How I love Mission: Impossible! Let me count the ways…

There’s a quirk of personal history connected with this show. The first time I ever saw it was as a teenager, when I happened to catch a rerun of a 1970 episode, “The Killer.” In this episode, co-starring Leonard Nimoy, the IMF team cons a killer who makes all his plans at random, at the last minute, to prevent anyone else from knowing what the plans are and developing countermeasures. So they pull off the con by making all the decisions for him. A très kewl episode.

Then Mission: Impossible came back for two more seasons in 1988-90. And I completely missed it. I still haven’t seen those episodes, and they haven’t yet been released on DVD. But now that the entire 7-season Mission: Impossible original series has been released on DVD, I hope they’ll continue with the 1988-90 episodes.

(And then, of course, there were the Tom Cruise movies. But we don’t talk about those.)

Since I’m almost through watching the original series on DVD, I was considering some of the things that characterized this show: