So as not to derail the Steven Hill memorial thread, let’s discuss MI. Anything is fair game, the Briggs episodes, the Briggs-less first season episodes, Mr Phelps, the revival series, even the movies.
On of my favorite Briggs episodes is “Fakeout”. I like its simplicity. I can see this episode actually happening. One guy in Justice is having lunch with some guy from State, and he causally mentions that he has a case against this drug lord, but the guy is in a non-extradition country. Guy from State calls his buddy at the CIA/IMF, “Don’t you have a department that does this sort of thing?” Next thing you know, the guy willingly crosses the border, and spends his time in prison trying to figure out exactly what happened!
In the Phelps era, I really like “The Mind of Stefan Miklos”. They have to fool a very smart foreign agent into believing something. The man is almost a Sherlock. They have to be subtle enough with their clues and information to let him figure it out on his own, but no too subtle that he misses the clues they left. Too much, and he’ll spot the trick. Too little, and he won’t draw the “correct” conclusion. Fortunately, Phelps proves to be the better thinker.
My favorite moment is a conversation in the change-of-pace episode THE TOWN.
Jim – not on a mission or anything, just heading to a hunting cabin for a vacation with his pal Rollin – stumbles across evidence that a doctor is plotting a major crime. Said doctor promptly makes it seem our drugged hero has a don’t-move-the-patient ailment and is being treated; and ‘if’ he dies it won’t look like foul play, right?
Rollin almost buys it, but things are just suspicious enough that he calls Cinnamon while figuring the phone might be bugged. Which means he can’t tell her anything.
So he matter-of-factly addresses her as Mrs. Phelps.
And she totally goes with it. We hear what the bad guys are listening in on, and it sounds completely innocuous when, in making-it-up-as-he-goes-along style, he suggests that she fly out there as soon as possible in hopes of consoling her husband before he passes from natural causes. And, hey, get someone to take care of the kid, okay? Make sure to tell little Willy that his Uncle Rollin hopes to see him soon.
It was usually Martin Landau’s character, Rollin Hand, and then Leonard Nimoy’s character, Paris, after Landau left, that did the rubber mask reveals, not Graves.
An interesting trivia point about the series was that at the beginning after Phelps received the assignment via self destructing tape/disc/recording, etc. Phelps would select the team for the assignment, and then they would meet at Phelp’s apartment to discuss the mission. In the apartment scene, they always wore black, white and grey clothes, no stark colors.
From the first season’s episode “Zubronik’s Ghost,” which would have fit nicely into the Twilight Zone. A scientist is thinking about defecting to the soviets, urged on by a phony medium who claims to be contacting her dead husband. The IMF brings their own medium along; Rolin is very skeptical. The line is the climax of a perfectly constructed setup – it makes everything suddenly clear in ways no one could have predicted, but was hinted at from the first.
I really stopped watching once Peter Graves joined. He just didn’t seem like a mastermind, and having him take part in the action was a poor choice.
I love the episodes that end when the team just disappears, and the mark is left trying to explain to his partners/authorities/secret police why he is coming out of a fake, empty submarine in a warehouse/fallout shelter after a nuclear attack/“desert island” that is really on the coast of his home city. And trying to explain where the money/gold/weapons/drugs/documents went.
Aside from the empty location, there’s no evidence to support the story this guy is going to tell. “You mean you thought it was 20 years in future, and you just TOLD them where our precious nuclear material was? Are you really that stupid?? Or a traitor?” If they don’t shoot him on the spot, he gets to spend his time trying to figure out what happened.
The bigger the psych-out the better. Three come to mind. Convincing a man that it was years later and that he had some weird kind of amnesia. (They did that twice, once with Fritz Weaver, and once with Vic Morrow.) Convincing a Soviet agent that the Soviets had invaded.
Oh, yeah. The one with the submarine, that was actually in a warehouse on dry land.
That was a great episode! Miklos had a photographic memory, and he was about to kill the guy Phelps was trying to protect (a double agent) when he remembered a vital planted clue that steered him in the opposite direction. He was played by Steve Inhat, aka the mad “Lord Garth” on Star Trek. The double agent was played by Jason Evers, aka the accelerated “Rael” on Star Trek. Ed Asner, aka “Lou Grant” on Mary Tyler Moore, was a Communist agent.
I also especially liked the one where they set up Fernando Lamas (another Communist agent) with disinformation to discredit some authentic information he had come up with. This was the one where an “adulterous” Lee Grant was poisoned with barbituates and they had to get to her in time to pump her stomach out. (I dug Lee Grant! :o )
The one with Hitler’s lost gold, mentioned in the Steven Hill thread, was remade in the 1980s during the Hollywood writers’ strike, but the recycled script was nowhere near as good.
In the remake, the gold was buried under the Braun crypt. In the original, it was neither in nor under the crypt; it *was *the crypt!
In the one where Jim was paralyzed in a hospital bed, it wasn’t just the doctor (Will Geer, aka “Grandpa Walton”) who was evil: the *entire town *was populated by Communist sleeper agents! The IMF intervened just in time to stop a political assassination.
William Shatner also fell victim to the “amnesia” ploy. He thought he was back in the 1930s following an attempt on his life.
Speaking of Fritz Weaver, remember the one where Cinnamon did her Marlena Dietrich impression? “If you drink … my glass … of wine…” This one never fails to crack me up when I think about it. “Why … she looks like Mona Bern!”
On second thought, “amnesia” isn’t the right word here. They fucked with his mind to make him think he had dreamed the last 40 years while he was unconscious following the attempt on his life.
One of my favorite catch phrases comes from the episode with Vic Morrow. He thinks he’s just regained his memory after 20 years, and Barney (masquerading as a presumably Cuban POW) says
“Hey, mon, it’s your birt’day! Happy birt’day, mon!”
Not M:I but seems like it could have been a lost episode: Hawaii Five-O, “The Cocoon.” Anyone remember this one, where McGarrett was put in a sensory deprivation tank and the evil (Chinese?) bad guy tried to break him with very M:I-like shenanigans?
To get around Hill’s limited presence in the first season, Dan Briggs often (a) “impersonated” the mark, i.e., “wore and peeled off the mask,” or (b) simply didn’t go on the mission!
That was the extra-long pilot episode with the hot Nancy Kwan. :o
When CIA agent Andrew Duggan is revealed to be a traitor in league with the evil Red Chinese (led by none other than Wo Fat), a trapped McGarrett lashes out and says
No one could survive (whatever the number was) 10 hours in the sensory deprivation chamber, but of course superhuman Steve can do twice that amount of time and still beat Wo Fat.
The episode that set the stage for what H5-0 was, both good and bad.
He was able to survive because he had been “conditioned” earlier through hypnosis. Why Danno et al. expected Steve to be thrown into a sensory deprivation chamber at some point, I don’t remember, but that’s what happened.
They memorably twisted that in “The Party”, where they stage a big con to make it look like the enemy agent returned to a hero’s welcome on his country’s home soil, complete with a banquet in his honor and dancing and drinks and et cetera – and then, in best you-just-spilled-the-beans fashion, they all clear out at the drop of a hat – leaving him to stammer to his real superiors that he’d been duped.
In fact, the whole con – and all of the clear-out-after-the-con hijinks – just made it so he’d blurt out that he hadn’t spilled the beans. You know, while still at the empty location. Which they’d bugged. Yes, tell them exactly what you didn’t reveal.
One of my favorites was a third season episode where Barney steals a villain’s gold from a vault by melting it and draining it through a hole in the floor. It was a lovely effect, although it couldn’t possibly have worked in real life. I later learned that the SFX crew had used ice cream for the melting gold bricks.
