art by Aireen Arellano (to view larger version, click here)

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SHOW: Mission: Impossible
EPISODE: “Illusion”
FIRST AIRED:  Apr. 13, 1969

The Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible movies get an undue bad rap from students of the 1960s TV show. Certainly, no points were won among longtime diehards when the makers of the first film disgraced the iconic Mr. Phelps in favor of a new out-of-nowhere entity, Ethan Hunt, and fans do have a legitimate gripe that the show was never about extended gunplay or CGI chase scenes.  

But most of the movies, including the fantastic if goofily named Ghost Protocol, do retain two key aspects that have been entwined in the Mission: Impossible franchise since creator Bruce Geller lit the first fuse back in 1966: the sexy high-wire thrill of seeing a team of professionals act as a single villain-thwarting organism, and the disturbing implications of protagonists who merrily play geopolitical chess with no serious sense of accountability or consequence. Season Three’s “Illusion” (available on Netflix Instant) has both on display and in abundance. 

The episode opens, as nearly all of them do, with IMF leader Jim Phelps receiving his mission from a mysterious voice on a self-destructing tape: this week’s task is to remove two evil candidates from contention for a chief-of-police job in an Eastern European country to make room for a third candidate who is “friendly to the West.”

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Jim picks the show’s most iconic team: master-of-disguise Rollin, actress Cinnamon, gadgets whiz Barney, and strongman Willy. (Character names were not the show’s strong suit.) The two “bad” candidates, a fretful schmuck named Skarbeck and a sneery stoic named Lom, hang out regularly at a nightclub, as does the “good” candidate, a bland-o-tron named Trock, so the whole episode takes on a sultry cabaret theme.

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Mission: Impossible was adored and derided during its heyday for requiring full and alert attention from the viewers to follow the noir-like puzzle-piece plots. Part of the joy in watching an episode often just comes from following along and watching the house of cards coalesce into finality. Thankfully, many of the episodes are tight enough to withstand deconstruction. 

“Illusion” has its fair share of flowchart logic, but the spine of the plot is straightforward: the IMF aims to take advantage of Skarbeck’s mental and emotional instability by stoking the flames of his past. At the nightclub, Cinnamon and Rollin perform a clown-and-singer act all too redolent to that of Skarbeck’s old and long-dead girlfriend, whom many believe he had murdered after he discovered her infidelities. 

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The IMF recreates the scenario for Skarbeck’s benefit: Cinnamon begins a love affair with Skarbeck, and the IMF makes him believe she’s cheating on him with Lom. Skarbeck kills Lom in front of a roomful of witnesses, and the mission’s accomplished: the chief-of-police job is Trock’s for the taking.

Actors and audiences often complain about the lack of character development on these kinds of hour-long procedurals. Compared to Mission: Impossible, cop shows like Law & Order seem to have all the character introspection of a Dostoevsky novel. Through seven seasons of missions, we discovered almost nothing about Jim, Rollin, Cinnamon, and the gang.  

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The show, however, excelled in character development of a very literal sort: since the show’s format was con-job-of-the-week, the main cast not only played but explored a seemingly endless library of characters. In “Illusion,” three performers steal the show: Barbara Bain keeps Cinnamon’s cabaret singer cool and detached as the femme fatale with shifting alliances. Meanwhile, Martin Landau plays Rollin’s jester as a spirited puck on stage and a sympathetic sad sack of music-box melancholy offstage.

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Most notable, however, is Fritz Weaver as Skarbeck. More often than not, Mission’s villains were merely off-the-shelf fodder, men in suits designed to stand there and let the IMF fool them. The show fired on all cylinders, though, when the villain hewed closer to a fully drawn human with choices and damning flaws.

Skarbeck is one of the more compelling Mission antagonists. Fritz Weaver brings to vivid life all the dark neuroses and that Jim proudly announces his team will be exploiting: his sexual insecurities, sweat-drenched paranoia, hair-trigger instabilities, and even some latent misogyny. The show may have primarily been a showcase of spies with gadgets, but the show transcended its fluffy forebears like James Bond when it made the IMF press, almost maliciously, on such thick webs of psychology like Skarbeck’s.

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“Illusion” exemplifies the stylized cinematography and production design that made the show such a visual standout during its time. With its lavish look, evocative chiaroscuro, and clockwork execution, it was one of the first hour-long TV dramas that garnered the now-cliché praise of feeling “just like a movie every week.” But the episode is also a telling example of the problematic implications inherent in Mission’s foundation.   

The show used the Cold War backdrop as justification for the IMF’s dubious moral compass. Since we’re meant to infer that “Illusion” takes place in a Communist Bloc country, then we’re not supposed to ask questions when the IMF manipulates one man into killing another under false pretenses. We’re not even supposed to ask questions when IMF outsider Trock (in a rare Mission plot point) actively helps the team to achieve their goal. 

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This was the way of Mission, for better or worse. Bruce Geller and his team of writers endlessly presented the team as intrepid American heroes who traversed deep behind the Iron Curtain to cure one more country of the evils of communism and fascism. American interventionism, needless to say, is a very real issue with grave consequences. For Mission to take such an easy, broadly shaped stance on it all (namely, that America always knows best and is beyond the grasp of international law) was troublesome.

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The IMF’s stunning lack of accountability didn’t go unnoticed by viewers when it originally aired: even when the show was a hit, it did generate criticisms from viewers for playing fast and loose with concepts like morality or international diplomacy. Instead of taking the opportunity to explore these criticisms by building them into the storytelling of future episodes, the writers instead retreated altogether. The last three seasons found the IMF staying in America to fight stereotypical crime bosses, thus avoiding the tricky subject matter altogether. In essence, it became just another cop show.

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So “Illusion” ends with Skarbeck and Lom out of the equation (Lom very much out of the equation), and Trock in the position to take the job. Our heroes, with nothing more left to say or do, board their car and drive away with no indication of what this means for the fate of the fictional Eastern European country. The shot of the IMF getaway vehicle zooming away to the next mission was a frequent end-of-episode punctuation, and it is emblematic of Mission’s nonexistent view on the long-term consequences of overseas meddling. As Rollin’s court jester proclaims in the cabaret act, “Who knows what tomorrow will bring?” Soon after, he answers what would surely be the IMF’s response: “Who cares? Who cares? Who cares? Who cares?”

~ C.J. Arellano

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About the Art: While (re)watching the episode, I was spellbound by the visually captivating play of light and shadow during Rollin’s sprightly cabaret performance under the lone spotlight. At the beginning of the episode, Rollin, wearing a playful-yet-eerie red jester mask, asks his audience, “Who knows what tomorrow will bring?” After a pause, he takes a shot of vodka, then emphatically sighs, “Who cares?” Seeing this playfully foreboding scene delighted and unsettled me. I knew right away I wanted to use this image in this week’s artwork. The image conjured up inspiration from iconic designer, Saul Bass, which you’ll see in the flat, bold shapes of the artwork. Later, when C.J. and I discussed the episode, we noted how disturbed we both were when the mission called for the eradication of two out of three individuals because the third was merely “friendly to the West.” I thought it essential to make a connection between the text in the artwork and the statement of American interventionism in the Mission series by adding stars and stripes to the background. Now, Rollin’s question forces us to ask the same. ~ Aireen Arellano