Mission: Impossible - 5x21 - A Ghost Story

    The team wants to get a man to reveal where he buried the body of his son, who was contaminated with a new nerve gas, in order to prevent the formula from falling into the wrong hands.  In order to accomplish this, they want to make the target think that he's being haunted by his son's ghost.
    A good episode, especially near the end.  There are a few twists that weren't needed, but they redirected the ending just enough to make it not predictable.
    I think I had a few reservations about the technology in this episode.  In one case, they use two lasers to create some illusions.  The lasers have been integrated into the target's bedposts.  While the replacement posts are identical, they have a shiny, glass lens instead of a curved wooden surface at one point.  This seems sloppy for the team.  I suppose that the audience needed to know it was there.
    I also felt like the villain wasn't sufficiently established.  I'm not sure why that was.  We see him kill his son at the beginning of the episode.  Then he talks about how his son needs discipline.  But most of it, he's not continuing his pattern of evil as strongly as I would like.

Mission: Impossible - 5x20 - Kitara

    The military has captured a black rebel freedom fighter named Kitara.  The IMF gets involved to get Kitara out of holding, and free up the gold he has hidden.  In order to accomplish this, the IMF plans on turning the military leader into a black man.
    There was a series of Bloom County strips that had Oliver creating an "electro-photo pigment-izer" which was mostly a flash bulb that would turn the subject black.  His goal was to hit a South African apartheid leader with it.  Of course, those strips were during the 80s.  This was the 60s.

    It's a typical, well-handled episode.  The audience is rarely given enough information to know how things will play out, or what the team has planned for.  So we usually can't tell if something has gone wrong.
    The racial angle is the interesting one.  The episode aired in 1971.  At least some of the reviewers felt like this handling was a little too heavy handed.  I suppose the biggest problem is that it brings out certain racial distinctions more than it should.  We see that he doesn't look like a convincing black man, because his face doesn't look right.  The photo that gets doctored shows a substantial difference, and just calls attention to all the ways that blacks legitimately are different.

Mission: Impossible - 3x11 - The Freeze

    The target is an inmate, close to release on a lesser charge, who was involved in an armored car robbery.  The statute of limitations on that robbery is running out, so the team wants to get him out of jail, and persuade him to claim the money early.
    Yeah, the premise seems like a bit of a reach.  It's not a bad plan, but it's not a great episode.
    First, they convince the mark that he's got a terminal disease.  They have the prison doctor give this news.  This provides a reason why he's getting out of jail.  But it also sparks his interest in being frozen.
    He agrees to be frozen.  He is unfrozen, and told it's 11 years later.  He eventually leaves the place they're held, and discovers that it's not 11 years later.  But a planted newspaper suggests that it is a day later than it actually is.  So he goes off to find his hidden loot.
    And you know the rest.  I felt like this plot wasn't as direct as it should have been.  The plan seems much more circuitous than other plots.  And it felt very bad that the doctor was willing to participate in lying to a patient in this way.

Mission: Impossible - 3x09 - The Play

    The mission is to discredit a propaganda minister behind the Iron Curtain.  In order to do this, they use a play that appeals to their sense of the relationship between the UCR.

    It's only just now that I've realized how difficult it is to write a review for an episode of Mission: Impossible.  There are specific sequences that I can point out, and say they did a good or bad job handling them, but most of the fun in watching an episode is seeing how the mission unfolds.  The episodes are so carefully structured, and the audience is just barely given enough information to make the whole thing satisfying.
    To make it simple, this episode is good.  It's not a great one, but it's pretty fun.  It isn't clear how the technology we see introduced early on is going to be used in the episode, and they hold off on it showing up until the last couple minutes.
    I've seen a few episodes that I would put above this, but I'd say this one falls solidly into the upper-middle end of the curve.