OK, let’s see how good you guys really are. I’ve been going nuts trying to remember a character actor. I can picture him in my head but don’t remember his name or a single damn thing he was in. He is a basic older white male mostly active, I think, in the 1970’s. Maybe he did an episode of Star Trek, or maybe not. The best I can do in describing him is that he was an insurance salesman or accounting type, with an occasional hint of menace. Think, maybe, mob accountant, and you’ve got it. Wore glasses, at least in my head picture.
I’ve tried Google searching for character actor pictures but no luck.
Sorry for the limited info, but if I remembered more I could find him myself.
James Daly, BTW, was the principal villain in the only episode of M:I in which a member of the IMF committed out-and-out cold-blooded premeditated murder. Dan Briggs shot him point-blank in the head while he was passed out behind his desk.
Normally they tricked the bad guys into shooting each other, or they were hoist by their own petard. At the end of this episode, Cinnamon complimented Briggs with a “Nice shot, Dan.”
AFAIK, no, Briggs doesn’t shoot the bad guy in the head; he shoots the guy the bad guy was supposed to shoot, making sure to aim for the thin metal plates that supply the target with a bulletproof area the size of a slim book.
That innocent then plays dead; Briggs then locks himself in the study and fires a shot nowhere near the head of a guy who’s slumped over at the desk (and who looks exactly like the peel-off disguise being worn by Briggs).
So at first it looks like Guy A shot Guy B dead and then shot himself in the head in a bizarre murder-suicide; but Guy B is alive, since Briggs is so fine a first-shot marksman (explaining Cinnamon’s praise), and the second shot just wowed folks outside the room (so they’d think a guy just got head-shotted). But then Briggs, sans peel-off disguise, strides in to deliver exposition.
No, I mean Briggs; IIRC this is when Steven Hill was getting less and less time in the episodes before getting dropped altogether for Peter Graves, so having ‘Briggs’ spend most of an episode ‘in disguise’ was a big help. (Plus they threw in a line about how the guy to be doubled physically resembled Briggs more than Hand.)
Schallert is way off (too milquetoasty). James Daly is actually the best guess we’ve had so far, but it’s not him. Dabbs Greer would be another good guess, but it’s not him either. This process is actually working the way I figured it would. Eliminating an individual takes out whole groups and we’ll narrow it in. Tobolowsky is bald and too contemporary.
According to IMBd, Briggs did indeed execute the impostor, which is how I understood it. I saw the episode a few months ago, and it came as a shock.
It’s also true Ricardo Montalban was whacked in another episode, but that was more a case of the villain doing himself in (he needn’t have been in the tunnel). Something similar happened with John van Dreelin in another episode when his diamond-making machine blew up. The IMF may have wanted him to die, but they couldn’t guarantee it.
It was a very convoluted episode as well: Briggs impersonating the bad guy who was impersonating the good guy whom the IMF rescued before they shot the bad guy who was supposed to shoot another good guy, but Briggs shot him instead, only he wasn’t really shot…
You needed a score card with this one, just to keep track of who was supposed to kill whom.
I don’t see how. I mean, okay, sure, you and whoever posted that IMDB comment agree, but: near as I can tell, (a) it’s not that we see him line the gun up with the guy’s head when he pulls the trigger; and (b) it’s not like we see the guy, and then there’s a quick cut to a close-up of Briggs firing, and we can’t technically see where the gun is pointed but the clear implication is obvious.
Near as I can tell, it’s a single long shot where we can see Briggs, and we can see the guy, and we can see where Briggs points the gun right as he pulls the trigger, and the gun is visibly pointed away from the guy’s head. (And it stands out as doubly obvious because, again, we just saw Briggs pull a trigger while actually pointing that gun at someone; we know what that looks like.)
