Daniel "Dan" Briggs’s main
role in the team was as its "captain"; he received the
instructions from the 'Voice on Tape', and selected and coordinated
the best people for the mission at hand. The team frequently
consisted of Cinnamon Carter, Willy Armitage, Barney Collier and
Rollin Hand, although Briggs did not always use all of these team
members and often also used other agents. He would brief the team,
then if needed, hand out extra disguises or devices. Though Briggs
played a significant role in many of the first season missions, he
was not an active participant in 7 of the 27 missions he
co-ordinated, after the mission briefings for these particular 7
missions, Briggs did not join the team in the actual execution of the
plan, evidently confident that his hand-picked team would succeed
without his direct involvement.
As
was the case with most characters in the series, Briggs's background
and personal life were never explored in detail. The first mission of
the series indicated that he had not worked with the IMF for some
time prior to that mission. (The 'Voice on Tape' ended the first
mission's instructions with the statement, "I hope it's welcome
back, Dan. It's been a while.") Another mission, "Old Man
Out," revealed that he had once romanced an IMF agent played by
Mary Ann Mobley (the original April Dancer in the Girl from
U.N.C.L.E. pilot). The only other insight into Briggs's personal life
was his one off-book mission, "The Ransom," where the
daughter of a personal friend of Briggs, a school teacher, is
kidnapped in order to force Briggs to deliver a mob informant from
police custody before he can testify before the grand jury.
Briggs was depicted at times as a cold,
calculating character, quite willing to kill in order to complete a
mission. Notably, he was the only member of the IMF shown personally
killing a non-target in anything other than self-defense, when he
ambushed and killed a sentry to get through a checkpoint in "The
Carriers." At other times, he exhibited a fatherlike attitude
towards his agents, and was frequently seen smiling encouragement and
patting shoulders as missions progressed. Several episodes, such as
"Shock," revealed that Briggs had acting, voice mimicry and
disguise abilities similar to those of one of his agents, Rollin Hand.
At the start of the second season, James
Phelps took over as lead of the IMF Team and no on-air explanation
was offered for Briggs's disappearance. The real-life reason was that
actor Steven Hill's Orthodox Jewish religious beliefs often
conflicted with the shooting schedule, making it difficult for the
production crew to meet deadlines. By mutual consent, his contract
was not renewed for Season Two.
After
appearing in Mission: Impossible, Hill did no acting work for the
following ten years. Hill left acting in 1967 and moved to a Jewish
community in Rockland County, New York where he worked in writing and
real estate. Hill returned to work in the 1980s and 1990s, playing
parental and authority-figure roles in such films as Yentl (1983),
Garbo Talks (1984), Neil Simon's Brighton Beach Memoirs, Heartburn
(1986), Running on Empty (1988), Billy Bathgate (1991) and The Firm
(1993). Hill also appeared as a mob kingpin in Raw Deal (1986), an
action vehicle for Arnold Schwarzenegger. Hill played New York
District Attorney Bower in Legal Eagles, a 1986 film, foreshadowing
his appearance as Adam Schiff in Law & Order.
Hill is best known as Adam Schiff in the
NBC TV drama series Law & Order (above), a part that he played
for ten seasons (1990–2000) and earned another Emmy nomination
for Best Supporting Actor In a Dramatic Series in 1997.
Jim Phelps (Peter
Graves) Season 2-7
James "Jim" Phelps (portrayed by
Peter Graves, in his Golden Globe-winning role) was the Director of
the Impossible Missions Force, or IMF, in seasons Two through Seven
of the initial television series, 1967-1973, taking over the position
from Daniel Briggs. The 1980s revival series shows Phelps' ID in the
opening credits, which state he was born August 10th 1929 in
California. Episodes of the original series establish that he grew up
in Norville County (state unknown), was a popular quarterback in his
youth, and later served in the United States Navy. He was the son of
the deceased A. Phelps, who owned a marina on a local lake. It was
implied by the business name "A. Phelps and Son" that Jim
Phelps was his father's only son. During the course of the series,
Jim Phelps donated the marina's land to the county to be used as a
local park.
While
he was not as personally cold as his predecessor, Daniel Briggs, had
been, Phelps ran equally risky missions and, unlike Briggs, ran
missions that put non-combatants in harm's way. Notably, Phelps ran
missions that included letting a mobster blow up a car on a city
street in the middle of the day, the IMF team capturing and holding
the significant others of targets against their will, the IMF team
tainting an entire hotel's water supply to give hotel guests symptoms
mimicking typhoid, and a member of the IMF committing an armed
hijacking of a commercial passenger flight to give credibility to his
impersonation of a well-known terrorist.
Also unlike Briggs, who did not
participate in about a quarter of the missions he co-ordinated,
Phelps accompanied his team on every mission and was an active team
member. Although Rollin Hand is generally known as the most versatile
role player on the IMF, Phelps successfully played an extremely wide
variety of roles, including a timid chemist, a tough-as-nails Federal
investigator, a gas company inspector, a hardware salesman, a slave
trader, and a leader of the American Nazi Party. Often, his role in
missions in a foreign country would be that of an American, but he
did sometimes impersonate a foreigner, such as an East German
policeman. Like Rollin Hand and Cinnamon Carter, Phelps was not
totally immune to romantic entanglements with enemy agents and defectors.
In the late 1980s revival, which lasted
for two seasons from 1988 to 1990, Phelps had a successor named Tom
Copperfield, who was killed off in the first episode, prompting
Phelps to come out of retirement. Phelps was the leader of the IMF
for the entire two-season run of the late 1980s revival series.
In
the 1996 Mission: Impossible film, Phelps (played by Jon Voight,
left center) is married to Claire Phelps (Emmanuelle Béart).
He was replaced as team leader by Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) after he
was revealed to be a traitor who murdered three fellow IMF agents and
sold secrets to an arms dealer, having been driven completely insane
by the disillusionment with his work. Phelps is the main antagonist
of the film. Phelps ended up being killed during a final
confrontation in the Channel Tunnel, when the helicopter he would
have escaped in explodes and crushes him on the tracks below.
Mission: Impossible fans were not happy with this portrayal of Jim Phelps.
Rollin Hand (Martin
Landau) Season 1-3
Rollin Hand’s role as
an IMF agent was that of an actor and disguise expert. In a
theatrical brochure that headed his dossier, he was described as a
quick-change artist and billed as "The Man Of A Million
Faces." As such, he had formidable skills in mimicry and voice
imitation (introduced in the second season) as well as a mastery of
make-up that rivaled that of Lon Chaney, Sr. He was also an expert at
sleight of hand and pickpocketing, which came into play in several
missions where he would pick pockets or hide things on someone else's
person without their knowledge. His language and cultural skills were
formidable. He regularly passed himself off as a citizen of various
Latin American and Eastern European countries and no one ever
questioned his authenticity. He also successfully impersonated
well-known public figures, such as the dictator of a fictitious Latin
American country, rumored Nazi fugitive Martin Bormann, and indeed
even Adolf Hitler himself. On at least two missions he even
successfully impersonated a left-handed person, doing all gestures
and reflexive actions left-handed when Rollin himself was
right-handed. He successfully falsified a wide variety of maladies in
the course of missions to dupe targets, including seizures and drug addiction.
His
abilities as a "ladies' man" were instrumental to the
success of a number of missions. On one occasion, his role would lead
to him having romantic feelings for a target who was killed at the
end of the mission. In several early episodes, a romantic attachment
to Cinnamon Carter was hinted at, if never explicit. While he
probably had the least expertise in hand-to-hand combat of the
original men on the IMF team, he was regularly called upon to defend
himself in hand-to-hand combat, and usually (but not always) came out
on top. He was skilled with handguns and capable of killing when
necessary. And Rollin has displayed several times incredible
endurance as shown by being put under physical torture frequently in
the series. Rollin was willing to do solo missions as well as help
with personal missions for the IMF leader.
The character of Rollin
Hand was created specifically for actor Martin Landau, and indeed, as
Patrick J. White's book The Complete 'Mission: Impossible' Dossier
pointed out, he was almost named "Martin Land." To achieve
many of Rollin's acts of mimicry, several of the characters he
imitated were either dubbed by Landau or played by him in a double
role under heavy make-up. This technique is used prominently in the
very first episode of the series, where Landau plays a Castro-like
dictator of a small island nation that Rollin must impersonate during
a national broadcast.
Cinnamon Carter (Barbara
Bain) Season 1-3
Cinnamon Carter’s role as an IMF
agent was that of "femme fatale" and "woman in
distress." In her IMF dossier, she was noted as being a
successful model and the dossier scenes during her three seasons on
the show showed at least three different magazine covers that she was
featured on. It was never explained how a famous international cover
model failed to be recognized as such during a mission. Carter was
often used to play on the vanities of powerful men to get them to
lower their defenses. Frequently, she would play the role of a
beautiful American woman on the make to draw the subject in. On
occasion, she would play a woman in distress to distract someone.
Carter
rarely adopted elaborate disguises, as did practically everyone else
on the program, because Barbara Bain, the actress playing her,
suffered from claustrophobia, and could not abide being hemmed in by
heavy makeup. In a nod to Bain's condition, Carter, too, was shown to
be claustrophobic. In "The Heir Apparent" she is made up as
an aging Princess, heir to a nation, while in "The Bunker"
she is masked as the objective scientist's wife. In episodes where
someone was needed to get into tight spaces, another female agent
would be brought in, but in "The Slave" Cinnamon, in spite
of her claustrophobia, is seen being placed into and later coming out
of the false bottom of a food carriage as part of the IMF plan.
Cinnamon's claustrophobia would be used against her in a devastating
way in the third-season mission, "The Exchange," when an
enemy intelligence service discovers her phobia after capturing her
and uses it in an attempt to break her. While Cinnamon was being
interrogated, she demonstrated that she had been trained in
counter-interrogation techniques, resisting all attempts to get her
to give up the team.
While Carter was rarely called upon to
defend herself in hand-to-hand combat, she was shown to have at least
the basic skills to disable a single adversary as evidenced in
missions such as "Odds On Evil" and "The Town,"
and she was confident handling a gun. Like Rollin Hand, on rare
occasions her assignments did lead to her falling for her target.
It was actually shown once that she had
feelings for Rollin Hand in a conversation she had with
"Crystal" a woman on one mission that had feelings for Dan
Briggs, when Cinnamon brought up that Crystal was worried about Dan,
who was, with Rollin, on a risky mission, Crystal replied that
Cinnamon was just as worried about Rollin as Crystal was about Dan.
Another time, in "The Pilot", where Rollin impersonates a
man who has "a real reputation for being a ladies' man",
and Cinnamon is supposed to come to his room, he asks her to help him
"get in character".
Barbara Bain was Martin Landau's wife at
the time, and a contract dispute Landau had with the program's
producers as the third season wound down resulted in both leaving the
cast together. Bain won three consecutive Emmy Awards for Best
Dramatic Actress for her performance as Cinnamon Carter and reprised
the character in a 1997 episode of Diagnosis: Murder.
Barnard
"Barney" Collier (Greg Morris) Season 1-7
Barnard "Barney"
Collier’s main role as an IMF agent was that of an electronics
and forgery expert. He also had an extensive knowledge of building
infrastructure such as wiring and plumbing standards, including
building standards in foreign countries. Generally, Collier was
brought in on missions to supply high-tech custom mission support. On
occasion, he would custom build a computer which would be well ahead
of its time, such as a computer that could read playing cards face
down on a table or a computer that could beat the world's greatest
chess players. Starting in Season Five, he was revealed to possess
criminology skills that were key to several missions. He was a
veteran of the US Navy, specifically the Sixth Fleet. In his IMF
dossier, it was noted that he owned his own electronics firm. It was
a common plot device, throughout the series, for Barney to be
smuggled into a building or facility by various means, such as a
collapsible filing cabinet, a specially designed crate, or even a
janitor's cart, so he could carry out some task in secret.
Due
to his being black, his role play in earlier missions which took
place in Eastern European countries was often as a supporting
character. Those missions which took place in Latin America or the
United States gave him the opportunity for more visible roles within
the mission. Although Barney Collier is primarily remembered as an
electronics expert, he was often called upon for his hand-to-hand
combat skills. Notably, he was an accomplished boxer, having been the
champion of the Sixth Fleet when he was in the Navy. His boxing
skills were the centerpiece of a two-part mission in the third
season, "The Contenders." He also had the strength and
agility to penetrate denied areas going hand-over-hand using
grappling lines without any assistance, shimmy up drainpipes, and
rapel down elevator shafts. He demonstrated incredible fortitude even
when injured, continuing with missions even after being shot in the
back, the knee or the head, temporarily blinded by a concussion, or
poisoned. In the course of seven seasons worth of missions, on rare
occasions he killed men in self-defense both in hand-to-hand combat
as well as with firearms. A recurring sub-theme for Collier was, when
a mission was at risk, his unwavering faith in his fellow agents in
their ability to come through.
Barney Collier, along with
Willy Armitage, was one of only two IMF agents that were regulars on
the team for the entire seven-season run of the original Mission:
Impossible TV series. Like all of the regular IMF agents, he was not
used in every mission, but he was the only character in the opening
credits of every episode of the original series. On occasion, he
would not appear during the course of a mission, but the characters
would use devices that were noted as being supplied by him. In later
years of the series, that stayed in the United States and dealt with
organized crime, Barney, although still supplying gadgets and
devices, did less of the physical duties, and began to be a character
more in line of the Mimic and Master of Disguise roles played by
Rollin Hand and Paris in earlier seasons. In later seasons, Barney
was also a de facto second-in-command of the IMF team in situations
where Jim Phelps was missing or incapacitated. It is worth noting
that Barney seems to have a strong friendship with Jim Phelps, in
particular, referring to him as a best friend in later years.
Barney had a brother Larry
who was a newspaper publisher that was unwitting to Barney's career
in the IMF. Barney's brother was killed in the fifth season episode
"Cat's Paw" for his efforts to bring a ghetto mob to
justice. Larry's murder was the catalyst for the off-book mission in
that episode to bring down the mob as a way to avenge Larry's death.
It was noted in that episode that, at the time, Barney's mother was
still alive.
In the series canon, Barney
had a son named Grant, born October 3rd 1957 in Georgia. However, by
1970, Barney was single in Season Four when he met and romanced a
woman in a foreign country in an off-book mission and brought her
back to the States at the mission's conclusion. (Barney's
relationship with an African girl in the Season Five episode
"Hunted" is interpreted by some as romantic, but the
actress in the role was only 17 at the time, and the relationship was
most likely meant to be platonic.) Barney would reprise his role for
three episodes across two missions in the Mission: Impossible series
revival in the 1980s, where his son Grant was an agent. It was noted
in one of those missions that Barney was extremely despondent at the
recent death of Grant's mother. Barney would return to the IMF as an
agent to work with another team apart from Jim's group as the inside
man investigating a drug cartel.
William "Willy"
Armitage (Peter Lupus) Season 1-7
William "Willy" Armitage’s
main role as an IMF agent was that of "muscle" and a
supporting player. In the first three seasons, Willy was brought in
on missions to work behind the scenes in mission prep or in minor
role-playing such as a waiter at a party or a maintenance man. Often,
he would have fewer than ten words of dialogue per episode, and in
fact there are two in which he has no lines at all. However, starting
in Season Four, his role play, visibility and dialogue as part of
missions did expand, including roles that required foreign language
skills. While he was not generally used in very complex role play, on
at least one occasion his on-the-fly interpersonal skills did save
the mission.
Willy's
background role meant that he did not get unintentionally captured
or trapped as often as other members of the IMF. However, in the
Season Six episode "Double Dead," Willy was captured in a
mission that was almost blown, and the episode had his recovery as
the main focus. In the end, Willy's ability to connect personally
with one of his captors would be instrumental in saving his life. In
the Season Seven episode "The Deal" Willy was shot after
jumping off a boat to avoid capture. While his injuries were serious,
he was able to rejoin the team by the end of the episode; however,
Willy's disappearance does mark the only time in the entire series
that a team member was believed to have been killed in the line of duty.
Even when not out in front on missions, he
still played a critical role as missions unfolded, often at a
moment's notice. On a regular basis, his split-second timing taking
down a sniper or other gunman saved the mission as well as the life
of the IMF team member in the crosshairs. In Willy's IMF dossier, it
was noted that he had set a world record in weight lifting. His
extreme strength was particularly leveraged in several missions,
mostly in Season One. However, notably, in Season Five, Willy
demonstrated a strength level that bordered on the super-human in
tearing a vault door off its hinges to save Barney Collier from
certain death in a fire trap. Willy was often called upon to carry or
wear extremely heavy objects without visible signs of exertion to
betray their weight, often as a way of smuggling teammates in and out
of secure locations. He was experienced in hand-to-hand combat, and
was often called on to silently disable sentries and policemen with a
single blow. He had other skills which were leveraged, but not
prominently featured, such as automobile customization and custom
construction. He would often custom-build rooms and scenes to make a
trapped person believe they were somewhere they were not, such as a
rubber room in a mental hospital, a hospital room twelve years in the
future, or a holding cell at a slave auction. Also, he was presumably
the best marksman on the team, as he would generally be the team
member to do any needed pre-planned tasks with a firearm, such as
shooting out a tire on a moving vehicle or firing an automatic weapon
at someone's feet to get them to surrender. In the episode
"Memory," he made reference to having lived in Indiana when
he was ten; this is presumably where Willy grew up, as well as the
birthplace of actor Peter Lupus.
It
is strongly implied over the course of the series that Willy is also
in part responsible for mission logistics, particularly the
procurement and staging of materials, vehicles etc. in foreign
countries. In addition, Willy often acted as support for Barney
Collier, particularly when a mission required the use of complicated
electronics or required drastic alterations in physical spaces. On
many occasions it would be Willy's construction skills that would
allow Collier to access the areas required to complete his own tasks.
Willy also ably filled the comparatively
less glamorous role of driver for the IMF team. Experienced with a
myriad of vehicles, including emergency and construction vehicles,
Willy, behind the wheel of a car or panel truck, meeting the rest of
the team for their extraction was often the indication of the
successful completion of a mission right before the final credits rolled.
Willy Armitage, along with Barney Collier,
was one of only two IMF agents that were regulars on the team for the
entire seven-season run of the original Mission: Impossible TV
series. Like all of the regular IMF agents, he was not used in every
mission, but he was a regular character each season even though he
was replaced by Sam Elliot's character in the opening credits of some
Season Five episodes. Willy was the only non-smoker out of all the
regular IMF team members for the first three seasons.
Untitled
Paris (Leonard Nimoy)
Season 4-5
The Great Paris (whose real name was never
revealed) was a retired magician played by Leonard Nimoy (who had
been released from the cast of the just-canceled Star Trek) who
joined the IMF with the first mission of Season Four, and he stayed
with them for two seasons. Effectively, he was a replacement for
Rollin Hand, who left the IMF at the end of Season Three. Like
Rollin, The Great Paris was a master of role play, languages and
disguises, capable even of successfully impersonating an ethnic
Japanese citizen in Japan.
Paris
grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and was raised by his father after Paris
was abandoned as a child by his mother. When he later served as a
magician's apprentice, he was caught in a love triangle between his
mentor and his mentor's assistant. This would lead to the master
magician murdering Paris's love interest, and this painful memory
would be used against Paris by enemy agents many years later, using a
lookalike for Paris's murdered love interest.
Paris's skills as a magician were heavily
leveraged when he played Zastro The Magician as part of Season Four's
"The Falcon," the only three-part mission of either series;
Nimoy thoroughly enjoyed shooting this mission. Paris’s role
playing may not have been as over-the-top as Rollin’s was, but
The Great Paris had a particular talent for a flippant or sarcastic
remark at just the right time as part of his role play that would
catch targets off-guard. Also, The Great Paris was particularly adept
at roles where he would embed himself as one of the targets and would
seemingly be working against the IMF team’s mission. Paris
apparently had a high tolerance for physical pain because he got
"roughed up" by antagonists several times during missions,
winding up beaten and bruised, but never compromising the mission.
Like some other members of the IMF, Paris was not immune to romantic
entanglements with enemy agents who were targeting him, falling for
snaring enemy agent Lady Cora Weston in "Lover's Knot," and
becoming entangled with phony defector Ingrid Brugge in "My
Friend, My Enemy."
Tracey (Lee
Meriwether)
Season 4
Tracey (no last name was given on screen)
was an IMF agent who took part in four separate missions in Season
Four, one of which was a three-parter. While she was not a regular
member of the IMF (not shown in the opening credits), she is
generally considered to be a recurring character due to fact that she
took part in four missions.
Unlike some other recurring characters,
she had no specific expertise beyond her role play abilities. She did
use her ad-hoc seductive skills to save one mission, but she was
never purposely given the role of a femme fatale, as Cinnamon Carter
often was. As part of her missions, Tracey played a nurse, a
magician’s assistant who was able to see the future, and twice
played a compromised agent.
The actress who played Tracey, Lee
Meriwether, had previously been a guest star on Mission: Impossible
as Anna Rojak, the kidnapped wife of an Allied scientist in the
two-part Season Three mission "The Bunker." Meriwether also
famously filled in for Julie Newmar as Catwoman in the 1966 Batman
movie filmed between the first and second seasons of the series.
Newmar was unavailable because she was working on the film,
Mackenna's Gold.
Dana Lambert (Lesley Ann
Warren) Season 5
Dana Lambert (Lesley Ann Warren, credited
as "Lesley Warren") was the regular female member of the
IMF in Season Five and she was featured in the opening credits. She
was the first regularly credited female member of the IMF following
Cinnamon Carter’s departure at the end of Season Three.
Dana’s advantage was the ability to
play off her youth. With subtle gestures as simple as biting her
lower lip, she could portray herself as extremely vulnerable. She was
able to relate to and draw in much younger targets than other members
of the IMF, for instance in "Blast," and she was also able
to draw in men a generation, and even two generations, older, for
instance in the episode "Homecoming," set in Phelps'
hometown where she becomes the new barmaid at a local tavern. In
spite of her youth, she was shown to be a capable agent, capable of
detecting attempted deceptions by enemy agents as well as helping
other more experienced agents with their tasks. She was willing to
compromise her personal safety for the sake of the mission, and was
able to maintain her composure even when captured. Although very
young, she was able to portray a number of roles, including an
international jet-setter, a bag woman, a college activist, a nurse
and an up-and-coming singer in a band.
Dana had one notable shortcoming which
nearly led to her death on two occasions, and that was a lack of
hand-to-hand combat skills. Her inability to disable a single
adversary in close quarters led to her needing to be rescued at the
last second by the IMF on at least two occasions. Also, she did
occasionally display an over-zealousness to move forward in defiance
of protocols, necessitating the more experienced agents reining her
in. She occasionally displayed over-compassionate feelings about team
members when they were in jeopardy, and not putting the mission
first, as was the rule in IMF protocol.
Dr. Doug Robert (Sam
Elliott) Season 5
Dr. Douglas Robert (Sam Elliott) was a
semi-regular of the IMF starting with the third mission of Season
Five, "The Innocent." Doug’s expertise, in addition to
role play, was his medical skills and knowledge. In his first mission
with the team, he saved Barney Collier’s life, which would have
been lost due to accidental poisoning from a biological weapon, had
there not been a medical expert on the team. He was also skilled in
delivering knockout blows from behind, saving missions on a number of
occasions. In his professional capacity as a doctor, he appeared to
be widely skilled in a number of areas of anatomy and techniques, for
instance possessing knowledge on mimicking drugs and later knowledge
in plastic surgery and hormones in the Season Six episode "Encore."
The
character of Doug Robert was brought in to phase out Willy
Armitage's character, but fan reaction led producers to bring Willy
back. Doug appeared in slightly over half of the Season Five missions
instead of Willy Armitage. Throughout most of Season Five, each
episode had either Doug or Willy, but never both, with the exception
of Doug's first mission ("The Innocent") and Doug's last
two missions ("The Party" and "Encore"), which
featured both of them. Doug Robert's final appearance in
"Encore" was his only episode in Season Six.
Although his role lasted such a short
time, Doug did possess one distinction over all the other characters
in the series, in being the only one ever to win an argument with Jim
Phelps. In the episode "The Rebel," Jim had sustained a
severe bullet wound in one arm, and Doug refused to let it go
untreated, despite Jim's insistence that other things took
precedence. In the end, Jim sat down and let Doug work, receiving
only a glare in return when he urged the physician to hurry it up.
Lisa Casey (Lynda Day
George) Season 6-7
Casey was the regular female member of the
IMF in Seasons Six and Seven. She was a replacement for Dana Lambert
who was only in Season Five. In addition to her role playing
capabilities, she had a particular talent for cosmetology, partially
filling the gap left in that area by the departure of The Great Paris
at the end of Season Five. She was also, like Paris, an expert in
voice imitation, and would often impersonate girlfriends or
associates of gang members in the later seasons. Her character was
intended by the producers as an amalgamation of the 'Master of
Disguise' and 'Femme Fatale' characters so that the team would be cut
down. When a mimicry of a male's voice was needed in Seasons Six or
Seven, either Barney Collier would do it or a male agent with voice
mimicry skills or a professional voice actor would be brought in for
a single mission. Casey demonstrated basic hand-to-hand combat and
defense skills when dealing with women, but was not able to defend
herself successfully against male villains.
Casey
would be on a long-term deep cover assignment in Eastern Europe in
the early part of Season Seven, leaving a slot open for a short-term
recurring role for Mimi Davis, as well as two other one-time leading
female agents (played by Elizabeth Ashley and Marlyn Mason; one other
Casey-less episode here featured Barbara McNair as a female IMF
target). Casey would return full-time later in the season. While she
was out, she was referred to regularly and tools used within a
mission were sometimes attributed to her. Also, in some episodes, it
was noted that there was a European portion of the mission being
handled by Casey. In reality, the actress playing Casey, Lynda Day
George, was on maternity leave. In four Season Seven episodes where
she did appear that were filmed immediately before she went on
maternity leave, the actress has a greatly reduced role in each, with
her body generally hidden.
The character of "Casey" was not
given any other name on screen until George's guest appearance in an
April 1989 episode of the revival series (#17, "Reprisal"),
when Casey was indicated to be her surname and Phelps addressed her
as Lisa, making her full name Lisa Casey. This was done so that she
would not be confused with the character of Casey Randall (Terry
Markwell) in the later series.
Mimi Davis (Barbara
Anderson) Season 7
Mimi Davis’ first assignment with the
IMF was the first broadcast mission of Season Seven. She was a prison
parolee and recovering alcoholic that was brought in to gain the
confidence of an ex-boyfriend who was a target of that mission. As a
result of that successful mission, she was released from parole and
offered a recurring role with the IMF to fill in for Casey, who was
on a long-term assignment in Europe. (In reality, Lynda Day George,
the actress who played Casey, was on maternity leave.)
Mimi would go on to take part in a total
of seven missions for the IMF until Casey’s full-time return
later in Season Seven. Mimi’s role playing abilities as an
unsavory character, possibly as a result of her criminal past, were
particularly leveraged in several of her missions, although she
played roles as innocents in other missions as well. In addition to
role playing abilities, she demonstrated basic cosmetology skills
used for mimicking facial injuries. During one mission, Mimi would
also persist in spite of a serious gunshot wound to successfully
complete the mission.
Significantly, Barbara Anderson, the
actress who played Mimi Davis in the seventh season, never gained
such name-in-the-title-sequence prominence as her castmates enjoyed.
The Hartford
and Globe
Repertory Companies
The Hartford and Globe Repertory Companies
were theatrical repertory companies that were part of the IMF in
Season Four. (Though the Hartford actually first appeared in Season
Three's finale, "The Interrogator;" a similar group, the
Horizon Repertory Players, were utilized by Dan Briggs in Season
One's "Operation Rogosh.") They were used several times in
missions where a larger cast of supporting characters was needed and
the IMF leader needed them to role play together as a group.
(Hartford was used five times and Globe was used three times.) The
brochure for Hartford Repertory Company, and later the Globe
Repertory Company, was a dossier available to Jim Phelps when he was
selecting his team. Although the company was selected in the dossier
scene when they were included in missions, they almost never
participated in the pre-mission briefing and planning session in Jim
Phelps’ apartment. In the episode "Submarine" two
members of the Hartford Repertory Co. are seen in the apartment
scene, but they have no dialogue.
The Voice On Tape
"Good morning, Mr. Phelps. Your mission, should you
decide to accept it..."
The "Voice On Tape" was that of
a nameless, never-seen man who gave Dan Briggs and Jim Phelps their
assignments. Briggs and Phelps, as leaders of the IMF, were the only
ones ever to listen to the recordings, with the exception of one
first season mission, "Action!," where Cinnamon Carter
listened to the recording. Other than the mention of "The
Secretary," the voice never gave any hint as to the
organizational structure behind the assignment or the IMF. In each
episode, the recording was planted in a different place such as a
doctor’s office, behind an elevator control panel, or a pigeon
coop on a roof. Some "mission drops," or methods of
delivery, such as an out-of-order pay phone and a photo booth, were
used more than once. Briggs or Phelps sometimes had to gain access to
the recordings by exchanging passwords or countersigns (generally
disguised as casual conversations in such cases) with an agent
protecting it, and that agent would never be in the room while the
recording was played. Pictures of the "mission targets"
were almost always included with the assignment. Often, the pictures
were in an envelope along with the recording although they were
occasionally shown on a movie screen or seen in a telescope or film viewer.
"As always, should
you or any of your IM Force be caught or killed, the Secretary will
disavow any knowledge of your actions. This recording will
self-destruct in five seconds.”
Bob Johnson provided the voice on tape
each season and in nearly every episode of the original series, as
well as every episode of the revival.
The only times the voice on tape did not
initiate a mission included one mission ("Memory") where
Dan Briggs got his instructions on a card from a street photographer,
which he then crumpled and presumably burned; off-book missions run
by both Briggs and Phelps, such as "The Ransom" and
"The Condemned;" one off-book mission run by Rollin Hand
where Phelps was incapacitated and needed to be rescued, "The
Town;" and one other, when mob figures recognize Phelps and
Collier from surveillance photos taken during an IMF operation
against a syndicate casino ("Casino") and kidnapped Jim to
force Barney to organize a mission for them ("Kidnap"). The
tape scene was also absent in episodes which began during or after a
mission (such as "The Hostage"), but it can be presumed
that these missions were assigned through taped messages which Phelps
received offscreen. As a result, the voice on tape was that of the
only consistent character through the entire Mission: Impossible
television franchise. The recurrence of the voice in opening every
episode, its standard delivery, and its consistent use of the same
phrases introduced those phrases to the pop culture lexicon. Although
the phrase "This tape will self-destruct..." has become
synonymous with Mission: Impossible, in several episodes the IMF
leader was responsible for destroying the recordings themselves,
either in a nearby incinerator or in a container of acid (which was
always conveniently close by).
Only 120 missions include the famous
warning that the tape will "self-destruct". Five say that
the tape will "decompose", one says that it will
"destroy itself", twelve instruct Briggs or Phelps to
"dispose of" the recording, seven tell them to
"destroy" it, and three contain no instructions, but Phelps
destroys the recording anyway. The remaining fifteen missions contain
no recorded briefing at all.
In the 1996 film adaptation, the voice on
the tape is that of IMF director Eugene Kittridge, played by Canadian
actor Henry Czerny. In the 2000 sequel, it is Anthony Hopkins as
Mission Commander Swanbeck. In the 2006 film it is Billy Crudup
playing John Musgrave, IMF Operations Director.
The Craig 408 (above) was
one of the tape recorders seen at the beginning of most episodes of
the series. It appeared in approximately 50 episodes for the mission
briefing. It was also seen in various episodes being used by the IM
Force during the course of a mission. This model was, by far, the
most frequently used tape recorder, but today it is the most
difficult and rarest to find of the three most common models that
were used in the series.
The Craig 212 (left) appeared in
approximately 40 episodes for the mission briefing. This model was
the second most frequently used tape recorder during the run of the
series, and today it is the least rare and easiest to find amoung the
three models that were used.
The Concord F-20 'Sound Camera' (right)
appeared in approximately 25 episodes for the mission briefing. This
model was the least frequently used tape recorder, and today it is
probably the 2nd rarest of the three taperecorders used in the
series. Frequently used in the first 5 seasons, this model was last
seen in a single appearance late in season 6.
The IMF Team in the 1988 Revival
The events of the series take place 15
years after the last season of the original Mission: Impossible TV
series. After his protégé and successor as leader of
the top-secret Impossible Missions Force is killed, Jim Phelps is
called out of retirement and asked to form a new IMF team and track
down the assassin.
Skills: Electronics, computers, sabotage,
engineer and the son of original Mission:Imposible character Barney
Collier, as well as the real life son of actor Greg Morris.
Casey Randall (Terry Markwell)
Skills: Designer, femme fatale,
sharpshooter. Midway through season 1, Casey is killed during a
mission, becoming the first ongoing IMF agent to be disavowed.
Shannon Reed (Jane
Badler)
Skills: Ex-Secret Service Agent, femme
fatale, disguise, mimicry, role play. After Casey is killed, agent
Shannon Reed succeeds her for the remainder of the series. With the
exception of this cast change, Phelps' team remains constant
throughout the series.
Characters in the
Mission: Impossible films
Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise)
Ethan Hunt is the protagonist of the film
series, to the point of the films not actually being ensemble presentations.
Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames)
Luther is the only character besides Ethan
Hunt to appear in all the Mission Impossible films to date. Luther is
an expert computer hacker who works for the IMF division of the CIA.
Benjamín
"Benji" Dunn (Simon Pegg)
Simon Pegg is an English actor, comedian,
screenwriter, and film producer. Pegg is best known for having
co-written and starred in the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy of
films, consisting of Shaun of the Dead (2004), Hot Fuzz (2007), and
The World's End (2013), and the comedy series Spaced (1999–2001),
all of them directed by his friend Edgar Wright. Upon completion of
Shaun of the Dead, Pegg was questioned as to whether he would be
abandoning the British film industry for bigger and better things,
and he replied, "It's not like I'm going to run off and do
Mission: Impossible III!", picking the title of an imaginary
blockbuster. Pegg would later go on to play Benji Dunn in Mission:
Impossible III as well as subsequent films in the series. Even more
famously Pegg earned a honored place in the Neat Stuff Universe when
he was cast as Montgomery Scott in the Star Trek reboot as Scotty.
Julia Meade (Michelle Monaghan)
Julia "Jules" Meade was Ethan's
fiancee/wife in Mission: Impossible III and IV.
As
was the case with most characters in the series, Briggs's background
and personal life were never explored in detail. The first mission of
the series indicated that he had not worked with the IMF for some
time prior to that mission. (The 'Voice on Tape' ended the first
mission's instructions with the statement, "I hope it's welcome
back, Dan. It's been a while.") Another mission, "Old Man
Out," revealed that he had once romanced an IMF agent played by
Mary Ann Mobley (the original April Dancer in the Girl from
U.N.C.L.E. pilot). The only other insight into Briggs's personal life
was his one off-book mission, "The Ransom," where the
daughter of a personal friend of Briggs, a school teacher, is
kidnapped in order to force Briggs to deliver a mob informant from
police custody before he can testify before the grand jury.
After
appearing in Mission: Impossible, Hill did no acting work for the
following ten years. Hill left acting in 1967 and moved to a Jewish
community in Rockland County, New York where he worked in writing and
real estate. Hill returned to work in the 1980s and 1990s, playing
parental and authority-figure roles in such films as Yentl (1983),
Garbo Talks (1984), Neil Simon's Brighton Beach Memoirs, Heartburn
(1986), Running on Empty (1988), Billy Bathgate (1991) and The Firm
(1993). Hill also appeared as a mob kingpin in Raw Deal (1986), an
action vehicle for Arnold Schwarzenegger. Hill played New York
District Attorney Bower in Legal Eagles, a 1986 film, foreshadowing
his appearance as Adam Schiff in Law & Order.
While
he was not as personally cold as his predecessor, Daniel Briggs, had
been, Phelps ran equally risky missions and, unlike Briggs, ran
missions that put non-combatants in harm's way. Notably, Phelps ran
missions that included letting a mobster blow up a car on a city
street in the middle of the day, the IMF team capturing and holding
the significant others of targets against their will, the IMF team
tainting an entire hotel's water supply to give hotel guests symptoms
mimicking typhoid, and a member of the IMF committing an armed
hijacking of a commercial passenger flight to give credibility to his
impersonation of a well-known terrorist.
In
the 1996 Mission: Impossible film, Phelps (played by Jon Voight,
left center) is married to Claire Phelps (Emmanuelle Béart).
He was replaced as team leader by Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) after he
was revealed to be a traitor who murdered three fellow IMF agents and
sold secrets to an arms dealer, having been driven completely insane
by the disillusionment with his work. Phelps is the main antagonist
of the film. Phelps ended up being killed during a final
confrontation in the Channel Tunnel, when the helicopter he would
have escaped in explodes and crushes him on the tracks below.
Mission: Impossible fans were not happy with this portrayal of Jim Phelps.
His
abilities as a "ladies' man" were instrumental to the
success of a number of missions. On one occasion, his role would lead
to him having romantic feelings for a target who was killed at the
end of the mission. In several early episodes, a romantic attachment
to Cinnamon Carter was hinted at, if never explicit. While he
probably had the least expertise in hand-to-hand combat of the
original men on the IMF team, he was regularly called upon to defend
himself in hand-to-hand combat, and usually (but not always) came out
on top. He was skilled with handguns and capable of killing when
necessary. And Rollin has displayed several times incredible
endurance as shown by being put under physical torture frequently in
the series. Rollin was willing to do solo missions as well as help
with personal missions for the IMF leader.
Carter
rarely adopted elaborate disguises, as did practically everyone else
on the program, because Barbara Bain, the actress playing her,
suffered from claustrophobia, and could not abide being hemmed in by
heavy makeup. In a nod to Bain's condition, Carter, too, was shown to
be claustrophobic. In "The Heir Apparent" she is made up as
an aging Princess, heir to a nation, while in "The Bunker"
she is masked as the objective scientist's wife. In episodes where
someone was needed to get into tight spaces, another female agent
would be brought in, but in "The Slave" Cinnamon, in spite
of her claustrophobia, is seen being placed into and later coming out
of the false bottom of a food carriage as part of the IMF plan.
Cinnamon's claustrophobia would be used against her in a devastating
way in the third-season mission, "The Exchange," when an
enemy intelligence service discovers her phobia after capturing her
and uses it in an attempt to break her. While Cinnamon was being
interrogated, she demonstrated that she had been trained in
counter-interrogation techniques, resisting all attempts to get her
to give up the team.
Due
to his being black, his role play in earlier missions which took
place in Eastern European countries was often as a supporting
character. Those missions which took place in Latin America or the
United States gave him the opportunity for more visible roles within
the mission. Although Barney Collier is primarily remembered as an
electronics expert, he was often called upon for his hand-to-hand
combat skills. Notably, he was an accomplished boxer, having been the
champion of the Sixth Fleet when he was in the Navy. His boxing
skills were the centerpiece of a two-part mission in the third
season, "The Contenders." He also had the strength and
agility to penetrate denied areas going hand-over-hand using
grappling lines without any assistance, shimmy up drainpipes, and
rapel down elevator shafts. He demonstrated incredible fortitude even
when injured, continuing with missions even after being shot in the
back, the knee or the head, temporarily blinded by a concussion, or
poisoned. In the course of seven seasons worth of missions, on rare
occasions he killed men in self-defense both in hand-to-hand combat
as well as with firearms. A recurring sub-theme for Collier was, when
a mission was at risk, his unwavering faith in his fellow agents in
their ability to come through.
Willy's
background role meant that he did not get unintentionally captured
or trapped as often as other members of the IMF. However, in the
Season Six episode "Double Dead," Willy was captured in a
mission that was almost blown, and the episode had his recovery as
the main focus. In the end, Willy's ability to connect personally
with one of his captors would be instrumental in saving his life. In
the Season Seven episode "The Deal" Willy was shot after
jumping off a boat to avoid capture. While his injuries were serious,
he was able to rejoin the team by the end of the episode; however,
Willy's disappearance does mark the only time in the entire series
that a team member was believed to have been killed in the line of duty.
It
is strongly implied over the course of the series that Willy is also
in part responsible for mission logistics, particularly the
procurement and staging of materials, vehicles etc. in foreign
countries. In addition, Willy often acted as support for Barney
Collier, particularly when a mission required the use of complicated
electronics or required drastic alterations in physical spaces. On
many occasions it would be Willy's construction skills that would
allow Collier to access the areas required to complete his own tasks.
Paris
grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and was raised by his father after Paris
was abandoned as a child by his mother. When he later served as a
magician's apprentice, he was caught in a love triangle between his
mentor and his mentor's assistant. This would lead to the master
magician murdering Paris's love interest, and this painful memory
would be used against Paris by enemy agents many years later, using a
lookalike for Paris's murdered love interest.
The
character of Doug Robert was brought in to phase out Willy
Armitage's character, but fan reaction led producers to bring Willy
back. Doug appeared in slightly over half of the Season Five missions
instead of Willy Armitage. Throughout most of Season Five, each
episode had either Doug or Willy, but never both, with the exception
of Doug's first mission ("The Innocent") and Doug's last
two missions ("The Party" and "Encore"), which
featured both of them. Doug Robert's final appearance in
"Encore" was his only episode in Season Six.
Casey
would be on a long-term deep cover assignment in Eastern Europe in
the early part of Season Seven, leaving a slot open for a short-term
recurring role for Mimi Davis, as well as two other one-time leading
female agents (played by Elizabeth Ashley and Marlyn Mason; one other
Casey-less episode here featured Barbara McNair as a female IMF
target). Casey would return full-time later in the season. While she
was out, she was referred to regularly and tools used within a
mission were sometimes attributed to her. Also, in some episodes, it
was noted that there was a European portion of the mission being
handled by Casey. In reality, the actress playing Casey, Lynda Day
George, was on maternity leave. In four Season Seven episodes where
she did appear that were filmed immediately before she went on
maternity leave, the actress has a greatly reduced role in each, with
her body generally hidden.
