Christopher L. Bennett's Blog, page 68

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE (1988) Reviews: “The Haunting”/”The Lions” (spoilers)

“The Haunting”: Written by Michael Fisher.

We open with Parker Stevenson burying a young woman’s body on a beach and flashing back to murdering her at an amusement park. That’s the whole teaser. Afterward, the episode opens oddly: Jim is already at that amusement park, supposedly in Honolulu, when he gets the disc briefing. Umm, did he get another disc telling him to go there? Or did he happen to be on vacation in the area and thus available when the IMF needed him? Anyway, the mission is to prove that Stevenson’s character, bearing the ridiculous name Champ Foster, committed the murder, the latest of several he’s suspected of — something the police can’t prove due to a lack of evidence, as well as the influence of his rich and domineering mother Victoria (Janis Paige). The victim was Princess Jehan, daughter of the leader of “an oil-rich emirate state” (ahh, good old Voice and his circumlocutions to avoid naming countries), and said emir is threatening to back out of important oil price talks if the murder isn’t solved in three days.

In light of the mission, the whole “If any of your IM Force are caught or killed” line is rather bizarre. Why would this mission be sensitive enough to require the government to disavow involvement? They’re just trying to solve a murder that took place on United States soil. Surely the emir would be grateful if he knew the American government had helped bring his daughter’s killer to justice. This just doesn’t seem like a job for the IMF.

The team joins Jim in (Australia pretending to be) Honolulu for the briefing scene as well. The plan is to take advantage of Victoria’s spiritualist leanings and stage a seance wherein they’ll catch the conscience of the Champ. Great — the third time in just nine episodes they’ve used a supernatural con. It’s already getting old.

So let’s see. Max insinuates himself into Champ’s life as a fellow sociopath who learned about him through a shared psychiatrist and intends to extort money from him in exchange for information he’s picked up about the police investigations into Champ. Tony Hamilton does a pretty good job as a menacing weirdo, but it’s hard to see how his role dovetails into the overall con, unless it’s to get Champ paranoid about the cops closing in. Nicholas plays Jehan’s sheikh brother, who insists that his sister had a prophetic gift, predicting her death and her return on her impending birthday. This gets Victoria on the hook, especially when Jim plays a mentalist at a party (after the team waylays the scheduled performers by stealing their truck, alas) and pretends to get a harrowing vision from Jehan. Grant then swipes the undeveloped party photos from the drop-off photo developing kiosk (remember when those were all over the place?) and uses a high-tech gizmo to superimpose an image of Casey-as-Jehan (no mask, just hair and wardrobe) onto the undeveloped film before returning it to the kiosk. Then they knock out Champ and let him wake up at the now-closed amusement park, where Casey-as-Jehan calls to him from a  rooftop and disappears before he gets there. I guess this was to help sell the idea of her return from beyond. Other than this, Casey’s only role in the episode is to tag along with Grant so he can give exposition to her about his gadgets. It used to be that the exposition would be given in the opening briefing and the gadget setup would happen mostly wordlessly. This episode is taking a number of liberties with the formula.

And I have to throw in a digression about the photo-booth scene. When Grant retrieves the bag containing the negatives and reads the label, it says “YACHT CLUB FIRST THING IN THE MORNING PLEASE”. Including the quotation marks. Why the hell would anyone put quotation marks on a note like that? I see this all the time in TV and it frustrates me — quotation marks around text that nobody would put in quotation marks, like newspaper headlines. I figure that what must happen is that the scriptwriter puts the text in quotation marks in order to say “This is what you should print on the sign” and somehow the art department doesn’t realize the quotes aren’t meant to be part of the actual sign. It’s bizarre that nobody catches these things.

Anyway, there’s a bit where Max pretends to kill Grant, who was a cop who was getting too close, but again I’m not sure of the point. The key to it all is the seance, where Grant’s trickery convinces Victoria that Jehan’s ghost is there, and a hologram projector generates a midair image of a button from the jacket Champ wore on the night of the murder, a button that Casey cut off earlier to make Champ think it fell off when he strangled Jehan. So he rushes to the place where he buried her to dig her up and find the button, and the cops are there to arrest him (so it wasn’t a secret government-deniable mission after all, since the team must’ve brought in the cops), and that’s about it.

I dunno, this one just doesn’t do much for me. I don’t see why this is an IMF mission and I don’t see what purpose most of the scam served. If anything, I’d think that making Champ worry the cops were onto him would make him less likely to dig up the body rather than more likely, since he knew that nobody else had any idea where it was. Also, the plot point about his domineering mother dictating his life, which was stressed in the disc and briefing scenes, had no real relevance to the story. It just doesn’t hold together well.

Not to mention that, for a story set in Hawaii, it was implausibly devoid of Asians and Pacific Islanders, except for a couple of extras and the Fosters’ houseboy who spoke in broken English. For the second time, the “modern” revival of the series features more blatant racial stereotypes than the ’60s original. (Although I must say that Thaao Penghlis, who’s of Greek ancestry, makes a much more convincing Arab sheikh than, say, Martin Landau or Leonard Nimoy would have.) Musically, John E. Davis’s score is nothing to write home about. Oh, and the seance is conveniently accompanied by a thunderstorm illustrated by what must be some really old stock shots of animated lightning. It feels like cheating to have nature itself conspire in setting the mood for an IMF scam, rather than having the team set it up. And they’re lucky all that ionization in the atmosphere didn’t disrupt Grant’s control signals to the hologram generator and other gadgets. Heck, I wish it had. This was a standard, formulaic M:I episode of the type where nothing ever goes wrong for the team. And there wasn’t enough else going on to generate interest in any other way. This is the poorest episode yet of the new series.

—

“The Lions”: Teleplay by David Phillips, story by James Crown.

In the stock-footage Himalayas, in the Tibet-like country of Bajan-Du, we see Ki (James Shigeta), brother of the late king, conspiring with his security chief Jaru (John O’Brien) to swap out a set of golden lion statues from the temple for fakes. The statues are a puzzle each new king must solve (reminiscent of the season 3 episode “The Heir Apparent”), and failure to solve it will trigger a death trap (which Ki and Jaru use to skewer a hapless monk who stumbles upon them). The fakes are weighted like loaded dice to make the puzzle insoluble. As we learn in Jim’s briefing (which he gets at the San Francisco Zoo, supposedly), Ki opposes his brother’s modernization and Western ties (favoring traditionalism and “Eastern alliances”) and intends to ensure that his brother’s half-English, Western-schooled son Mikos, or “Mike” (Jeremy Angerson), is killed by the test so he can claim the throne. The team’s mission is to stop Ki and ensure that Mikos gets a fair chance. Because of course Westernization is always good and traditional non-Western values are always bad, right? In the briefing, Casey even uses the word “primitive” to refer to the Bajan-Du people’s ancient tradition. Ouch.

The briefing scene is another one that doesn’t quite get the point of those scenes in the original series. It’s not about the team reviewing the plan they’ve already made and tantalizing the audience with glimpses of the specific devices and schemes they’ll use — it’s Jim, Nicholas, and Grant briefing Max and Casey for the first time on what they need to accomplish, with no discussion of the method beyond what the team’s covers will be. There’s even a bit where Grant receives some important bit of info (I guess via computer) during the briefing itself.

Jim goes in as the new tutor for Prince Mike, because of course his mumsy insists he get a proper, superior Western education. Despite the uncomfortable ethnocentrism, this is actually rather engaging, because it lets us see Jim bonding with the teenaged scion, trying to offer what guidance and encouragement he can, and having to debate with himself whether to give the boy the answer to the puzzle once he and Grant figure it out. We so rarely get to see the IMF team members developing genuine bonds with anyone on their missions, and it’s nice to see. Mike’s mother (Diane Craig) even figures out that Jim isn’t what he appears, but he assures her that he’s there for her son’s benefit.

Nicholas plays an agent of the company that insures the golden lions, demanding to be shown the specifics of the security system so he can later show Grant and Max how to break in. Casey plays a reporter who hints her interest in Ki is more personal than reportorial, but whom Nicholas insinuates is not what she appears. This is one of the few times Casey is called on to play the seductress, and while it’s perhaps a sign of progress that that’s not the female lead’s principal role anymore, I have to say that Terry Markwell is pretty bad at it. She looks nice, but that’s about the only thing she brings to the seduction game — no charm, no sultry voice, no alluring expressions. She flirts in the same tone she’d use to discuss the weather. (Well, sometimes discussing the weather is flirting — cf. “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” — but you know what I mean.) She’s kind of the opposite of Barbara Bain, who was only moderately attractive to look at but could be intensely alluring when she chose to be.

Grant goes in Topkapi-style, lowered from the ceiling on ropes, much like his father did in “Doomsday” and anticipating Tom Cruise by seven years. He plants some kind of devices on the fake lions — amusingly, between their hind legs. Meanwhile, Nicholas knocks out and impersonates Jaru in order to frame him for taking a payoff from Casey to swap the statues back. This provokes Ki to restore the real statues, thinking they’re the fakes (and of course he kills a confused Jaru for his alleged treachery). Prince Mikey now has a fair chance.

Jim figures out the solution to the puzzle straight away, and disappointingly, he tells the audience. I’d already figured it out myself at that point: The five statues represent the five virtues of manhood and must be placed in order of their importance, and the answer is that they’re all equally important and must be placed together. Which is also kind of the obvious solution to the matter of maintaining the physical balance of the temple platform. So it’s not really that much of a puzzle. Still, it would’ve worked better dramatically if Jim had left the solution unspoken and Mikos had been the first one to spell it out aloud. Of course, he does figure it out… and what happens next is kind of inexplicable. You’d think that Mike’s non-deadness would prove to Ki that the lions were the real ones and he’d been duped. Indeed, Mikos’s success prompts him to run to his safe and check the lions held there — the fakes which Jim has now melted by activating Grant’s statue-crotch attachments (that’s one hell of a chastity belt!). Which somehow convinces Ki that Mikos has destroyed the real lions, so he comes back to the temple accusing Mikos of blasphemy and treason, then declares the statues on the temple to be fakes, picking one up and getting skewered when the balance is broken. Umm, what? None of that made any sense. There’s no way Jim could’ve predicted he’d react that way to the melting of the fake lions, so why were they melted at all? Wouldn’t it have been better to, say, have him followed back to his safe and catch him in the act when he opened it and revealed the fakes?

So this is quite an unbalanced episode, you could say. The ethnocentrism is irritating and the ending makes no damn sense, but otherwise it’s a pretty nice story. The sets and visual effects representing Bajan-Du are nicely done, aside from the obvious video matte lines whenever anyone’s standing in front of the window to Jim’s quarters. Ron Jones contributes a nice, interesting score blending Asian influences with the Schifrin themes. And it’s nice to see Jim forming an honest connection with the prince and his mother, actually having a personal stake in the outcome but having to trust in the boy rather than micromanaging every step of the problem as he usually does. There’s a lot of good here but a lot of problems too, especially at the end.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE (1988) Reviews: “The Cattle King”/”The Pawn” (Spoilers)

“The Cattle King”: This original episode, written by Ted Roberts, takes advantage of the show being filmed in Australia to do a story set in Australia. And boy, do they ever shove Australia in our faces. We open with a shot of an Aboriginal Australian using a spear to hunt kangaroos, then stumbling upon a sacred cave site which our villain, a cattle rancher named Matthews (David Bradshaw), is blithely desecrating to store a stockpile of stolen Stinger missiles that he’s selling to terrorists to pay off his enormous gambling debts (not unlike the villain in season 3′s “Doomsday,” though the episode has no other similarities to that one). Matthews blows up a tree that the aborigine had just run past, which I think was meant to convey that he killed the guy. Or maybe he was just afraid the tree had seen too much.

Jim’s mission, received on a boat in a marina, is to retrieve the missiles before he delivers them to his terrorist buyers (who are into shooting down passenger jets, apparently). The plan involves a familiar M:I gambit, taking advantage of the bad guy’s superstitions to manipulate him, with help from an Aboriginal shaman named Mulwarra (Warren Owens), whom Jim persuades to assist the team so they can retrieve the missiles before his band takes vengeance on Matthews for his crimes against their people. The portrayal of Aboriginal Australians as spear-carrying, chanting, bush-dwelling tribesmen in loincloths and body paint is pure stereotype and caricature, tantamount to the way ’60s American TV portrayed American Indians. It might seem surprising that a show actually made in Australia would depict its indigenes in such an unrealistic way, but apparently such stereotypes are quite pervasive in Australia itself, just as Native American stereotypes have long been in the US. The original M:I generally managed to avoid such gross stereotyping of other cultures, largely by avoiding their portrayal and focusing on Western countries, with rare exceptions like “Butterfly” (unlike, say, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., which seemed to go out of its way to find new cultures to stereotype and diminish). It’s sad to see its more modern revival actually backsliding from the original.

Grant contacts Matthews as a buyer for his remaining missiles to lure him to Sydney, then makes him wait in town for a couple of days, so that the compulsive gambler Matthews will go to the racetrack and meet Jim — playing a successful land speculator, courtesy of a planted magazine in Matthews’s suite — and Casey, playing an acquaintance of Jim’s who’s so impossibly lucky that she’s been barred from the track and the casino. She claims to be an anthropologist living among the aborigines and granted luck by a magic spell, which she demonstrates to Matthews by swapping out his personal “lucky” dice for loaded ones (at least while she’s throwing them). She takes him to see Mulwarra in hopes of getting his own luck spell, but Mulwarra (sincerely) tells him he’ll be cursed instead for his crimes.

Although it takes some help from technology which Grant and the others set up in Matthews’s suite, including speakers and a projector to play images and sounds of Mulwarra’s band chanting, a rigged balcony that catches fire and then gets completely repaired by the time Matthews brings the security guy up, and so on. There’s a neat bit later on where Matthews is stuck in the elevator and the doors open to reveal a vertiginous drop to the street and then Mulwarra’s haunting face — and only afterward do we see the team dismantling the projection equipment from in front of the elevator doors, an inversion of the usual M:I pattern where we see the setup before the execution. (Although it’s unconvincing that he could be standing just a foot or two away from the projection screen and perceive it as a 3-dimensional open space. But many M:I episodes have had muche the same problem.)

Anyway, all this is just to get Matthews in a superstitious state of mind. He plans to take advantage of Casey’s luck spell to win a fortune in Jim’s land speculations, but the team makes it look like Jim’s been arrested for fraud, and then Matthews finds Casey lying “dead” with a self-inflicted bullet wound. Now he’s not only desperate for money, but desperate to get the missiles off Aboriginal land so they’ll free him from his curse. So he accepts Grant’s terms to cancel the delivery to the terrorists and sell all the missiles to him straight away. Matthews brings the missiles in a truck and then swaps vehicles with Grant, but Grant’s rigged the car with more curse multimedia, so Matthews crashes in the middle of the outback, and the team leaves him to the mercies of Mulwarra’s band of stereotyped savages, to whom he sobbingly promises to return all of his land.

It’s unusual to see an episode where Casey has a lot to do and Nicholas and Max have relatively little. Terry Markwell shows she can deliver an adequate performance when actually given something to do. Nicholas gets to do a bit of roleplay to help set up the whole land-speculation thing, but Max serves little purpose beyond flying a helicopter, helping Grant and Nicholas set up gadgets, and doing a tiny bit of roleplay here and there. Ironic, since the episode confirms that Max is from Australia (despite his US passport in the main titles — but then, I guess I shouldn’t expect spies to have accurate passports). Nicholas’s Aussie accent goes unexplained, though.

Anyway, it’s not bad, but a little unfocused. I didn’t really figure out until writing this review that the point of all the superstition/curse stuff was to make Matthews want to get the missiles off sacred ground. It seemed more like padding than anything else. And the whole trope of using technology to fake supernatural phenomena was one that the original M:I came to resort to a bit too often, and my recollection is that the revival series used it quite a lot as well — indeed, this is the second time in only seven episodes. Still, one of my big problems with the trope in the original series was that they often used supernatural gambits to win over skeptics, when it would’ve made more sense to save them for marks who were already superstitious and primed to buy into the scam. That’s not a problem this one has.

This episode is the debut of composer John E. Davis, who will alternate with Ron Jones for six episodes and then take over as the sole composer for the remainder of the series (except for a single season 2 episode). Much of the score is a pretty typical ’80s-TV synth score, but it has moments that are rather impressive. It bugs me a bit, though, that it used a partial statement of “The Plot” to underscore Jim’s disc scene at the beginning. Really, “The Plot” is meant to represent the team’s machinations while the caper is in progress, so using it in the opening is premature.

As of this episode, the end titles begin using a montage of stills instead of the big “IMF” background — but they’re clips from the episode just ended rather than a generic montage of gadget close-ups like in the original.

—

“The Pawn”: Jim just rides a horse on the beach to get to the disc player on a random rock — maybe the horse was trained to know the route?? Anyway, the mission is unusually straightforward for this show: Help a Czech chess champion, Antonov (Bryan Marshall), defect from the Soviet bloc. This is the third M:I episode with a chess focus, after “A Game of Chess” (surprisingly enough) in season 2 and “Crackup” in season 7. And it’s the first one that doesn’t involve an implausibly portrayed chess computer. Billy Marshall Stoneking provides the script.

Antonov is being watched like a hawk by the hardnosed Major Zorbuskaya (Rowena Wallace), who knows he’s eager to defect after the killing of his protestor son — which she knows because she’s the one who killed him in the episode’s teaser, though that never really becomes relevant. Jim’s plan to smuggle Antonov out involves a magician named Joseph Rultka (Philip Hinton). Nicholas is surprised at this, which is odd, because his predecessors Rollin and Paris were both professional magicians. (And I found myself lamenting that they couldn’t have gotten Martin Landau or Leonard Nimoy in for a guest appearance.) But Max, as it turns out, studied magic in college, so he’ll be apprenticing with Rultka to play the magician in the caper. Once again, Max, who initially seemed to be the new Willy, has turned out to be better at filling Rollin and Paris’s shoes than their nominal successor Nicholas. Why do we need Nicholas again?

Okay, I exaggerate. For Major Zorbuskaya’s benefit, Nicholas establishes himself as part of the gaggle of reporters questioning Antonov about his upcoming “grudge match” with his bitter rival Bakunin (who, interestingly, is played by future Farscape writer/producer Justin Monjo). Jim plays a Texas talent scout looking to persuade Antonov to come play in Texas, making Major Z intensely suspicious of him, and convinced he isn’t as dumb as he’s playing. It’s not entirely clear what purpose Jim serves here, unless it’s to divert the major’s suspicion with his obvious pretense. Anyway, magician Max and his lovely assistant Casey (the most literal manifestation yet of the “hover helpfully in the background and look pretty” mode that’s been her primary role in most episodes so far) employ a gambit much like that used by Paris in season 4′s “The Falcon”: Get Antonov to volunteer for an illusion, make him disappear, and have a masked Nicholas take his place to divert Major Z’s attention while the real Antonov is smuggled to safety, along with his daughter, who’s coming in on the Prague Express. The plan is that Nicholas just has to keep up his impersonation for a couple of hours, though he has some difficulty convincing an old friend of Antonov’s who’s happened to show up. (By the way, we see Nicholas studying up on Antonov as he prepares for his impersonation, and this includes listening to an audio dossier narrated by Bob Johnson. I believe it’s the first time in the entire M:I franchise that we’ve heard Johnson’s voice during an actual mission rather than solely in the opening.)

But a bigger problem rears its head when the Prague Express is delayed 12 hours — the daughter won’t get in until tournament time! Nicholas will have to play chess at championship level! But Grant manages to rig an electric signal pulse in Antonov’s ring and deliver it to Nicholas, so he can use Morse code to communicate the moves Antonov picks as he watches the match on satellite TV from the train. But there are some hairy moments as the group on the train has to hide what they’re doing from the border guards, and Nicholas is forced to make a critical move on his own — and it’s brilliant! With a little more help from Antonov, fake Antonov wins the match and retires to his room — whereupon Jim tells the gaggle of reporters that there’s a press conference there, they burst into the room, and when Major Z herds them out, a now-unmasked Nicholas just walks out with the crowd (a gambit I’m sure I’ve seen before on M:I, though I can’t remember the episode). Oh, gaggle of reporters. You’re so predictable. Oh, and Jim tricks the Soviet guards into thinking that a bag full of defectin’ supplies belongs to Major Z, and they find the passport that Grant sewed into her coat lining earlier, and she takes a well-deserved trip to Siberia.

Well, at least until the Soviet Union falls about two years later. It’s kind of amusing to watch a defection story aired in 1989 and think that if they’d just waited around a couple more years, none of this would’ve been necessary. Except, well, Major Z made it pretty clear that she planned to send Antonov to a gulag in the immediate future in any case.

I think this is my favorite episode yet of the revival series. Although it does have a couple of plot oddities, a lot of it is very clever and fun. It’s the kind of episode I like, where the team faces real setbacks and has to improvise. It portrays chess more plausibly than the prior two chess episodes — except for an odd bit where Bakunin accused Antonov (the real one in the first match) of cheating, even though his protest seems to have more to do with Antonov just being distracting than with any recognized form of cheating in chess. Peter Graves gets to show off some of the comedic chops he developed in Airplane! and afterward. And Bryan Marshall is well-cast as Antonov — and, more importantly, as Nicholas playing Antonov. He resembles Thaao Penghlis enough in bone structure and speech rhythms that I can buy the conceit that Nicholas is behind the mask. And Ron Jones provides his best score yet for the series, the highlights of which are the action/chase motif under the teaser and an elegantly meticulous harp-like melody in waltz time accompanying the chess play. Beyond those, Jones goes for a more unusual and interesting sound than he has in previous episodes, and it’s nice to hear him stretching himself.

Cincy Library Comic Con report

Here I am at the Cincinnati Library Comic Con 2014 this afternoon:

(Thanks to library volunteer Lori for taking the photo for me.)

As you can see, I brought a variety of my books with me, but I still had most of them by the end of the event. Still, I sold a bit over a quarter of my stock and earned a decent chunk of change, with 20% donated to the library. Not shown in the photo: the one copy I had left of Spider-Man: Drowned in Thunder. Since this was mainly a comics event, my Spidey novel and Only Superhuman sold significantly better than the Trek titles, a change of pace from what I’m used to. It makes me think I should’ve tried harder to market OS at comics events back when it first came out.

The library had snacks available for the guests, including mini-quiches from Panera. I’m not usually a quiche eater, but I was hungry and I saw that they had a spinach-artichoke variety, so I decided to give it a try, and it was quite good, as one would expect from Panera.

Another thing that really impressed me was the material covering the table, that gold sheeting you see there. The texture had a good firm grip to it and it nicely held my books in that upright position. I usually have trouble keeping them from falling over when they’re like that, but they were all very well-behaved today, so I can only conclude it’s because of the tablecloth material. If I knew what it were called, I’d recommend it to all my conventions.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE (1988) Reviews: “The Legacy”/”The Wall” (spoilers)

“The Legacy”: A remake of Season 1, episode 15. Credited to Michael Lynn and Allan Balter, the latter being a co-writer of the original episode. Balter’s collaborator William Read Woodfield had his name taken off the episode.

The remake adds a rather pointless action teaser of a battle scene at the end of WWII in Europe, with some Nazi officers escaping the Allies with a truck full of gold. After the titles, Jim gets the briefing disc in a car in the parking lot of an amusement park. The mission is basically the same — find the gold before the four Nazi heirs do — but now the heirs are the grandsons rather than the sons of Hitler’s officers, the gold is now worth 5 billion on today’s market, and the cabal’s plan is not specifically to build a Fourth Reich but simply to fund terrorism and foster a new Nazi movement in Europe. Lalo Schifrin gives us his familiar “self-destruct” harp glissando one more time.

To a large extent, this is the most verbatim adaptation yet, except that Max takes the lead “customs agent” role that Dan Briggs (Phelps’s predecessor) played before. Tony Hamilton stands out as the greatest improvement on his original series predecessor; he has the build to be a plausible strongman like Willy, but is a more capable actor and better able to carry the roleplay as well. The postcard clue is simplified — Cinnamon deciphered it in the original, but here, Casey is left with very little to do, continuing the trend. The four scions meet in a church now, lighting candles and placing their postcards on the table, which is a bit more plausible than the rather easily deciphered chalk-drawing code of the original. Nicholas is the undercover man, like his counterpart Rollin in the original — but I have to say, the Nordic-featured Max would’ve made a much more plausible Aryan. Maybe they hewed a bit too closely to the original on this point.

A small change is that two of the other men give Graff (Judson Scott) their portions of the bank account number before Nicholas finally refuses to give his. Also, Nicholas shows visible alarm at learning of the numbers (that he doesn’t have). Rollin controlled himself better and adapted more swiftly. A more subtantial change comes when the team speaks of planting misleading information about Graff’s partying and gambling in a local magazine to get the other Nazis to question Graff’s motives for seeking the gold. But then it’s back to the original plot, with Casey “becoming royalty” (a role she doesn’t take to nearly as well as Cinnamon did) and having a simpler version of the “Baroness”‘s first meeting with the bank manager, here called Kubler (Shane Briant). But before then there’s a new scene where Grant uses a dial-up modem to hack the bank computer and plant her forged financial records. Ooh, so high-tech!

In the original, a real psychologist named Lubell was brought in to drug and hypnotize the bank manager, but here, Lubell is just an alias used by Jim, who handles the hypnosis himself with help from some techie frippery to give Grant more to do. Passing the matchbook with the numbers to Nicholas is simpler, for Casey just impersonates a hotel maid. After the foursome leaves for the bank, the rest of the team breaks into their suite, plants the magazine article about Graff, and taps into the electronic microscope the Nazis plan to use to read the microdot. This means the IMF team wil get the information at the same time the Nazis do, which changes the purpose of Nicholas pretending to lose his watch. Rather than a ploy to get Rollin out of the room so he can pass along the map, it’s part of the campaign to make the others suspicious of Graff’s intentions. (They also hypnotized Kubler into mentioning a failed investment of Graff’s.) As before, it also serves to let the IMF team get to the cemetery ahead of the bad guys. (And the parts of the map are engraved microscopically on their watch crystals, correcting the original’s scale problems with the microdot vs. the stamp-sized map pieces hidden in their watches.)

And here’s where the episode departs most from the original. There, they found the crypt of “Braun” (which was a pretty obvious clue they hardly should’ve needed a map for), found no gold, got into an overlong shootout with the bad guys, let Graff get away after they caught him (!), and accidentally found that the whole crypt was made of gold. Oh, and Dan got shot in the right lung but reacted like it was just a flesh wound. It was a flawed ending to an otherwise superb episode. Here, Grant uses a computer map of the cemetery to identify the crypt of “A. Lois,” which Jim recognizes as a play on Alois, Hitler’s father’s first name. Once they find the crypt empty, Jim figures out that the incongruous period is the trigger to a secret panel that reveals the gold in a cavern beneath. Grant uses Mylar to reflect the cave wall and hide the gold, and they leave the crypt gaping open for Graff and the others to find “empty.” Nicholas turns the others’ suspicion against Graff, and Graff, shockingly, shoots Nicholas and one of the others, before discovering the real gold. Penghlis plays his “death” very effectively, with a disturbingly sharp twist of his head when he’s shot, but we soon learn he had a bulletproof vest — and the team has called in the Swiss police to arrest Graff, handily contained in the crypt, for the murder he just committed. (Lucky for Nicholas that Graff didn’t go for a head shot.)

“The Legacy” was one of the strongest episodes of the original series, giving the revival a tall hurdle to surmount. Most of this remake is either a direct copy of the original or a simplification, and the performances of Penghlis and Markwell disappoint compared to their forebears. (Indeed, the more I watch Markwell, the more I wonder why I liked her so much in 1988. She’s not a very versatile or engaging performer, and I can see why they’ve used her so little.) But the final act is an enormous improvement. The shootout ending of the original didn’t really fit the show, but the psychological warfare the ’88 team uses to turn the Neo-Nazis against each other is a classic M:I gambit. One reason I like this story is because it was such an unusual challenge for the team, since they started out with almost no advance information and had to improvise at every step, rather than the usual formula where they’re ten steps ahead of the villains the whole time. That’s still true here, but Jim’s plan to discredit Graff makes the team less reactive. It’s the first remade episode where there’s more cleverness on display than there was the first time around. I never expected the revival to live up to the quality of an episode like “The Legacy,” but while it falls short on some levels, it’s actually managed to improve on it where it counts.

I can’t say the same for the casting, though. Up to this point, the remakes have mostly improved on the originals in their guest casts, but in this case, the new Graff, Judson Scott, isn’t nearly as convincing a menace as the original, Donald Harron. I wish the Graff role had gone to the actor playing supporting Neo-Nazi Brucker, Steven Grives. He would later play the lead villain in BeastMaster: The Series, and was a really excellent scenery-chewing bad guy there. But unfortunately he’s relegated to a minor role here. (It’s interesting to realize that both iterations of M:I were produced contemporaneously with iterations of Star Trek and that both drew on many of the same actors as well as directors, composers, and the like. And the same has more or less been true of the recent movie versions of the two sister franchises, with ST:TNG writing duo Ron Moore & Brannon Braga writing the story to the second M:I movie, and with J.J. Abrams and his collaborators, including Simon Pegg, starting out on M:I and then moving to ST. I guess the two are just destined to go together.)

The music is also a disappointment this time out. The score, credited to Schifrin, is rather ordinary and partly tracked; the last act largely reuses cues from Ron Jones’s two prior scores, and some of the Schifrin cues may be reused as well, or else are just rather generic. The original was tracked too, but mostly with Walter Scharf’s superb score to “Old Man Out.” This score just doesn’t compare. Which is a pity, since it’s Schifrin’s final original contribution to this series and thus to Mission: Impossible as a whole.

—

“The Wall”: This one looks like it started as a remake of Season 2, episode 15, “The Bank”, but I’m guessing the writers’ strike ended early enough that it could be reworked into an almost completely different story by scriptwriter David Phillips. Little remains except the basic premise of a villain pretending to smuggle people out of East Berlin but leading them into a trap in order to steal their money. In this case, Dr. Wolfgang Gerstner (Alan Cassell) pretends to show people a safe route across the no man’s land between East and West Berlin, but tips off his partner Col. Batz (Peter Curtin) to arrest or shoot them before they get across. Since this was made in the age of glasnost, not long before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the story establishes that there are peace talks underway, and since Gerstner and Batz depend on the Wall for their profits, they’ve kidnapped Ilsa, the teenage daughter of a leading West German negotiator, to force him to sabotage the talks. This raises the stakes for the team, should they decide to accept the mission to rescue the girl and bring down the bad guys (and you know they will). Six episodes into the new M:I, and we finally get a political/espionage mission instead of a crimebusting mission. Well, I guess stopping a Neo-Nazi movement is political, but this is the first time in the new series that the fate of nations has potentially hung in the balance.

The team members make their way across the border into East Berlin (now called that openly — none of the original series’ coy references to the “East Zone”), but Grant — who is totally rocking the trenchcoat-and-fedora look — uses an obviously fake passport to get himself arrested and brought before Batz, whereupon he reveals that he’s a Cuban officer working for the KGB. The team intercepts Batz’s phone when he calls his superior, and Nicholas imitates the man’s voice — another case of a different actor’s voice being dubbed over Penghlis, so there’s still no evidence that he can do accents. It’s an odd oversight in the casting, hiring a “master of disguise” who can’t disguise his voice without audio trickery. Anyway, Grant claims to be investigating a black-market smuggling ring, in order to spook Batz and get him to warn Gerstner to call off his operations. This is after Jim plays much the same role Rollin did in “The Bank,” a desperate man who comes to Gerstner begging for his services to get himself and his “daughter” Casey (who’s still mostly just hanging around Jim rather than doing anything of her own) out of the East. After getting Batz’s call, Gerstner is about to shoot Jim and Casey, but “Stasi officers” Max and Nicholas come in and arrest him (and Tony Hamilton actually can fake a German accent).

The team takes Gerstner to a fake prison set they’ve built in a warehouse and, given the time limit on negotiations, put him through a lightning-round interrogation, using drugs, lighting, and fake stubble on his cheeks to make him think days have passed. (Casey applies the stubble makeup. Hooray, she’s useful! Lucky break that he just looked at his “stubbly” chin in the mirror rather than feeling it). They let him see Stasi Max interrogating Jim and KGB Grant interrogating “Batz” (Nicholas in a mask), and “Batz” gives up Gerstner, prompting Gerstner to incriminate him in turn, with the team taping it. Then Jim stages a fight wherein he shoots the guards, and he and Casey start to run off with Gerstner — but he wants to collect his hostage Ilsa first, and mentions the address just before the drug they injected him with knocks him out. (Geez, guys, cutting it awfully close there.) Meanwhile, Grant shows Batz the first part of the doctor’s taped confession so he’ll send it to his superior, then swaps it out for a tape of the second part where Batz is named, getting the colonel to damn himself. Then at the warehouse, the team rescues the girl and gets away, but not before prompting Gerstner to flee into his own escape tunnel and — in the return of an old M:I tradition — get shot off-camera. And then the negotiator and his daughter are reunited on the other side.

There’s not much point in comparing this to “The Bank,” since they’re such different episodes. It’s an okay story, a pretty standard M:I caper but with a bit more relevance to then-current events than the original series ever got to have. Some parts of the plot seem overly convoluted or gratuitous, serving little purpose but to generate act-break cliffhangers; for instance, the hostage girl is in a medically induced coma, and when the team arrives in the warehouse, they set off a failsafe that cuts the power to her life support, threatening to kill her until Max restores the circuit at the top of the next act. I’m not sure why cutting the power would stop her heart if she’s just in a drug-induced coma and can recover quickly once the drugs are stopped. Cast-wise, there are no notable guests, and Terry Markwell and Thaao Penghlis still come off as the weak links in the main cast. But Phil Morris gets his best chance yet to show his stuff, and he and Hamilton are both reasonably impressive at their role-playing. Musically, we get a fully electronic score by Ron Jones, which, well, sounds a lot like you’d expect a fully electronic score by Ron Jones to sound. For me, while I think Jones did more interesting and distinctive things with electronics than a lot of his contemporaries did, I’ve never enjoyed it as much as his orchestral work. I’d call this a routine Jones score, nothing exemplary.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE (1988) Reviews: “Holograms”/”The Condemned” (spoilers)

First off, a couple more observations about the new main title sequence:

The main title sequence is longer, with a truncated, ten-bar reprise of the main melody added before the final sting, over the cast credits. The montage includes shots of the team members’ passports. The camera is zooming out as the image changes from one passport to the next, so varying amounts of text are visible, but here’s what I can discern:

All five team members’ passports claim they’re US citizens, and Nicholas was allegedly born in Massachusetts, despite Max and Nicholas having distinct Australian accents and Casey a subtler one. Casey’s date of birth is March 8 (year unseen), Grant’s is October 3 (year unseen), Nicholas’s is July 24, 1950. Jim was born in California on October 10, 1929. That makes Jim two and a half years younger than Peter Graves and Nicholas five years younger that Thaao Penghlis. Jim’s passport was issued January 27, 1987.

And now to our story.

—

“Holograms”: Sorry, folks, this is not a Jem crossover. It is, however, our first chance to see what the new M:I writing staff can do when not remaking an original episode. Robert Brennan is our writer this evening.

We open with an assassination brazenly committed while the victim is being interviewed. The TV reporter recklessly declares the victim dead seconds after the shooting. After the titles, we get stock footage of San Francisco, confirming that Jim still lives there (although the Australia-based filming means we don’t get actual footage of Jim in SF locations like we did in season 7). He trades code phrases with a street violinist on what’s probably meant to be Fisherman’s Wharf. Despite being a new episode, its setup closely parallels the original’s “Fakeout”: drug lord Col. Usher (Gerard Kennedy) is self-declared president-for-life of a nameless country, indicted in absentia by the US but kept immune from overthrow by his enforcer Duvall (William Zappa), who assassinated his only legitimate rival for the presidency. The mission is to neutralize Duvall and lure Usher onto US-controlled soil so he can be arrested. (The country is probably meant to be in the Caribbean somewhere, but it’s hard to tell since it’s so oddly Anglophone.) The show has reprised the original’s device of freeze-framing and showing the series title over a music sting (originally done at the end of the dossier sequence, now at the end of the disc sequence), though that serves little purpose now because the producer, writer, and director credits do not accompany it. The music sting here is basically the original one, with Schifrin himself providing this episode’s score.

The apartment briefing is handled differently than in the original show. There, usually, the team had already been briefed on the basics before we arrived, and we’d just see them going over the details one last time; it was clear they knew things we didn’t, and part of the suspense came from wondering what purpose the various devices and stratagems were meant to serve. Here, though, most of the team seemed to be learning the plan from Jim for the first time. The exception is Grant, who’s been working on a holographic system projecting a ghostly image of the new series’ first guest team member: Kieron Taylor (Gavin Harrison), the 15-year-old son of an IMF member, who’s going to play the role of the long-lost son that Usher believes he has (from an abused wife who left him and whom he believes was pregnant at the time) and has been obsessively searching for. This is one more indication that the IMF now has people working for it beyond the individuals Jim recruits. The new series is fleshing out the agency a bit more than the original did, a step toward the huge IMF bureaucracy of the Tom Cruise movies. Anyway, the plan is to lure Usher to a beach house on a US-controlled island by building a duplicate beach house on a neutral island where Usher is safe and then doing a switcheroo. I don’t much care for having the plan revealed up front like this; I prefer the old method where we just got hints.

Nicholas and Grant get in by impersonating a recently-arrested drug dealer and his bodyguard, there to sell Usher the ether he needs to boost his cocaine manufacturing. Grant rigs Usher’s bedroom with hologram projectors that, when it’s dark, create a midair image of Kieron doing a Princess Leia-style “Father, we need you” routine. (As usual in fiction, there’s no explanation for what the “hologram” is supposedly reflecting off of in midair.) This is a rehash of the gambit the team used in season 4′s “Phantoms” and season 5′s “A Ghost Story,” although the techniques used there were more intricate. Anyway, Usher (who already suffers from a congenital neurological condition giving him severe headaches) worries that he’s hallucinating, and Nicholas happens to mention that there’s an American neurologist named Dr. Quinn in the vicinity. Now, here’s where the script makes a mistake: They’ve perfectly set up Usher to invite Quinn and believe it was his own idea, but instead Nicholas takes the liberty of inviting Quinn — who of course is Jim — on his own. Sorry, wrong. The key to a con game (or so I understand it from fiction) is to make the marks think it was their own idea to do what you want them to. Make them think they’re being led and it’ll just make them suspicious.

Anyway, Dr. Quinn, Medicine Agent lets slip that he’s been treating a boy with an almost identical congenital condition (and the same rare blood type as Usher) on a nearby island, ferried there by a seaplane pilot played by Max. Duvall brings Max in and he tells Usher where to find the island, and it’s the neutral island where the team has built the fake house. There, Usher meets Kieron, who drops enough hints to convince Usher that he’s the long-lost son. (Casey briefly impersonates his ex-wife from a distance, but otherwise her only role in the story is to be Kieron’s chaperone, as well as his scuba partner for a trick earlier on where Kieron appeared before Usher in the flesh and then ran to the beach and swam off underwater so that Duvall couldn’t find him.)

Meanwhile, Nicholas is rigging the (oddly unoccupied) cocaine processing facility with explosives when he’s caught by Duvall, who’s been tipped off by the guy Nick’s impersonating. Duvall calls Usher back from the island. Grant sees that Nick’s been arrested and helps him knock out Duvall. Now, I always like it when the plan goes awry and the team has to improvise, but it feels like a cheat here, because apparently taking out Duvall and having Nicholas impersonate him was the next step in the plan anyway. (And having Usher called away at that point was apparently part of the plan too, since it lets Kieron relocate and the team’s helpers dismantle the duplicate house.) As Duvall, Nicholas tells Usher that he had the impostor killed, and that the US fleet is on maneuvers so he can’t take the boat back to the island. The only option is Max’s seaplane — and again the script makes the mistake of having Dr. Jim blatantly suggest the idea to Usher rather than just letting him think of it himself. You’d think Usher would be suspecting a trap by this point, since by now he knows that the man who brought in Dr. Jim was an impostor. But Usher is conveniently clueless and lets himself be led by the nose to the wrong island, where US authorities are there to arrest him.

This is a mediocre and flawed beginning for the revival’s original stories. It’s largely a rehash of tropes from older episodes, which is perhaps forgivable considering that they were all going to be remakes at first; perhaps this script grew out of a preliminary remake plan. But the greater problem is that the execution is awkward and lacking the subtlety which a proper con game should have. It shows a lack of understanding of the show and its approach. There’s also some really clunky expository dialogue, and a rather silly part where Usher soliloquizes to Dr. Jim about his deepest concerns and anxieties immediately after first meeting him and before he has any reason to trust him.

Still, the production succeeds where the writing fails. Kennedy is excellent as Usher, with a gravel-voiced performance reminding me of Kevin Conway’s Kahless from Star Trek: TNG, and showing a more sympathetic, almost touching side as he tentatively reaches out to the boy he believes is his son. The location filming made possible by the Australia-based production leaves the original show’s soundstages and backlots in the dust. And Lalo Schifrin provides an excellent score that reminds me at times of some of his work from the original’s season 3, while occasionally venturing into more modern territory (though I still suspect Ron Jones of arranging some of the synth ostinati in the second half). Schifrin also provides an original action cue which is basically an inversion of the main theme, and in the climax he does something only rarely done in the original, combining the main M:I ostinato with “The Plot” before shifting into a full statement of the main theme for the moment of triumph and the finale.

But the new main cast is still a little underwhelming. Nicholas is supposed to be playing an American here, but if he’s even attempting to do an American accent, then he’s doing it really badly. They really should’ve tried harder to cast actors who were good with accents. To be sure, the narrow repertoire of fake accents that Martin Landau and Leonard Nimoy were able to bring to bear wasn’t very convincing, but Penghlis doesn’t seem capable of faking an accent at all, short of having another actor’s voice dubbed over his own.

—

“The Condemned”: Remaking Season 2, episode 19. Teleplay by Ted Roberts and Michael Fisher, with the story credited to John Truman, a pseudonym for the original episode’s writer Laurence Heath.

This time there’s a lot of rewriting, although the basic plot is the same. The teaser shows former M:I regular Barney Collier (Greg Morris) at a cafe in Istanbul, where he’s arrested by the corrupt Captain Hamidou (Adrian Wright), a composite of the honest Mexican police captain and the criminal Constantine from the original episode. Apparently it takes Barney three months to get a message out about his arrest to the IMF — yes, this time it’s an official mission, while in the original it was a personal mission for Jim. He gets the assignment in a trailer on the beach, allowing for a couple of gratuitous bikini babes to walk by (in addition to the belly dancer in the cafe earlier). For some reason, the Voice is cagey and doesn’t tell Jim until the end that the wrongly condemned man he has to rescue is Barney. In the briefing, Jim suggests that Grant sit this one out since it’s too personal, but the young Collier insists on coming along. We learn that his mother passed away two years ago.

Jim convinces an honest underling of Hamidou (and one ambitious to be given back the prison governorship that Hamidou kicked him out of) to let him and Grant visit Barney — corresponding to the opening scene of the original, and giving Jim a chance to photograph the walls of the cell, which is an utterly awful, squalid place compared to the stark but clean cell in the original. Grant uses the photos to print out latex sheets duplicating the wall texture in three dimensions, which Nicholas and Max smuggle in wrapped around their legs during their priest impersonation (where they engage in some fun and well-played banter not present in the original). But they can’t very well have Greg Morris languish behind a fake wall for the whole episode like Kevin Hagen did in the original, so as soon as the “priests” return with the hooded executioner, and once the guard discovers the “empty” cell and runs off to sound the alarm, Max and Nicholas knock out the hangman, take down the fake wall, dress Barney in the hangman’s robe and hood, and escort him to freedom.

But they still have to clear Barney and bring down Hamidou. They need Barney to confront the woman who helped frame him, here named Lydia (Anna Maria Monticelli), but Barney’s in no condition after three months in that horrid cell, so Nicholas has to turn Grant into his father. This allows for a father-son exchange where Barney laments missing birthdays and important events in Grant’s life due to all his secret agenting, but Grant absolves him as, now disguised as his father, he tells him, “I wanted to grow up to be just like you.” Aww.

Casey tags along with Jim to investigate the home of the murder victim, here named George Stanton; since Cinnamon wasn’t in the original episode, Casey has no role of her own to fill. For the second week in a row, she’s pretty much a fifth wheel. She and Jim discover that Stanton and Hamidou stole a priceless royal necklace (rather than the original crown), then  get arrested by Hamidou (in place of being captured by Constantine). Jim plays private investigator again, and convinces Hamidou to go into a partnership to find the necklace and split its insured value. Meanwhile, Barney confronts Lydia and forces her to go to Stanton, who kills her like in the original. This time, instead of accidentally falling to his death, Stanton confronts and almost shoots Jim, then gets into a fight with Nicholas before falling to his death. To save time, Lydia lingers long enough to fill Jim in on the plot details the team had to figure out on their own the first time. In this version, Stanton faked his death in order to double-cross his partner Hamidou and get away with the necklace.

The endgame is much simpler than the elaborate remote-control car chase in the original. There, they had to make it look like a dead man was still alive in order to prove to the honest police captain that he’d faked his death earlier. Here, they have to expose the corrupt captain’s culpability in the crime. So they just lure Hamidou to Lydia’s cafe, where Barney confronts him (using the old mirror-in-the-door trick to avoid Hamidou’s bullets — three times in a row, since Hamidou has an amazingly flat learning curve) and gets him to confess to his acts of thievery and murder while the team tapes the whole thing. Seriously, the guy can’t resist incriminating himself repeatedly and in detail, which comes off as laughably contrived. All the team has to do is invite the honest cop and show him the videotape — after Barney “accidentally” tips Hamidou off that the necklace is in his cell, driving the corrupt captain back to the prison so he can be handily locked away.

The caper portions of this episode are a step down from the original. That was the first off-book mission we’d ever seen Jim on, a rare departure from formula in which the team had to improvise its tricks and solve a mystery on the fly (although, as I said in my review, their improvised tricks were implausibly elaborate and indistinguishable from their usual schtick). Not to mention the added challenge of proving that a man thought already dead was still alive even after he’d died for real. This was more of a conventional mission aside from the personal angle, and an easier problem to crack since there was still a living villain to extract a confession from after Stanton died. So on that level, it falls short. But it benefits from the personal angle, using the plot of Jim saving a friend as an opportunity to bring back Greg Morris (for his first of several guest appearances) and explore Barney’s relationship with his son. It’s Barney’s scenes with Jim and Grant that make the episode work.

Production-wise, we’re still getting good location work, although there are a couple of less-than-convincing digital matte paintings of the hilltop prison fortress and the Istanbul skyline. Ron Jones scores again, reusing the ostinato he added to “The Plot” in episode 2, but his score here doesn’t impress me as much as his previous one  – perhaps because I watched this just after watching the original, which was tracked with some of the old series’ best cues. We also get a shorter version of the main titles this time, leaving out most of the montage portion.

New interview on TrekCore

TrekCore.com recently interviewed me for their blog, and the article is now up. It covers Rise of the Federation: Tower of Babel and a bit about my future plans for the series, as well as the upcoming DTI: The Collectors eBook and my work in general.

You can read the interview here.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE (1988) Reviews: “The Killer”/”The System” (spoilers)

Huzzah! Netflix has finally gotten the first season of the 1988 Mission: Impossible revival series in stock, so I’m finally able to resume my review series after a gap of nearly two and a half years. Unfortunately they only have the first season at the moment, but that constitutes 19 of the revival’s 35 episodes.

The M:I revival series came about as a consequence of the 1988 Writers’ Guild of America strike, which fell during the time when the networks needed to develop scripts for the 1988-9 season. Desperate for material to film, the networks began looking around for pre-existing scripts they could reshoot. Paramount decided to revive Mission: Impossible, this time selling it to ABC rather than CBS, and filming it in Australia to save money. The initial plan was to remake episodes of the original series with new actors playing the original characters. But once Peter Graves was brought back to revive the role of Jim Phelps, it was decided that the remainder of the cast would play new characters instead. (Not that it really made much difference, since the characters were always pretty interchangeable.) The strike was resolved early enough that the recycled scripts could be revised, modernized, and adapted for the new series. For the remade episodes, I’ll be rewatching the originals for comparison and discussing what was changed in the remakes.

The new cast was as follows:

Peter Graves as Jim Phelps: The veteran Impossible Missions Force team leader, 15 years older than when we last saw him but otherwise unchanged.
Thaao Penghlis as Nicholas Black: The master of disguise, filling the shoes of Rollin Hand and the Great Paris.
Phil Morris as Grant Collier: The real-life son of Greg Morris playing the son of Barney Collier and filling the same tech-genius role.
Terry Markwell as Casey Randall: The femme fatale, replacing Cinnamon Carter, Dana Lambert, and the original Casey (no relation).
Tony Hamilton as Max Harte: The strongman, replacing Willy Armitage, but also a frequent roleplayer.
Bob Johnson as the Voice on Tape — now updated to the Voice on Disc. The only returning regular besides Graves.

Okay, we’ve been waiting years for this, so without further ado:

—

“The Killer”: A remake of Season 5, episode 1. Credited to the original author, Arthur Weiss, though given an uncredited rewrite.

The opening is completely new. This “Killer,” under the alias Drake (John DeLancie, just a year after his debut as Q on Star Trek: The Next Generation), assassinates a middle-aged man at a party, using a hallucinogenic dart that causes him to imagine he’s on fire and thus throw himself off a balcony. Seems a rather overcomplicated and unreliable murder weapon. But then at the funeral, we see Jim Phelps watching from afar, looking resolute. Lalo Schifrin is back to score the new pilot, and he introduces Jim with a soulful variant of the main title theme, modulating into a bit of “The Plot” (the motif used in every episode to accompany the execution of the team’s plans), then returning to a more resolute main theme statement as the teaser ends. (Notably, the teaser takes place in San Francisco, which was evidently where Jim lived in the final season of the original.)

The main titles feature a very ’80s-ish synth/guitar rearrangement of the main theme, and instead of giving us a montage of scenes from the current episode, they just provide a generic montage of clips of the cast and various spy gear and techie stuff (some taken from episodes, others staged for the titles). Notably, the match that lights the animated “fuse” is now held by Peter Graves himself rather than an anonymous hand (actually creator Bruce Geller’s) as in the original. And the “fuse” now runs across the lower portion of the screen rather than the middle. (The end titles are over a static “IMF” in a red computerish font, rather than the original montage of gadgetry.)

In the message-drop scene, Jim exchanges code phrases with a fisherman as in the original, but this time the fisherman offers some slightly stilted exposition about how the victim, Tom Copperfield, was a former team leader for the IMF and Jim’s personal protege, presumably sometime after the original series ended in 1973. (Might’ve been nice if it was a character we knew, so the death would have resonance, but that would’ve precluded that actor returning for a guest spot later on, so maybe they didn’t want to go there.) This hardly seems necessary, since the Voice delivers that same information moments later on the briefing disc. Yes, the old mini-reel-to-reel tape player has been replaced by a thumbprint-encoded black box that opens to reveal a keypad requiring a 3-digit code sequence, whereupon it releases a miniature optical disc (a fake technology at the time, but close in size to the Sony MiniDisc introduced 4 years later) that Jim places in a slot to activate it. There’s also a video screen (replacing the envelope of photos that used to accompany the tape) with a row of green LEDs over the screen that show the progress of the playback, plus a set of three status lights on the side: A green “Run” light while the message plays, a yellow light with a rectangular symbol for the self-destruct warning, and a red “Destruct” light over the 5-second countdown. And one more change: “Good morning, Mr. Phelps” has evolved to “Good morning, Jim.” Which could make it hard for new viewers to figure out what Jim’s full name is.

The mission is basically the same as before: Stop the assassin’s next killing and discover the identity of his employer, Scorpio. But we’re given less information. The focus is more on Jim’s vendetta and less on the dilemma of how to stop a murder when you don’t know the who, when, where, or how.

We move to the revival series’ sole use of the classic dossier sequence (not seen since season 4), albeit in updated form, and scored by a variant of Schifrin’s original dossier-scene music. Jim’s (new IMF-provided?) apartment comes with a keyboard hidden in the coffee table and a big screen that unfolds from a decorative pillar. These replace the binder of dossiers from the original, and the video dossiers come with narration by Bob Johnson, offering us brief backstories for the new team members — more than we ever got for the originals. Nicholas Black is a drama teacher at “an eastern university.” Casey Randall is “a top designer on three continents” who helped the IMF catch the terrorists who murdered her husband and has continued to freelance for them. (Same problem as Cinnamon Carter: How does someone so famous function as an undercover operative?) Max Harte is an athlete who organized his own private Rambo-style mission to liberate his older brother from a Vietnam POW camp. And Grant Collier is Barney’s son — ’nuff said.

The rest proceeds largely as in the original episode, even with a fair amount of verbatim dialogue, but with a few changes. The action now takes place in London rather than Los Angeles. Drake arrives late and has a deadline to call his contact, explaining his hurry better than the original did. The team also fakes the street signs outside the hotel, correcting an oversight in the original: If he picked the hotel out of the phone book, wouldn’t he know the address? The cadre of assistants needed to fake up the hotel (a classier facility in this version) is smaller, with the team relying more on high-tech printers and gizmos, losing some of the charm of the original. Max slows Nicholas’s cab down by playing traffic cop and pulling him over, whereas Willy just screwed with the traffic lights. On first facing Drake as the hotel clerk, Jim (who’s been away from the game too long) almost has a lapse of control and wants to lash out at his protege’s murderer. When Drake calls his contact (played by Farscape‘s Virginia Hey), he uses a phone booth outside and is picked up by Max’s shotgun mike, rather than using the bugged lobby phone. And the scenario is reversed from the original: Drake arranges to meet her at a park, and when Nicholas calls her back impersonating Drake, he changes it to the hotel. This leads to a nice moment where Drake and the woman pass each other on the stairs unknowingly. Casey doesn’t seduce Drake to slow him down — a bit of an oversight, since it leaves less time for Jim and Grant to get the target to safety. She does, however, drop a hint about him becoming “famous” for his murders, a compliment he’s uneasy with.

The assassination sequence is simplified considerably. The real target is taken to safety off-camera. The dummy intended to stand in for Grant is introduced much more casually — and is far, far less convincing than the one from 18 years earlier. Drake doesn’t reserve a room over the phone, but just breaks in. The murder weapon is the same — a plastique bomb disguised as golf balls — but he plants it on the floor from the room below rather than lowering it through the air vent from the room above, and it goes off after one minute rather than fifteen. Rather than meeting Casey in an alley and seeing her assassinated by Scorpio’s men, he returns to the hotel to find her there to assassinate him herself and become his replacement. Drake takes the gun from her and “kills” her (as planned) before leaving to hunt down Scorpio — who turns out to be the guy back in San Francisco who threw the party where Copperfield was killed. Drake breaks his cardinal rule of never repeating a murder method, reusing the hallucinogenic dart to kill Scorpio — but why? That killing was only special to Jim, not to Drake or Scorpio, so there’s no reason for the symbolism. Plus it’s implausible that it has the same result, a balcony dive (off-camera). Scorpio — who has the same real name as in the original — only wounds Drake, so the hitman is able to see the closing beat where the team members assemble to let him know he’s been had. Followed by a tag scene at Copperfield’s grave, where Jim tells the other four that he should stick around since it would be a shame to break up such a nice team.

So how does it stack up to the original? Well, I’d say it’s mixed. “The Killer” was a fairly good choice to remake; it was the debut of the superior season 5, wherein the show broke away from its longstanding formula in which the missions played out effortlessly for the team and instead began injecting more challenges and difficulties. That made for a more suspenseful story, and that’s effective here. The added stakes for Jim don’t really resonate beyond a couple of brief added scenes, though. It would’ve been better to pick an episode in which Jim had a more direct interaction with the killer. But as I’ve mentioned, while some of the changes were slight improvements (particularly the more up-t0-date, less gendered role for Casey), there were a couple of misfires with the whole hallucination-dart thing. Still, the teaser here is a vast improvement on the rather dull one in the original.

The new cast isn’t too impressive yet. Peter Graves is the same as he always was, which is cool. Phil Morris is younger, less experienced, and less potent a performer than he would become later on, and thus is not quite on the same level as his father on the original. Penghlis and Hamilton are okay, but both speak in Australian accents even though they’re supposed to be American. Markwell is rather lovely — though less so than I seem to remember finding her back in ’88 — but isn’t impressing me yet as an actress (and fakes an American accent imperfectly, though better than the other two Aussies). The only guest star of note is DeLancie, and he’s certainly a more charismatic and classier villain than Robert Conrad was.

As for Schifrin’s music, it’s a solid M:I score — fortunately orchestral rather than electronic like the new main title — but not a standout, and not as distinctive as his funk-influenced score for the original episode. (There are a few parts of it that sound to me as if they might have been arranged by Ron Jones, the acclaimed TNG/DuckTales composer who would score several other episodes in the season ahead. That’s just an impression, but it’s possible. It’s not unheard of for TV or film composers to help each other out with orchestrations when there’s a time crunch; for instance, Alexander Courage and Fred Steiner both worked with Jerry Goldsmith to arrange cues for Star Trek: The Motion Picture.) But it solidly re-establishes the main motifs of the original series. Both the main title theme and “The Plot” will continue to play central roles in every episode of the revival, as they did for the original.

—

“The System”: Remaking Season 3, episode 15. Credited to the original author, Robert Hamner.

Again we get a new teaser — the original had none. We see Frank Marley (James Sloyan, replacing James Patterson’s Costa) and his boss Connors actually killing the federal witness against the latter, a murder we only heard about in the original. Jim gets the disc message at a football stadium after trading code phrases with the popcorn vendor, and it’s the same mission as in the original: Convince Marley to testify against Connors, something he’s never likely to do since he’s Connors’s trusted heir apparent.

Marley’s casino is in the Bahamas rather than stateside. It’s odd that the first two episodes, even though they’re set around the world, are adapted from US-bound mob stories from the original. And it makes the inclusion of the “Secretary will disavow any knowledge” line rather incongruous. The original series dropped that line for stateside organized-crime cases, since they weren’t espionage-related. In these episodes, they’re still going after criminals rather than spies, so the cloak-and-dagger stuff is as incongruous as it was in the crime-focused seasons 6 and 7 of the original. (And moving the crimebusting stories overseas makes me wonder about the legality of the team’s operations on foreign soil).

The original “The System” was a weak, bland episode only livened up by its innovative and striking cinematography, which helped compensate for its rather dinky casino set. Here, we get a much more lavish location shoot at a real hotel-casino, making the episode look more expensive even though the cinematography is more conventional.

Max plays the hitman role that Jim filled in the original, tipping Marley off that Connors plans to hit him, while Jim takes over Rollin Hand’s role of the auditor supposedly sent by the mob boss. Max offers a better motive for the tipoff: rather than just being uneasy with a high-profile hit, he wants to hitch his wagon to Marley’s star since he’s the likely new boss. (We also begin to see here that Tony Hamilton is a much better actor than Peter Lupus was.) Casey fills Cinnamon Carter’s role of the sexy gambler with the system, drawing Marley’s interest to trick him out of large sums of money and frame him in his employees’ eyes, and Grant fills his father’s role of breaking into the vault. The vault sequence is less imaginative than the original. The pressure-sensitive floor alarm is replaced with a rather silly wall unit firing out random lasers, which Grant blocks with a mirror so he can climb into the room — which leads to a new act-break cliffhanger when the mirror falls out of place and he needs to call in the others (using the miniature walkie-talkies that are evidently standard IMF equipment now) to cut the generator long enough for him to replace it. That’s a nice introduction of danger into a story that was too by-the-numbers originally, and makes up for the sillier security system. Grant also blocks a security camera using a handheld video camera (using one of the mockup IMF mini-discs) to record a shot of the room and feed it into the security cable.  The larger size of the foreign bills and the staging of the later counting sequence also address my problem with the original sequence, giving a reason why Jim couldn’t have just brought the extra money in with him and planted it rather than having Grant break in beforehand.

The biggest plot change is made to introduce the use of full-face-mask impersonations. Now the masks seem to be created by a mix of hand-sculpting by Nicholas and computer-aided design by Grant. Nicholas impersonates Marley in order to do what Rollin and Cinnamon did with a forged note on a piece of paper: Telling the blackjack dealer to let Casey win a lot of money. The real Marley is distracted with another cash counting scene, not in the original. The faked attempt on Marley’s life is moved to a scene with Max rather than the later scene with Casey (Cinnamon) where she reveals she’s working for the mob boss. The oddest change is when, rather than having Nicholas or Grant (whom Marley hasn’t seen) play the real hitman, it turns out that Max was the hitman all along, just pulling a fakeout as part of the frame, or something. That part doesn’t work so well. Anyway, it ends like the original, with Marley locking himself in the vault and calling the cops to make a deal to testify.

Despite the less impressive cinematography and gadgetry, this is much more effective than the original. The story is pretty much the same, and it’s a standard M:I tale with no insights into the regular characters; but some of its flaws are improved on, and the location shooting makes it much more impressive. For the second week in a row, they’ve cast a far stronger villain than the original did, even though Sloyan doesn’t have much to work with here. The strongest part is Ron Jones’s debut score for the series. It’s very much an M:I score, but also very much a Ron Jones score; those two things mesh quite well. In the vault sequence, Jones’s use of the first three notes of the main theme as a recurring motif over one of his trademark electronic ostinati reminds me very much of some of his TNG work. But at other times, he goes for a more contemporary sound (much as Schifrin did in the original “The Killer”), distinguishing his score from both TNG and the original M:I. Notably, in Grant’s break-in, Jones arranges “The Plot” over a distinctive bass guitar riff, one I actually remember even though I haven’t seen this series in a quarter-century. This riff will be reused in later Jones scores for the series.

—

So how can we cope with these remakes in the context of series continuity? Maybe we could pretend that Jim is reusing plans that worked in similar situations, if it weren’t for the fact that so much of the dialogue was verbatim, character names like Scorpio/Chambers were the same, and the villains reacted the same way to the team’s scripted lines and maneuvers. There’s really no way to reconcile them. And a larger issue for the show in general is that Phil Morris was already 7 years old when M:I began, but Barney was always portrayed as an eligible bachelor. It’s hard to make it fit.

But then, TV shows in the ’60s and ’70s rarely had much continuity, and M:I was a prime example. Team members would reveal their faces on national or global television one week and then be totally anonymous again the next, or be badly injured, brainwashed, or tortured in one episode and be perfectly healthy a week later. Regulars vanished without explanation and their replacements were treated like they’d always been there. Only in season 7 was there even the slightest attempt to acknowledge continuity. In those days, before commonplace syndication or home video, episodes had to stand alone since past episodes might never be seen again, and missed episodes might never be seen at all. So even shows with continuing characters tended to work like anthologies. There are many such shows — even as late as Law & Order — that function more like a set of parallel realities featuring identical characters rather than a series of consecutive adventures in a single reality. Indeed, sometimes a show would remake its own earlier episodes in later seasons (one example being Mannix, the third Desilu drama developed by Herb Solow alongside M:I and Star Trek, which remade a first-season episode with Charles Drake into a sixth-season episode with William Shatner). There’s really no way to reconcile such things.

But that’s okay — next comes the revival’s first original episode!

I’ve sold a novelette! “The Caress of a Butterfly’s Wing”

I’m pleased to announce the sale of an original novelette, “The Caress of a Butterfly’s Wing,” to the online magazine Buzzy Mag. It’s a transhumanist love story set in a young, distant star system where human castaways have transformed themselves to survive among the asteroids. It may sound a bit similar to the setting of Only Superhuman — and in fact it’s set in the same overall universe – but the transhumanism here goes much farther than anything in Emerald Blair’s world.

I’m particularly pleased because this is a story I originally wrote a long time ago, around the time of my earliest sales to Analog, but was never quite able to get into a sellable condition. I got a slew of rejection letters from editors telling me it was a beautiful, poignant tale but didn’t quiiiite work for them, and I couldn’t figure out how to get it over that last barrier. Eventually I realized that, on top of that, I’d made some scientific mistakes in my portrayal of the setting, so I shelved it until I could figure out how to resolve both problems. And that’s where things stood for quite a while. But last year, I tried revising it to submit to a themed anthology that I felt it might work for, and I noticed a couple of plot problems I hadn’t spotted before and reworked the story to fix them. It didn’t quite fit the anthology, as it turned out, but apparently the revisions did the trick, since Buzzy Mag bought it. I’m really glad that the story will finally see the light of day after all these years.

This will be my fifth published work in my “default” universe, after “Aggravated Vehicular Genocide,” “Among the Wild Cybers of Cybele,” “The Weight of Silence,” and Only Superhuman. It doesn’t really have any direct connections to any of the others, though — it’s too far removed in space and time for that. But it’s one more small step to fleshing out that universe and maybe, eventually, building it into a more unified whole. It’s also my first published default-universe tale since 2000 to be set outside the Sol System.

The publication date for “The Caress of a Butterfly’s Wing” hasn’t been determined yet, but I’ll announce it once it’s set.

I’ll be at Cincinnati Library Comic Con May 10

I have another signing coming up at the Main Library in Cincinnati, as part of their Cincinnati Library Comic Con event going on now through May 10. The Main Event is on Saturday, May 10 from 1 to 6 PM, and I’ll have a booth there that afternoon with copies of my books on sale. A portion of the profits will be donated to the Library. I just got a new carton of remaindered copies of the Only Superhuman hardcover, so there’ll be a bunch of those on hand, along with assorted copies of various other books of mine.

As before, here are directions and parking info for the Main Library.

At last, the 1984 show: Thoughts on THE RETURN OF GODZILLA

As I mentioned before in my overview of the Heisei Era of the Godzilla film franchise, I was unable to see the first film in the rebooted series, 1984′s The Return of Godzilla (known simply as Gojira in Japan, despite being a sequel to the film of that same name rather than a remake), due to its unavailability on home video in the US. But I’ve just discovered that the entire Japanese version of the film is available on the video site Metacafe: Gojira (1984). So now I’ve finally gotten to complete my survey of the Heisei series — which is timely, since it’s just weeks before the release of the new American Godzilla (the fourth film in all to bear that title in one spelling or another), and it should be interesting to compare the two reboots.

TRoG has a fairly straightforward story, but with some intriguing complications. It begins like its 1954 namesake, with a Japanese fishing boat coming under attack. Our reporter hero Maki (Ken Tanaka) finds the sole survivor, Okamura (Shin Takuma), who identifies the monster that attacked the ship as Godzilla. In this continuity, this is the first sighting of the big guy in 30 years. There’s no attempt to reconcile Godzilla’s survival with his death at the end of G’54; the characters are too busy coping with the ramifications of his return to theorize about how it happened. And they have no Dr. Yamane to theorize about a second Godzilla (as in Godzilla Raids Again), so it’s never really addressed whether it’s the original or another one. Which fits into my hypothesis for reconciling Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah (in which he was treated as the original) with G vs. Desotoroyah (in which the same Godzilla was explicitly the second and the original was unambiguously killed), namely that the characters in the Heisei continuity simply didn’t figure out it was a second one until years after his return.

Anyway, that’s all post-game analysis. What matters in the story itself is that the Japanese government, led by Prime Minister Mitamura (Keiju Kobayashi), initially chooses to quash the news of Godzilla’s return, in order to avoid a panic. Maki investigates anyway and speaks to Godzilla expert Professor Hayashida (Yosuke Natsuki), whose assistant Naoko (Yasuko Sawaguchi) is Okamura’s sister and has not yet been informed of his survival. Maki tells her the truth, ostensibly as a kindness, but is actually using her so he can snap a newsworthy photo of their reunion, which offends Naoko.

Mitamura’s decision to keep the secret almost goes catastrophically wrong when Godzilla destroys a Soviet nuclear sub (according to Hayashida-Sensei, Godzilla feeds on nuclear energy) and the USSR blames the Americans, bringing the world to the brink of war until Mitamura reveals the truth. Both the superpowers come to Japan and insist upon the right to attack Godzilla with nuclear weapons even if he lands on Japanese shores. Mitamura sticks to his guns and insists that if nuclear weapons are used once, they might be used again for other reasons. He is adamant that nuclear weapons will never be used on Japanese soil, and asks the superpowers’ ambassadors: “What right do you have to say we must follow you?” He convinces both governments to back down, while Hayashida-Sensei, Okumara, and Naoko devise a plan to lure Godzilla to a volcano and bury him in an eruption. (Turns out he has a magnetic homing sense like a bird, which can theoretically be tapped into. This was around the time that theories on the relationship between birds and dinosaurs were coming into the public consciousness.)

But of course the superpowers have nuclear missile satellites ready to go just in case, and when Godzilla does attack Tokyo, he damages the Soviets’ control ship, starting the countdown to missile launch. The Soviet captain heroically tries to stop the launch, but dies before he can reach the cutoff switch. (Notably, in the American version Godzilla 1985, this is changed so that the captain intentionally launches the missile, which is said to be 50 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, rather than 50 percent as powerful as in the original version.) The Americans intercept the Soviet missile with one of their own, but the radiation from the aerial explosion revives Godzilla after he’s been tranquilized by a Japanese weapon. Hayashida and Okamura must try to escape Godzilla’s attack and reach the volcano with their equipment, and are forced to leave Maki and Naoko behind to fend for themselves and play out their role as romantic leads.

This is the most serious, solemn Godzilla film I’ve seen since the original, and I’ve now seen pretty much all of them, except maybe for a few of the sillier ones from the ’60s and ’70s. It’s intriguing to see a serious-minded Godzilla film made during the height of the tensions of the Cold War; the scenario of Godzilla being a wild card bringing the world to the brink of nuclear holocaust is intriguing. It echoes Godzilla’s use as an allegory for nuclear devastation in the original, but in a way that’s more topical for 1984, since the represented threat is not just the United States, but both superpowers and their hyperaggressive mentality. The film is an interesting glimpse of how the superpowers must have seemed to the rest of the world, to nations like Japan that were caught in the middle and constantly being pushed around and endangered by the superpowers’ brinksmanship. There’s an element of wish fulfillment in the scenes where the Prime Minister of Japan puts the superpowers in their place and condemns their arrogant assumption that they’re entitled to tell everyone else what to do. But it’s very effective. Who has greater moral authority than the Japanese to say “never again” to the idea of using nuclear weapons?

So I found the film quite effective as an allegory and a political statement, and the characters were fairly effective too, although the leads weren’t as richly drawn as in the original. Kobayashi is the standout as the troubled, principled Prime Minister. But the action and effects sequences weren’t nearly as impressive. The Godzilla costume (and puppet for close-ups) wasn’t very well-made, which undermined an otherwise quite effective initial reveal, starting with a panicked watchman at a nuclear plant and panning slowly up Godzilla’s body to his head. And the action sequences were kind of sluggish, unfocused, and sloppily edited. The final act features a gorgeously realized, enormous miniature cityscape of the Shinjuku district at night (not nearly as built up in 1984 as it is now, I think, but still impressive), but Godzilla’s rampage through same is somewhat desultory, like his heart isn’t in it. It’s not entirely clear why he’s even come to Tokyo beyond it just being the obligatory thing for him to do. (The US version apparently claims he was drawn by Hayashida’s experiments, but I don’t think that explanation works in this version.)

The music is okay, but lacking in Akira Ifukube’s themes (although they are used in the film’s trailer). The film’s treatment of Godzilla’s roar is pretty good, though, incorporating the familiar version with the rising flourish at the end, but enriching it with more of a deep, growly quality in the middle. (Oh, and I almost forgot — the end title song is ridiculously out of sync with the tone of the rest of the film. Its lyrics, in English, are singing to someone who’s going on a journey in search of something and wishing him well — and the refrain makes it clear that the addressee is Godzilla. “Goodbye now, Godzilla, goodbye now, Godzilla, until then! Take care now, Godzilla, take care now, Godzilla, my old friend!” Say what now?! Who thought this song was a good idea at the end of one of the darkest Godzilla films ever?)

All in all, this was a much better film than I expected based on the reviews I’ve read. It may be the best use of Godzilla as an allegorical figure other than the original film, and it’s a fairly good companion piece to the original in its tone and gravity, though it’s not on quite the same level. I’d definitely put it on my list of the most essential and important Godzilla films (and I’ll be editing that list accordingly).

The American version of this film, in addition to the changes mentioned above, brought back Raymond Burr to shoot new framing material as his character from Godzilla, King of the Monsters, Steve Martin (though they just called him “Mr. Martin” to avoid reminding people of the comedian of that name). This material was a lot less extensive than in the original, though, and mostly involved Martin advising the Pentagon on the situation. Godzilla 1985 actually referenced the events of the original more extensively than the Japanese version did, and apparently had Martin pointing out that the Japanese hadn’t found a body after their attack on Godzilla in ’54, strengthening the implication that it was the returned original. (Although the Oxygen Destroyer totally disintegrated Godzilla, so there wouldn’t have been a body anyway.) A lot more was changed as well, and reportedly the tone of 1985 is somewhat lighter than that of TRoG, to fit American audiences’ expectations (though nowhere near the campy comedy dub that was originally planned until Burr put his foot down). Wikipedia has more.

The new American Godzilla, due out in May, sounds like it’s aspiring to be far more serious and potent, in the spirit of the original. In other words, it has very similar aspirations to this film. But it’s being made in a different era with different fears and concerns, not to mention in a different country with a different perspective. The comparison should be intriguing.