized, despite a complete lack of thrusters, and perfectly oriented so that purging her oxygen valve will jet her back to the shuttle. (I wonder, are spacesuits even designed to be able to purge oxygen? Seems kind of counterproductive.)

Meanwhile, Jim and Max have planted the notion that there are loose radioactive materials on the base — none of the techs bother to question this, perhaps because they sense these guys are helping them, or more likely because they’re extras who aren’t being paid to do dialogue. They fake a radioactive steam leak next to Robard, get him into the bio lab for decontamination, and use a rigged cigarette to knock him out so that Nicholas can impersonate him using the mask generator that Grant just happens to have with him even though they didn’t know they’d need it. Nicholas-as-Robard orders the troops to follow Max to a “bunker” against the missile strike, so Max can lock them up. Once Shannon knocks Rhine out by purging the airlock to suck him into it (more wasted oxygen) and locking him inside, she uses the shuttle’s relay to patch Jim into NORAD, where he gives his “government cryptonym” — US Alpha 716 Charlie — and tells the general the base is secure. (The general doesn’t actually confirm the cryptonym with anyone first, though.) Then it’s just a matter of Shannon single-handedly flying the shuttle home, which she somehow does effortlessly.

Okay, so the spacey stuff is rather ridiculous, the special effects are cheesy as hell, and Earth is never actually a target, unless you count the part of Earth that the ESS base was on, which was targeted by people on another part of Earth. Still, despite all that, this is a fairly good format-breaking episode of the type seen mainly in the fifth season, where the original mission (ill-defined though it was) is blown in the first act and the rest is all improvisation. Shannon continues her streak of being the team member most commonly placed in danger, but she’s also the one who must do the most single-handedly to resolve the situation, so it’s a strong showing for her. And even John E. Davis’s music is relatively interesting for a change, since he’s doing some more spacey stuff, a bit grander than his usual scoring. All in all, I rather enjoyed it, though parts of it made me wince.

—

“The Fuehrer’s Children”: Or perhaps “Fuhrer’s,” as it’s spelled on the DVDs. The first of two episodes written by supervising producer Frank Abatemarco, who would later write Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s abysmal “Man of the People,” but then redeem himself by co-writing the classic “Chain of Command” 2-parter.

We open in Oregon where white supremacist Richard Kester is holding a meeting of his White People’s Coalition and spewing a nauseatingly vicious racist screed (complete with the n-word) to his eager followers. Kester is played by Albert Salmi, who was such a ubiquitous character actor in the ’60s that I’m surprised this is his first M:I appearance. Anyway, Kester’s daughter Eva (Nancy Black) informs him that there’s a “race traitor” in their midst, a government agent they capture and hang.

Peter Graves is showing off his equestrian skills again, for Jim gets the disc at a show-jumping ground from a fellow rider. It’s hidden in a haystack by a jumping fence — again with the flammable locations for the self-destructing discs! But “flammable” is the word, for Kester’s WPC is the most violent Neo-Nazi faction around, and he’s meeting in Germany with other international Neo-Nazi groups to unite them under his leadership and start a global race war. The mission is to discredit him and undermine the Neo-Nazi movements.

Jim sets Shannon up as a manager at the inn near Hamburg where the meeting is being held, while Jim himself takes the place of a real South African computer expert Kester has reached out to for help (no word on how they intercepted the real guy, who looks nothing like Jim). The others are basically responsible for tracking down the “secret weapon” Kester supposedly has to support his cause. There’s a setback when Eva catches Grant bugging Kester’s suite just before Kester arrives. Jim is fortunately there too, and is able to talk Kester out of shooting Grant then and there, but they lock him up to be the prey for a special “hunt” the next day.

Then Kester goes out to a freighter he’s owned for a dozen years, just sailed in from the Philippines. Max, Nicholas, and Shannon have already come onto the ship as customs inspectors, and here’s a blast from the past: Their cover was that they were looking for contamination by the Mediterranean fruit fly virus — a slightly garbled reference to the problems that the US and other nations had in the 1980s with infestations of the invasive “medfly” species (the actual flies themselves, not a virus), including a deliberate release of medflies in California as an ecoterrorist act in the summer of ’89, just before this season of the show. Anyway, Nicholas follows Kester and discovers his “secret weapon”: Horrifyingly, it’s a room full of young boys that he’s held captive on this ship since abducting them as infants, raising them to know nothing but his Nazi propaganda, the perfect Hitler Youth. They’ve been trained by Kester’s man Vogel (John Bell), who leads them in singing a Nazi song (a familiar one, but I can’t place it) in their sweet little boys’-choir voices, while Nicholas and Shannon look on in horror through a window. It’s really rather horrific.

Meanwhile, Kester talks to Jim about setting up a computer network to allow hate groups to communicate worldwide. Oh, for the days when that was still science fiction. Jim proposes connecting it to the world’s financial network, both because it’s the most secure and because it would let him set up a program to embezzle insignificant amounts from many banks and thereby steal a lot of money undetected. To make this work, though, the team needs to rescue Grant, who’s been strung up by his feet by Vogel and had a tracker put around his neck so the kids can easily find him — quite an unsporting “hunt,” though that’s the least of the things wrong with it. Nicholas and Shannon knock out Vogel and Eva, and Nicholas somehow has a Vogel mask all handy and intercepts the boys before they can shoot Grant full of crossbow bolts. Then they take the boys back to their cabin and Grant introduces himself as a friendly human being and begins to show them that what they’ve been taught all their lives is a lie. It doesn’t prove hard at all to change their minds once they’re faced with the benign truth.

So Jim is able to make the funds transfer successfully (or Grant is, doing it remotely so it looks like Jim did it), and all the Neo-Nazi leaders agree to put their financial info on the special cards he hands out. This will let the team bankrupt their organizations. And Eva almost escapes, but Shannon chases her down and recaptures her, while Grant and Nicholas-as-Vogel give the kiddies a lesson about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. So that night, when Kester proudly presents his Hitler Youth to the waiting Neo-Nazis, they begin singing a song about the Rev. Dr. King while Grant hijacks the video projection to show the “I have a dream” speech and clips of John and Bobby Kennedy, and Jim and Nicholas slip out in the tumult as the other, about-to-be-financially ruined Neo-Nazis turn violently on Kester.

Okay, so it’s hokey and unsubtle, but I love it. What Kester did to those children is probably the most horrific and sick thing any M:I villain has ever done, and it creates a sense of a more palpable threat from this group than you usually get from M:I villains. And while the racial message is kind of awkward, I love it that this becomes a story about rescuing and redeeming the children, about good ideas winning out over evil ones. It gives it a more optimistic feel than M:I episodes usually have. And seeing Nazis get their comeuppance never gets old. The climax reminds me of a line I wrote in Only Superhuman, about some of the things that Emerald Blair’s Freakshow gang did on behalf of persecuted transhumans: “They cracked the computer net of the Fourth Reich Neo-Nazi habitat, wiped their database, and replaced it all with endlessly looping video files of The Great Dictator, Casablanca, and The Producers.” I wonder if maybe I unconsciously remembered this episode when I wrote that.

New Sherlock Holmes essay on Locus Roundtable; Publication date revealed for “Butterfly’s Wing”

Announcements about two things what I wrote:

First, the editor of Locus Roundtable, the blog of the Locus Online webzine, invited me to write a column for him on whatever subject I wanted, and I submitted an essay comparing the two current Sherlock Holmes television series, “The Problem with Sherlock in a Post-Elementary World.” Its publication is a bit delayed so it’s not as timely as it was when I first conceived it, but at least it’s finally out there. Since I neglected to mention it in the essay itself, I want to thank fellow local author and Holmes expert Dan Andriacco for offering some useful information about Holmes’s screen history which I mentioned in the article.

—

Second, the folks at Buzzy Mag have informed me of the publication date for my novelette “The Caress of a Butterfly’s Wing,” which I announced back in April. The story is scheduled to go out on November 14, 2014. It’s already been through the first stage of editing, and I feel that editor Laura Anne Gilman’s story notes have helped me improve the tale considerably.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE (’89) Reviews: “Countdown”/”War Games” (spoilers)

“Countdown”: Written by Chip Hayes.

We meet religiously motivated terrorist Su Lin (Julie Ow) praying to a photo of her Dalai-Lama-like Holy One, who looks a lot like Nicholas in glasses and a pointy hat — oops, spoilers. A subordinate arrives in a truck with a stolen item, and when it turns out he peeked and saw what the item is, Su Lin kills him. Because it’s a French-made nuclear warhead. Jim has a one-sided code exchange with a mime in a park (praising his art, as if anyone would believe that), and the Voice on Disc tells him that Su Lin stole the warhead on behalf of General Xang Kai (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa in an eyepatch — IMDb calls him Vang Kai, but I’m going by the subtitles and the pronunciation). He’s one of several military strongmen ruling the fictitious and oddly Anglophone Asian country of Kangji (of course, all M:I foreigners speak accented English), and he plans to nuke the capital and blame it on America in order to kill off his competitors and seize absolute power. He got Su Lin to help him in exchange for a promise to rescind the Holy One’s exile. For some reason, Voice finds it necessary to describe Su Lin as “beautiful but deadly,” as well as encouraging Jim to stop the general’s “evil plan.” He’s in a melodramatic mood today. It’s also the first of three times in this act that she’ll be called beautiful or a beauty, though I don’t think she quite lives up to the hype.

The plan is to take advantage of Su Lin’s religious loyalties, but Jim warns the team that Xang Kai would kill her as casually as swatting a fly — and would do the same to any of them. But when Su Lin meets with the general and tells him where she hid the bomb, she points out that he won’t just kill her because he can’t know what plans for retribution she might already have in place. So she leaves intact — but Xang Kai tells his aide Major Chung (John O’Brien) to swap out her control keypad on the bomb for his own.

Su Lin plans to board a train to where the Holy One is staying. Nicholas rather crassly impersonates a Buddhist to convince a monk to tell him where that is, and Shannon arranges to make contact with Su Lin on the train, with Max running interference with Chung, who has orders to kill Su Lin if she seems to be making contact with anyone. The team rigs a track signal to make the train stop suddenly, and Shannon bumps into Su Lin and uses a knockout-needle ring on her. Su Lin wakes up in the hospital ward the team is using (they’ve convinced the hospital that they’re running an inoculation program), and is told she was in a train wreck that killed over a dozen followers of the Holy One. Grant plays a fellow patient, a mercenary who bonds with her in their mutual resentment of Chung (played by a masked Nicholas, who comes to threaten them both). He also uses the latest IMF gadget to digitally edit the general’s speeches to fake a news broadcast where he says he’s rescinding the Holy One’s exile so he can commiserate with the victims of the “tragedy.” Horrified that the general has tricked her into nuking her own religious leader, Su Lin convinces Grant to help her break out. The team contrives to let her escape with Grant, then track them to a shrine in the center of town,where the bomb is hidden. (It’s a shrine to past leaders, not the Buddhist temple.) Su Lin is dismayed to discover the keypad has been swapped out for a tamper-proof one she can’t disarm. Pulling at Grant’s lapels, just when it looks like they’re heading for a romance beat (since Grant is clearly into her), she exposes the tracker under his clothes, accuses him of being a spy for Xang Kai, wallops him good, and runs off screaming bloody vengeance against the general. Chung guns her down before Grant can catch up, and Grant grieves over her corpse. Hmm, I guess the “beautiful” part trumps the whole murdering-terrorist part.

So now the team needs a Plan B to get the general to deactivate the bomb. And it entails more crass manipulation of sincere believers, as Nicholas starts a rumor that the Holy One is at the shrine in order to get them to go there (right toward the bomb? Oh, nice, guys!), then briefly dresses up as the H.O. to make an appearance before the believers (complete with fake epicanthic folds — something I’d hoped they would’ve stopped doing by 1989). Jim has Grant use the video-editing software to make a tape of Su Lin telling the general that she’s stopped the bomb’s timer. This provokes Xang Kai and Chung to go to the shrine, where they find the bomb still counting down with minutes to spare, so the general is forced to enter his shutdown code. He and Chung conveniently incriminate themselves with their dialogue, which Grant’s bug broadcasts over the shrine speakers, leading to a people’s arrest of the bad guys and a “not with a bang but with a whimper” quip from Jim.

Okay, so there’s some cultural insensitivity and a few bits of silliness in this one, plus a labored attempt to set Su Lin up as a romantic interest for Grant, but mostly “Countdown” is a strong and effective episode, a solid M:I story with high stakes. It continues what’s evidently a trend this season to have the plans go awry and the team forced to improvise and adapt, but for once the adaptation led to a second clever caper rather than being an excuse for more conventional action storytelling, so it really feels like an authentic M:I story in the vein of the best of the original series. And it seems to me that the producers are building up Grant’s role to take more advantage of Phil Morris’s talent, since here he was in the key roleplaying capacity that would normally go to Nicholas. Morris continues to be the one cast member who gets the most chances to emote, and for once it’s not involving his father.

—

“War Games” is the last episode of the revival to be written by original series veteran Walter Brough. General Szabos (Kevin Miles) of the Eastern European socialist republic of Sardavia (as if M:I-verse Eastern Europe weren’t crowded enough already) is conducting war games, but a junior officer (later revealed to be a US agent) is asking questions about the amounts of live ammunition and such, suspecting there’s more going on. So Col. Garva (Lewis Fiander) contacts Szabos, who arranges to have the officer’s jeep blown up. Jim gets the briefing in a restored Rolls, learning that Szabos is using his war games as a cover for an impending invasion of neighboring Bucaraine — against the wishes of his own superiors in the Politburo — and has ballistic missiles ready to launch. The team has very little time to prevent the war. Fortunately, Szabos, like his “war hero” Hitler, is nuts for astrology, and that’s Shannon’s way in.

Jim and Nicholas play good cop/bad cop as UN observers of the war games (Jim sympathetic and appeasing, Nicholas suspicious and hostile) so they can get pictures of the big board in the war room and scans of the circuitry behind it (Nicholas’s pen is a digital camera, an advanced technology for 1989). Grant is their driver. Max tries to break into the military compound to find the hidden missiles, but an alert captain catches him promptly and interrogates him. Surprisingly, this turns out not to be part of the plan, but somehow Max and Grant already have the necessary tech to break him out (Max has a beacon in his coat button, and Grant has a tracker that turns into a gun that fires an explosive round and blows out the cell wall). They almost catch Grant when he hides Max in the limo’s trunk, but Max has hidden behind a false panel by the time the soldiers get the trunk open.

Meanwhile, Shannon is playing a countess related to the deposed royal family, and the haughty persona Jane Badler puts on was like seeing her play Diana from V once again, albeit with a faux accent. She makes subversive comments and insinuates knowing what the murdered officer/agent knew about the invasion plans, in order to get herself arrested, and then impresses Szabos with her astrological technobabble, convincing him that his auspicious horoscope was the result of his astrologer’s incompetence. I think this is mainly just to get his attention, since the key thing she does is to say the agent disarmed the missiles, so that Garva will go check on them and the team can follow him to them, whereupon they disarm the missiles themselves. Then Grant sneaks in behind the big board in the war room and rigs it so he can send false orders to the troops, making them retreat, while showing Szabos the invasion he wants to see. The one hitch is that Szabos has had Shannon taken out into the field to be a target. Max rescues her, but their jeep is being targeted, until Grant changes the target to Garva’s bunker. So much for Garva.

Grant makes the missiles self-destruct, but Szabos believes he’s successfully bombed the enemy and advanced across the border, and with the Rubicon crossed, he makes a statement on TV ordering the Bucarainians to surrender and promising to overthrow the Sardavian Politburo — who of course promptly come to arrest him while the team saunters away.

Not a bad one — a pretty classic type of M:I caper, and continuing the season’s practice of having things genuinely go wrong with the plans. That hasn’t happened this often since season 5. Still, I’m getting a little tired of Shannon being the damsel in distress. And Szabos is too broad a character, too irrational and easily fooled. On the other hand, while this borders on being the first supernatural-themed con of the season, there’s no attempt to use technology to fake supernatural occurrences, just a lot of empty talk about horoscopes that doesn’t really accomplish anything (just like actual astrology!). And John E. Davis finally deigns to work a few more notes of “The Plot” into his score, though it’s still just snippets.

Why do we still call them phones? Redux

Here’s a probably incomplete list of the things I’ve done with my new smartphone since I got it two weeks ago:

Browsed websites
Looked things up on Wikipedia, IMDb, and elsewhere, by both typing and voice entry
Posted to Facebook/checked status
Checked mail regularly
Received a couple of texts from the wireless carrier
Taken a few photos
E-mailed a photo to my laptop
Recorded a test video
Listened to portions of my complete Star Trek: TOS soundtrack collection while out on walks (and this morning used it to drown out that annoying Whitney Houston song my neighbor blares every so often)
Used the voice recorder to dictate writing notes to myself
Checked the weather regularly
Entered upcoming appointments and events in my calendar
Used GPS navigation to direct me from the movie theater to the grocery store
Used the calculator to compute my gas mileage
Used the astonishingly bright built-in flashlight
Downloaded a magnifying-glass app
Downloaded and played a chess game and a bubble-zapper game
Used the front-facing camera as a shaving mirror (or tried to — might work better if I magnified the image)
Used the memo pad to remind me how much I spent at Taste of Cincinnati
Checked the bus schedule online after Taste of Cincinnati
Watched a couple of short YouTube videos

Here is some of what I have not yet done with my smartphone as of this writing:

Made a phone call
Received a phone call

Admittedly, I’m not the most social person around, so going two weeks without making a phone call isn’t unusual for me. I’m sure I’ll get to try out that function soon, since I’m planning to visit family in Detroit later this month. But I still find it amusing that we still refer to these powerful computer/data interface/multimedia devices in our pockets as “phones” when that’s become such a small part of their function.

Indeed, that’s one reason I decided it was time to upgrade to a smartphone, even though it meant spending more money. Sticking with the cell phone I had was a false economy, since the only thing it did that wouldn’t incur an extra data fee was making phone calls, which I hardly used it for anyway, so I was basically spending nearly 50 bucks a month for something I only really used to dictate notes to myself. (Its music player tended to glitch and freeze up the phone, apparently a systemic problem with that model, so I couldn’t use it for that either.) Now I’m spending a certain amount more per month, but I’m getting immensely more value out of it. (Unfortunately it has unlimited talk and text but a finite data limit per month — I wish it were the other way around, since I don’t need the talk and text that much.)

I also haven’t yet figured out how to get it to sync files (i.e. audio, video, photos) with my laptop when it’s hooked up, since the software I downloaded isn’t working the way it’s supposed to. There’s a number I can call where they can fix that, but I haven’t gotten around to that yet. In the meantime, I’ve purchased a MicroSD card with 16 gigabytes to replace the 2GB one I’ve been using, so that I’ll be able to copy and save all my music CDs to it. (Now if only I had a way to do that with my old LPs and cassette tapes.)

I’m particularly glad to have a working portable music player at last. I haven’t had a reliable one of those since the days of the Walkman. (The portable CD player I had didn’t have any kind of strap or carrying case, which was awkward unless I had my backpack with me, and it didn’t handle being jostled well.)

One drawback of the smartphone is that it uses a lot of power. I have to recharge it daily, much more often than my old phone. But then, I’m using it so much more. I guess it’s the same as it was with the fee — I didn’t expend as much before, but much more of what I did expend was wasted.

Although it will help if I remember to turn the flashlight off when I’m done with it…

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE (’89) Reviews: “The Princess”/”Command Performance” (Spoilers)

“The Princess”: Written by Ted Roberts. We open with Grigor Caron (Robert Coleby) getting intel on the title princess from a nervous man who feels guilty about betraying his country — there’s some interesting dialogue and characterization bits in their exchange. Caron pays him with money in a briefcase that, predictably, blows him up. Jim gets the disc from a rowing coach who directs him to a racing shell, and we’re informed that the target is the princess of the tiny Monaco-like principality of Valence (pronounced the French way), an American ambassador’s daughter whose influence has persuaded her husband the prince to pull away from the Warsaw Pact and propose a US alliance. An Amurrica-hatin’ resistance called the Red Guard, led by Caron, intends to assassinate the princess as part of a terror campaign to prevent this. In the briefing, for once, Grant seems to be hearing things for the first time along with the rest, though Nicholas has some knowledge about Valence already. The princess refuses to leave the country because she’s sponsoring a film festival, so the team goes in as a film crew.

While movie-producer Jim and starlet Shannon schmooze at the festival, Nicholas — inexplicably using his full real name — makes contact with Caron and convinces him that he and Grant have a plan to mount an armored car heist. Since the Red Guard bankrupted itself hiring their assassin (and blowing up all that money in the teaser), this is an effective lure. They stage an actual armored car heist, orchestrated to ensure the guards are unharmed by using knockout gas, and then when Nicholas and Caron drive off in the hijacked car, the gas “accidentally” comes on again. Caron wakes up in the interrogation-cell set at Jim’s rented studio, and Jim and Max play brutal interrogators who “kill” Nicholas before Caron’s eyes, getting him to confess that he hired a noted international assassin called Coyote, whom he only knows through his female contact. Concluding they’ve learned all they can, Jim reveals the scam to Caron and has him taken away for the authorities to find. (I was surprised they didn’t just fake the entire armored-car heist, but I guess they wanted to implicate him in a real heist attempt to get him put away.)

Which leaves the new problem of identifying Coyote, and the beginning of the episode’s second caper. Two for the price of one! Grant researches Coyote and finds that though “he” leaves no evidence behind, all his assassinations are committed before large crowds; Coyote loves an audience. They decide to appeal to the assassin’s ego, so producer Jim announces that he’s abandoned the film he’d been touting before in order to do a new project based on the true story of the assassin Coyote — including the killer’s next crime, which writer Grant tells the press he’s been able to predict given all he knows about Coyote. A woman is watching — the “contact,” whom I’d already guessed was the real Coyote (Dale Stevens) — and she decides to pay them a visit and find out how much they do know.

Oddly, even though this whole thing was bait to lure in Coyote, Jim and the team are ill-prepared to respond when she takes the bait. It’s unclear what they actually planned to do, or why they didn’t anticipate that Coyote would be there waiting when they got back to their rented studio. The assassin prepares to shoot Jim, but Shannon senses the intruder and shoves Jim aside, taking the hit. Coyote then gets away without anyone seeing her. I was unclear on whether this was part of the scheme, but the next act begins with Shannon in the hospital and the team out of character, so somehow they really let the bad guy get ahead of them. Maybe it’s because they were forced to improvise, but Jim is usually so many steps ahead that this lapse is surprising. Anyway, Shannon’s in bad shape, so she can’t tell the team how she detected the intruder’s presence in a darkened room — except to mutter one word, “Camion.” I’d already guessed that Shannon smelled the assassin’s perfume, but I had the advantage of already knowing it was a woman. Grant and Max figure out that Camion is the name of that perfume through an Internet search — or since this was 1989, I guess it’s supposed to be a search of IMF Research’s database.

So Grant rigs a laser spectrometer to identify the unique chemical signature of that perfume interacting with Coyote’s skin chemistry (which he knows because she left some transfer traces on the things she touched at the studio). The plan is to scan every woman at the princess’s big speech — but gasp, Coyote is disguising herself as a male waiter! That’ll teach you to profile, Grant. But Grant catches a lucky break, since the “waiter” steps into the path of his spectrometer beam after planting a bomb on the podium. So Grant fingers her, the team chases after her, she jumps out a window, Grant throws the bomb out the same window, and she’s a victim of her own bomb — though her eyes are open and moving when we last see her, so it’s unclear whether she’s supposed to have died or not. Then there’s a very silly ’80s-ish jokey tag scene with Shannon and the team in the hospital.

Although there were some conceptual problems here, I really liked this one. There was some nice dialogue writing and characterization (still limited by today’s standards, but something), and I like these formula-breaking episodes where the team faces real crises and needs to adapt and improvise — even if lately the trend has been to use those as excuses for conventional action-adventure stuff, which was somewhat the case here. I would’ve preferred it if the second caper had actually played out longer rather than falling apart after the first move. Still, I found it enjoyable and effective. There was even a nice bit of music from Davis for a change, accompanying the parallel scenes of the assassin preparing her bomb and Grant explaining his spectroscope.

—

“Command Performance”: Written by Robert Brennan, but bearing similarities to one of my favorite first-season episodes, “Old Man Out.” A dissident runs from troops in uniforms bearing a generic swastika-esque insignia that I could swear I’ve seen in past M:I episodes, and manages to hide a gold cross he’s carrying before they shoot him. He gets to a church and tries to pass a message (the name David and the number 1769) to Father Thomas Vallis (Ivar Kants, previously appearing in last season’s remake of ‘The Legacy”), a dissident leader. Vallis is arrested by the head of the security police, Defense Minister Savitch (Grigor Taylor, who looks kind of like a cross between Sean Patrick Flanery and Henry Darrow), who wants the location of the cross.

Back in San Fauxsisco, Jim gets the disc from a flower vendor. Savitch’s nameless Baltic country is democratic, but Savitch’s secret police has carried out a reign of terror under the clueless prime minister’s nose, and the cross — a relic called the Cross of St. Boniface — hides a microchip containing proof of his atrocities (how this happened or how the IMF found out about it is unknown). The mission is to free Vallis from a mountaintop fortress prison and expose Savitch. Jim’s plan involves infiltrating a circus that will be giving a command performance for the PM in a few days (he basically blackmails the owner into letting him join), and will also involve a helicopter that Max says is like the one he flew in ‘Nam. Wait a minute, I thought Max was too young for Vietnam but mounted a rescue mission to save his POW older brother. Maybe that’s what he meant — that he flew the chopper during the rescue — but that isn’t what the line implies. Meanwhile, by a staggering coincidence, the world’s greatest expert on the Cross of St. Boniface just happens to look exactly like Nicholas with a cheesy goatee and gray temples, which lets Nicholas get into Savitch’s circle without the need for latex.

Jim makes several phone calls to Nicholas, whose phone Savitch’s paranoid henchman Braun (Nicholas Bell) has bugged, and that leads Savitch to the circus to meet him. The idea is to set Jim up as a relic hunter searching for the cross. Shannon plays Jim’s unhappy wife (talk about your May-September romances) and basically uses her cleavage to catch Savitch’s eye, while making it clear she’s not particularly loyal to hubby, so that she can later pass Savitch fake info about where the cross is hidden and also trick out his phone with an interactive recording of Nicholas speaking in Savitch’s voice. Savitch is a violent man, using a knife to cut a couple of buttons off of one of Shannon’s few tops that don’t display her cleavage (although we get one hell of a closeup as the buttons come off), and forcing a kiss on her — though fortunately this is commercial TV so a forceful slap is enough to dissuade him for now.

Meanwhile, Grant and Max climb up the studio cliff toward the matte-painting fortress (in case I haven’t made it clear, the special effects on the revival are kind of lame), using a fanciful sci-fi “disruptor” device that slices through stone, and having to dodge some Indiana Jones-ish deathtraps. Nicholas uses a forged letter and the phone voice thingy (see last paragraph) to get Braun to let him in to see Vallis, where he knocks out Braun, lets in Max and Grant through the hole they’ve cut in the wall, and helps the father escape in Braun’s uniform, while putting Braun in Vallis’s cassock and a mask of his face. Obviously Nicholas is setting up Braun to be shot by Savitch (and he is, once Savitch has retrieved the fake cross), but the priest seems to have no objection to this. He and the team later figure out that the dead guy’s message was referring to verses 6 and 9 of Psalm 17, which was a really, really obscure clue to the fact that he’d hidden the cross in a statue with wings. Once workmen Grant and Max retrieve the cross, they just have to get out of the country even though Savitch has closed the borders.

And they choose to do it right under Savitch’s nose, probably to provoke him into Gestapo tactics in front of Clueless Prime Minister so he’ll get a clue. Jim causes the ringmaster to lose his voice so he can take over. (When the circus owner asks Jim what he knows about being a ringmaster, Jim replies, “I know more than you could imagine, my friend.”) Then Grant, Nicholas, and Vallis dress up as clowns and they and Shannon get lifted up out of the tent as part of the clown routine, getting out to the helicopter Max has hijacked for their escape. Vallis drops the cross, but Jim retrieves it with Savitch close after him, and they get to the choppah and fly away.

If this was meant to be a reworking of “Old Man Out,” it wasn’t handled nearly as well. The circus angle seemed rather random, and the escape was quite inelegant compared to the one in the original episode. The matte-painting prison fortress with its B-movie death traps felt kind of tacked on too. And Savitch is such an impulsively violent and cruel man that it’s hard to believe he could’ve kept his brutal tendencies hidden from the prime minister for any length of time. All in all, and throwing in the sex-appeal angle with Shannon, this felt like an exercise in flash over substance. It had its moments, but wasn’t very smart or subtle.