Mission: Impossible - The Fifth TV Season

These old shows were good. Great acting and plots.

I will always give a five-star rating to each of the 5 seasons of the original MI series, but, unfortunately, it was in season 5 that the show lost much of the luster it had in its first four seasons. (Please note-even a "poor" MI episode is heads and shoulder above almost everything else on television). Creator Bruce Geller was forced out of having anything to do with making the show, which led to changes the irrevocably changed the nature of the series. One was to make the show more attractive to a younger audience. This involved bringing Leslie Warren in as the regular female member of the team. Most of her performances were lackluster, with one notable exception. In addition, the theme song was made more "modern" and less gripping, in my opinion. Secondly, a number of experiments were made with the basic premise of the show, most of which were not successful. Among them was a scene in the episode "Blast" which is played for pure comedy (a house belonging to a well-to-do couple is taken over by terrorists, including IMF people pretending to go along with them, and the IMF people are forced to promise not to damage the furniture and to take good care of their dog!), another is an especially uninteresting episode where Jim goes back to his home town and gets involved in solving a murder which is a total waste of the IMF's talents and in which Paris quotes the the stupidest line ever from the series: "I dig old home towns!". On the positive side, there is a very good episode ("The Innocent") where Barney is injured and the IMF is forced to bring in a reluctant outsider to help them and in which the morality of what the team does is questioned.It must be said there are numerous fine episodes that dealt with what were then current events such as nuclear weapons proliferation ("The Field"), apartheid in South Africa ("Kitara"), another episode in which Barney is injured in a white-ruled country in Africa which was a thinly disguised version of Rhodesia, and the famous hotel-switch episode with Robert Conrad ("The Killer").As I noted above, Leslie Warren was just not the best person to take Barbara Bain's place on the team, being too young and not "serious" enough, however, she did put in a fine performance in "Flight" in which she is captured and at first seems to break down and cry claiming she was a fringe person innocently recruited into an intelligence operation without really knowing what is going on, then, she quickly changes persona, becomes cool as a cucumber and tells her interrogators that yes, she is working for American intelligence. However, this brief moment of glory for her and her character didn't last.I happen to think Sam Elliott was a fine addition to the series, but I guess they didn't figure there was room for both him and Peter Lupus in the show. His best performance was in "Kitara" where he plays an Afrikaner army officer (he had the accent down pretty well) who is an expert in rooting out blacks pretending to be whites. Again, like Leslie Warren, he wasn't really given any other challenging roles.This season was Leonard Nimoy's second as Paris, and he was very disappointed in the show and decided to leave it. He was not given that much to do, but he also put in some fine performances (although, on the whole, he is not the actor Martin Landau is), among them, "The Field" where he plays an American traitor who is arrested and accused of murder, which was not part of the original mission.Finally, it was in this season that the decision was made to de-emphasize the episodes about international intrigue due to the unpopularity of the War in Vietnam, however there are still some good ones, particularly, "The Amateur" with Anthony Zerbe, one of MI best villains. After this season, these type of episodes were completely phased out with the Missions changed to battling organized crime, which quickly lead to the writers running out of ideas.Having said all this, any fan of series will still enjoy these season 5 episodes.

As Mission Impossible enter season 5 you wouldn't know it, the show in fact seems to get some of its shine back that it lost a little bit in season 4. Mostly because they didn't find a permanent replacement That season for Barbara Bain who departed after 3 years but this season they did with Lesley Ann Warren she bring some new life to the series which makes this as far as I'm concerned the second best season of the entire run of the series behind season 3 which is still my favorite. The rest of the game is back almost Peter Graves is still there as the leader of the IMF team Leonard Nimoy and Greg Morris are also there but Peter Lupus is missing from most of the season. I Googled to try to find some information why, the best I could find is a Wikipedia article according to the writer of that article The Producers at the time we're thinking about dropping Lupus permanently from the show but he proved so popular with fans that they brought him back as the season was coming to an end. A young Sam Elliott appears in most of the season and it's very good obviously but he's no Peter Lupus. There's some really good episodes in this season and there's not a lot of repetitive stuff that there had been previously except a couple of episodes at the end. In one episode they try to make a man believe that his house is haunted something that they had already done a couple times in previous seasons and in another episode they tried to bring down a bad guy in a high-stakes poker game yeah that sounds familiar too. But overall it really is a great season you certainly get the field that the show has now moved into the 70s they go heavy on that. they even try an updated version of the theme. Apparently that didn't work it was dropped the next year for the original version. I love this season I highly recommended and it's a very reasonable price if you're a fan I want to become a fan you should get it

The by-now long running spy series took a different direction in its fifth year, moving away from Cold War espionage stories to more stories about fighting organised crime (in the shape of "The Syndicate"). This reflected a changing world, and also saved the producers some money in having to create various foreign-looking locations in southern California.Fashions were also a-changing, and the is no doubt which decade these episodes are from. Just check out Jim's orange turtleneck in the excellent opening episode, "The Killer", with guest star Robert Conrad from "The Wild Wild West". This also introduced a regular new female IMF agent, played by Leslie Ann Warren, who was certainly pretty but never came across as having any unique skills - which was a pity.The episodes are generally highly enjoyable and a lot more free-form that what had gone before, with more improvisation rather than the unwavering execution of a master plan revealed at the start. Arguably, the series had to evolve, to avoid a wearing off of the original novelty of simply seeing the aforementioned master plan unfold.So, the style changed (and this would continue in the following seasons), but the MI magic was still very much there. Highly recommended.

Excellent series, shame Leonard Nimoy leftDare say he left to play Spock

Excellent replacement

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