For the past couple months, I’ve been watching reruns of the old Mission: Impossible television series, which aired from 1966 to '73. Along the way, an odd collection of musings have been building up in my late-night affected brain, and I thought I’d share. Partly for therapeutic purposes.
Steven Hill. Mary Mother of God. Who’d have thought.
I knew this actor only from his 1990s role in Law & Order, as the old, gruff, fat and balding district attorney. I was flabbergasted to see him as a thin young man, running around, grinning, jumping out of moving vehicles, punching out bad guys. The contrast makes one stop and think a bit — perhaps about one’s own fattening and balding tendencies.
Title: Misleading. Although the show is called Mission: Impossible, I can’t help noticing that our heros manage to bag every single one of their missions. Maybe you noticed this too. These are what I call demonstrably possible missions. I suppose the show wouldn’t have been very satisfying, or long-lasting, had the title been honored literally.
In fact, you’d have to wonder how the Impossible Mission Task Force came to be created in the first place, given that name. If I were a U.S. senator on the Intelligence Committee when this thing was being proposed, I think I’d ask, “Well now, if you won’t be able to accomplish any mission assigned to you, by definition, then what the hell’s the point? Hmmm?” Those would be my first two questions, verbatim.
So I propose that the show be renamed retroactively to: Mission: Thorny and Difficult To Be Sure, Even Vexing, But Well Within the Reach of Those With Sufficient Training, Initiative, and Unlimited Funding.
What I’d like to see, just once. Mr. Phelps (Peter Graves) is at the “drop” site, listening to the tape and looking over the photographs and maps. The tape concludes, “Your mission, Jim, should you choose to accept it, is to kidnap the Zamboni ambassador and find out when and where the counterfeit nickels will arrive in the United States. As usual, should any of your team be captured or killed, the secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions. Good luck, Jim! This tape will self-destruct in five seconds.” Tape goes up in smoke.
Peter Graves raises his eyebrows, snorts, and says, “Well, that one’s a turkey. Pfff!” Then he walks off into the distance, strolling casually down the street, whistling and doing a little window shopping. Stops in a diner for a cheeseburger. Roll credits.
It could be a very special three-minute episode of Mission: Impossible.
Favorite episodes. I think my favorites so far are the ones where our heros transport the villain into a fake version of the distant past or future, which he doubts initially but falls for in time, and then, just as planned, reveals the big criminal secret he was selfishly keeping to himself. There are two episodes I’ve seen like this: (#1) William Shatner, as a seasoned gangster, is made to think he’s back in the Depression era as a young gangster, on the day he’s thought to have murdered a rival (whose body was never found). He and his old “friend” murder the man again, or so he thinks, and he then unwittingly leads everyone to where the body is buried.
Then there’s (#2) — a traitorous nuclear physicist is knocked out, and when he awakes, is made to think he’s in the year 2000, living now as a prison laborer in the dismal aftermath of a nuclear war. He freaks out over this for quite a while (to pad the script, I think), but eventually tells where he’s hidden the nuclear fuel that he stole earlier, “back” in the year 1972.
I think I like these episodes because it’s so implausible you could pull off such schemes. There would be a hundred things our heros might overlook in their otherwise meticulous planning, all of them giveaways. (“Hey, I didn’t have this scar when I was twenty!”)
Catch as cats can. In one episode, our heros need to steal an amulet. (Or was it a bracelet? Something like that.) The amulet sits on a pedestal in a vault room with high security. They don’t dare enter the vault themselves. Any noise they make, any pressure they put on the floor, will set off the alarms. And apparently they can’t disable the alarms in this episode. Fine. You play the hand you’re dealt.
The team’s solution? It’s obvious, really. (You’ll thump your head on the desk when I tell you.) First, infiltrate an adjacent room and set up shop. Cut a square hole about two-foot wide in the wall, opening into the vault room. Scoot a very long plank out through the hole, all the way across the room, letting the far end rest on the pedestal with the amulet. Let the near end rest on the bottom edge of the hole you cut.
Then, bring out the orange cat.
Yes, a cat. This was the villain’s oversight! No counter-cat measures had been taken whatsoever. I’d call it poor planning, really. They just didn’t look at all the angles.
You can see now how it’s going to go down. Team puts cat on the plank. Cat trots down the plank — pausing occasionally to watch pretty hallucinations, as cats do — but finally makes it across and grasps the amulet in his mouth. Cat trots all the way back, after some more suspenseful pausing mid-plank. Then, quickly but smoothly, the team wraps it up. Grab the cat and amulet. Pull back the plank. Patch up the hole. Skedaddle. Mission accomplished. (Commence thumping.)
Now call me a wet blanket, but I say this plan was a tad risky, just a tad, for depending so critically as it did on a cat. Oh sure, this one occasion was a brilliant success. I guess someone must have spent years, decades, training this cat so that it wouldn’t hop down at the first opportunity, or curl up mid-plank and start napping, or go bounding after a fly, real or imagined, that it spotted.
But I still say, if you have designed a mission plan which at some point says something like, “Step 23: Deploy house-cat”, then might I suggest you back up a few steps and re-consider. Really. Your plan needs a little peer review, as we call it in my line of work.
These are just my thoughts.
