Mission: Impossible Season 1, Episode 16: The Reluctant Dragon

Pilot

IMF team leader Dan Briggs assembles his team for the first time. The mission: to recover two nuclear warheads belonging to General Rio Dominguez from a hotel vault in Santa Costa. Jim and Willy sneak safecracker Terry Targo into the vault, who figures out how to get out. The team then captures Dominguez but Targo's fingers are broken in the attempt. With no other alternative, Briggs has himself and Dominguez put into the vault, and Briggs threatens to enter a random combination if Alicio doesn't tell him the code. Dominguez breaks. With the bombs defused, Willy takes the warheads out of the vault. Briggs remains behind and uses the information Targo gathered earlier to get out during a fireworks distraction set off by Barney. Briggs and the rest of the team make a desperate race for safety and get onto a plane heading to safety seconds before the military can catch up to them.

46 min

Memory

The IMF must undermine ""the Butcher of the Balkans"", Janos Karq, by having his head of security capture an agent, Sparrow, who will then incriminate Karq. To pull off the ruse, they need a memory expert, Baresh, who can memorize the necessary information in the short time allowed and pretend to be Sparrow. Baresh will later be traded back. However, during a faked ""rescue"" to make Sparrow look more convincing, Baresh gets a look at Soska's master list of agents, and the team must rescue him from the prison immediately to get the information.

46 min

Operation Rogosh

Imry Rogosh is a mass murderer who kills to forment political upheaval. He is targeting Los Angeles, so the IMF knock him out in a car accident. When Rogosh ""wakes up"" he is in a cell in a prison in his own country, three years later, and ready to be executed as an American agent. To "prove" his loyalty to the cause, Rogosh has to spill the information on his secret operation, but during the mock trial a slip-up cues him in on the ruse. Briggs has to act fast to get Rogosh to reveal the plan to kill the citizens of Los Angeles.

46 min

Old Man Out (1)

The IMF team goes in as a circus team to rescue Anton Cardinal Vossek, who is being held in the impregnable Seravno Prison. Vossek is the leader of the country's freedom movement, in rebellion against Colonel Scutari, and is awaiting a fake trial before execution. With the aid of circus acrobat Crystal Walker, the team must get Vossek out. To do so, Rollin fakes being a pickpocket so as to be arrested. Once inside Servano, he has to sneak through the prison and get Vossek out of his cell as a test run for the next day...only for the guards to interrupt at an inopportune moment.

46 min

Old Man Out (2)

Rollin manages to avoid the guards and escape, but Vossek is moved to a new cell in solitary confinement. Briggs comes up with a new plan and manages to relay it to the imprisoned Rollin. They manage to do so, and manage to rescue Vossek from the prison. With Barney providing distraction as a clown, the team manages to get Vossek over the border before Vossek's captors can catch up to them.

46 min

Odds on Evil

Prince Iben Kostas plans to use his money to finance a war. Infiltrating his casino, the IMF team goes to work: IMFer Andre (pretending to be Cinammon's husband) breaks the bank at roulette thanks to a not-so-portable computer worn by Willie underneath his tux. Andre then loses the money to Rollin as another gambler. Kostas tries to get the money back by playing against Rollin and cheating by using marked cards and tinted contact lens. However, Rollin has a similar pair of lens and also deals bad hands to Kostas. Finally Kostas antes up the 1.5 million in war funds, thinking he can't lose. Rollins tricks him, and the team must make a desperate escape.

46 min

Wheels

In the country of Valeria, the IMF must assure that the corrupt Nationalist party's rigged voting machine doesn't give them the election.

46 min

The Ransom

Mobster Frank Egan kidnaps the daughter of Dan's friend and uses her as a hostage to force Dan and the team to break out a key witness, Augie Gorman, against him. After several failed ploys, Barney manages to contaminate Gorman's water supply inside the hotel safehouse where the police are keeping him. The team has taken over the hospital room and use a rotating examination table to switch Gorman for IMF member Steve (who resembles him). At the exchange, Egan tries to double-cross Dan, but the IMF team leader has a trick or two of his own to make sure things go smoothly and Gorman gets what's coming to him.

A Spool There Was

Rollin and Cinnamon go it alone to recover a reel of recording wire containing information on a chemical warfare project aimed at the U.S. The courier carrying it was killed by the enemy, and the wire is missing. The two fake a lovers' reunion and then Rollin slips out during a pre-recorded conversation. To duplicate the circumstances of the courier's demise as closely as possible, Rollin lets himself be discovered and then chased along the same route. He finds the wire, hidden in plain sight as part of a fence. He and Cinnamon plan to recover and smuggle out the wire the same way, but it is taken by a young boy looking for fishing wire. Rollin manages to recover it, and they send the wire out disguised as the wire on a balloon.

60 min

The Carriers

Enemy agent Janos Passik is preparing to train 200 foreign agents to infiltrate the U.S. and engage in some form of bacteriological warfare. The team figures out that Passik has created a replica of a ""typical American town"" so as to train his agents to learn how to blend into American society. Rollin, Cinnamon, Barney, and bacteriologist Rogr Lee replace the new group of recruits and must then find their way to the research lab. They soon realize that the American-trained agents will be infected with a highly contagious plague and then sent into American to kill millions. The group must not only destroy the plague samples but make sure that Passik and his superiors do not find out that the destruction was deliberate.

Zubrovnik's Ghost

The wife of a deceased scientist, Kurt Zubrovnik, is being pressured by Eastern forces to work for them. They are using a phony psychic to convince the wife her dead husband wants to defect! Accompanied by IMF ""psychic consultant"" Ariana Domi, Rollin and Barney try to disrupt the fraud and convince her to return to working for the U.S. The psychic, Poljac, is torturing the husband for information to use to convince his wife Poljac's powers are real. Ariana senses a real ghost present. In the end, Rollin sets up a final seance and Barney prepares to use a technological projection of Zubrovnik to decry Poljac. However, a blackout causes his equipment to fail, and Ariana's alleged powers, plus some ghostly phenomena, allow them to complete their mission.

Fakeout

Anastas Poltroni is the head of an international narcotics syndicate, and has taken refuge in a country with no extradition treaty. The IM Force is assigned to lure him out without kidnapping him (to avoid the publicity). Cinnamon woos Carson until Briggs, pretending to be her husband, interrupts. Carson refuses to bribe Briggs, while Barney plants some of Carson's heroin in his own hotel room and tip off the police. The IMF ambush Carson and steal the heroin, and Carson later escapes. He grabs Cinnamon and follows Briggs to a deserted lodge to retrieve his own heroin. The police are hot on his trail, and he flees with Cinnamon still in his grasp. Thanks to confusing road signs altered by Barney, Carson ends up over the border where he is arrested and the heroin is taken into custody.

Elena

Double-agent Elena Del Barra is acting bizarrely, sending a microfilm of defense secrets from her own country. Rollin is sent into investigate, and return the microfilm without its theft ever being detected. Complicating matters is that an assassin, Callao, has been sent to kill her if Rollin can't figure things out in two days. Rollin convinces her to meet with teammate Dr. Enero, who hypnotizes her and learns she is suffering from a post-hypnotic suggestion to denounce the President, her good friend. With time running out, Rollin must return the microfilm, figure out the traitor, and save Elena.

The Short Tail Spy

A defector has been targeted by two rival groups from the same foreign country. The team is to discredit the younger group, so that the U.S. can more easily handle the old-line group. The IMF sets it up so that the younger group's assassin, Fetyukov, must seduce Cinnamon to get to the defector. The two play a dangerous romantic game, while Dan convinces the older group's assassin, Shtemenko, that Fetyukov betrayed him to the Americans. They then get pictures of him trying to assassinate the defector, and try to blackmail him to convince him further that Fetyukov is responsible. Cinnamon ""saves"" Fetyukov and convinces him that she wants to defect. As Fetyukov goes after the defector, it's up to Cinnamon to stop him.

The Legacy

The IMF must get hold of a horde of Nazi gold through four young men, sons of Hitler's top aides, who are sent to Switzerland to meet for the first time and pool their parts of the ""puzzle"" together. One of the men, the only one known to them, is replaced by Rollin. Each has part of an account number, and the team needs to hypnotize and trick the bank manager into giving them the complete account # and then slip it to Rollin. The bank account contains an envelope with a microdot, which when combined with a slide in each man's pocket watch provides the location of the treasure. After seeing the other men's slides, Rollin fakes the loss of his watch, then he and the rest of the team head to the cemetary. Two of the men figure out the puzzle from their pieces and follow. In a gunfight Dan is wounded, but one of the men is killed and the other runs off rather then face Rollin's wrath. The gold turns out to have been made into a crypt, and is recovered.

The Frame

Gangster Jack Wellman is moving syndicated crime into politics, killing off certain politicians and replacing them with men more sympathetic to the Syndicate. The team goes in as caterers. Cinnamon sneaks into Wellman's room, blows a hole in the wall, and inserts a fake safe. Meanwhile, Barney and Willy break into the real vault from the rear and steal the 4 million in profits that Wellman has tucked away, and which he is to split with his fellow mobsters at a dinner that night. They open the real vault and discover the money missing. Going upstairs, they find Cinnamon who claims to be Wellman's girlfriend, tells him she knew ""it"" wouldn't work, and reveals the fake safe. As Cinnamon and the rest of the team depart, the other mobsters tell Wellman to open the safe or they'll kill him, and don't believe his desperate pleas that he's never seen that safe before in his life.

The Trial

Josef Varsh plans to put an American on trial on false charges, discredit the West, and gain power. Rollin, disguised as Dan, meets with a woman who sold out her boyfriend/Western spy. Meanwhile, Briggs himself is with the Deputy Minister, a rival of Varsh's and a reformer. Rollin-as-Briggs leaves behind evidence implicating himself, and Varsh has the real Briggs arrested. Kudnov, who knows Dan is innocent, insists that Varsh let Briggs go, so Varsh orders him killed. The IMF team makes the Deputy Minister vanish - now they have to get the Deputy Minister and the girlfriend into court to testify and make Varsh look foolish.

The Diamond

Henrik Durvard has taken over the country of Lombounda by military coup, and holds the natives in terror. He has obtained a diamond from the native miners, and the IMF are assigned to take it away from him. In London to auction the diamond, Durvard is approached by the team who offer to top all bids if they get exclusive rights to diamond production in Lombounda. Since Lombounda is not known for its diamond production, Durvard is suspicious. Eventually the team lets him figure out that they have a plan to use his country as a blind to distribute artificial diamonds that they claim they can manufacture. Durvard insists on being part of the scam, and forces the team to ""make"" a diamond from him using a piece off of the original stone. They do so, but when it comes time to fake the real diamond, the machine apparently overloads from the strain. The team slips the diamond out of the machine and leaves, as Durvard and the machine blow up.

The Legend

An imprisoned member of the Nazi party, Herbert Raynor, is released from prison and is being flown (along with his daughter) to Puerto Huberra in South America, along with other Nazis. All of them are being flown there by an unknown benefactor. Briggs and Cinnamon take the Raynors' place.They and the others are introduced to Martin Bormann, now a bedridden invalid. Borman's secretary, Rudd, informs them that Bormann will lead the Third Reich to new glories. Dan ducks a murder attempt, breaks into Bormann's room, and finds that he is a mannequin with a voice provided by Rudd. Rudd has recorded tapes duplicating Bormann's voice, and the last tape will turn leadership of the party over to him. To stymie Rudd, Rollin dresses up as Bormann and is suddenly not so bedridden. Of course, Rudd knows Rollin is an imposter but can't reveal it without exposing his own ploy. "Bormann" gives orders that eliminate Rudd once and for all and end the threat posed by the Nazis.

Snowball in Hell

A former prison guard, Sefra, has got hold of a supply of cesium 138, which explodes at temperatures above 70 degrees. Sefra plans to sell the sample and the formula from the closed-down prison base where he once worked. Rollin and Barney go in as a photographer and model respectively, and Sefra ""learns"" that Barney is a former prisoner returning for revenge. The team fakes a generator break down while Sefra beats Barney, and the cesium starts to heat up. Sefra has it taken to a nearby hospital refrigerator, where the IMF makes the switch. When Sefra discovers the missing jar, he forces Barney to show him the escape route which he supposedly used to escape. As Sefra makes his own escape, the IMF send the cesium sample toward him on a remote-controlled mini-tank, and it blows up, killing Sefra and making sure no one gets the formula or the sample.

The Confession

Andreas Solowiechek, a member of a Communist trade delegation, is arrested after assassinating a U.S. Senator, Townsend. Townsend's backer, McMillan, is rallying his supporters for the U.S. to break off all trade talks with the Russians. It is believed Solowiechek wasn't working on the orders of his government, so the IMF team have to break him. Rollin becomes the assassin's cellmate, and arranges to be handcuffed to him. Rollin then fakes an escape, and threatens to kill Solowiechek. The assassin promises that his backer can Rollin money. Meanwhile, Dan has pretended to be an artist and got into McMillan's house, leaving a camera behind hidden in his art box. Rollin and Solowiechek confront McMillan, and the latter admits that he arranged for Townsend to be killed so as to become a martyr to his cause, unaware that his words are being transmitted on national TV.

Action!

Miklos Klaar, an Iron Curtain filmmaker, has film of American soldiers and plans to edit it into an atrocity movie to discredit the U.S. He has recreated the jungle as a set from the one print of the film he has. Disguised as a Ministry of Propaganda officer, Rollin destroys the print and Barney floods the negative vault, forcing Klaar to reshoot the American footage as well. Cameraman and IMFer David Day is snuck in and films Klaar recreating the American footage. On the day the press is assembled, David and Willy manage to bypass Klaar's guards and air the footage of Klaar rehearsing his cast and crew and congratulating themselves on the phony massacre.

The Train

Prime Minister Larya of Svardia is working to establish democracy, but is unaware that his personal protege, Deputy Premier Pavel, plans to set up a dictatorship. The team must persuade Larya of Pavel's plans. The IMF fakes a train ride for Larya, Pavel, and Pavel's aide Androv. They then fake a crash, put Androv and Pavel in a fake hospital, and tell them that Larya is dead. They immediately begin plans to eliminate anymemory of Larya and start arresting dissidents. Then the hospital wall slides away to reveal that Larya has heard the whole thing, and dismisses them both.

Shock

Enemy operative Kiri has kidnapped U.S. envoy Carl Wilson and has an imposter, Gort, who is impersonating him to discredit a U.S. trade agreement. The team have to rescue Wilson and foil the impersonation before Kiri kills Wilson. Cinnamon impersonates Wilson's niece while Willy kidnaps Gort and Briggs-as-Wilson takes Gort's place, pretending to be Gort. The team put Gort in an asylum and give him electro-shock to scramble his memories, then claim he is is a delusional accountant. Under the threat of more electro-shock, Gort tells them the full details of his delusion: that he's to kill an American official and leave Wilson to take the blame. Barney and Willy replace the unconscious Wilson at the reception with a drugged Gort set to look like a suicide, then Briggs-as-Gort-as-Wilson takes a shot at the official. Briggs returns and reveals that "Wilson" is actually Gort, who was in Keri's employ.

A Cube of Sugar

Vincent Deane is a jazz musician and undercover U.S. intelligence operative who has memorized the plans to a microcircuit code but was then captured and imprisoned. The IMF must get him out. Deane's interrogator, Brobin, has hooked Deane on drugs to try and break him using the withdrawl symptoms, unaware that the chip is concealed among some sugar cubes Deane had. Pretending to be Deane's wife, Cinnamon implicates Rollin as the real enemy agent. Brobin has Rollin captured and imprisoned,but Rollin manages to escape and tamper with Deane's drugs so that he goes into a coma. Briggs pretends to be a U.S. representative demanding Deane's body, so Brobin has it cremated to prevent a revealing autopsy. Barney and Willy switch out the ""dead"" Deane. Rollin then agrees to tell Brobin where the microcircuit is, knocks out the interrogator, and with the aid of two masks makes his escape.

The Traitor

An American intelligence officer, Hughes, has defected to the enemy with the only copy of an encoded top-secret message. The IMF must get to him, get him out, discredit him, and recover the message before the enemy can get a cryptographer, Belson, to work on the message. Rollin takes Belson's place, and sets it up so that Ambassador Brazneck, in charge of Hughes, believes that Dan is going to buy the papers from someone in the embassy. Rollin-as-Belson works with Hughes to decode the message, then drugs him. Willy gets special agent Tina Mera, a contortionist and acrobat, into the embassy through a fake air duct. She uses a fake bed covering to make Hughes ""disappear"", then break into the vault and get the real message. With Hughes out, Briggs picks up the fake message from someone pretending to be Hughes, who has ""disappeared"" from the embassy. Tina returns, plants money on Hughes, and removes the fake disappearing bed cover. Brazneck believes Hughes has betrayed him and Hughes flees

The Psychic

An investment promoter, Alex Lowell, gained control of manufacturer of NATO top-secret defense hardware and absconded to South America to sell them to an enemy powers. The IMF needs to recover the stock documents worth $80 mil. Cinnamon gets close to Lowell as a psychic who manages to prove herself accurate with her predictions thanks to IMF assistance. She then "predicts" that Rollin (as a gangster) will play against him, try to cheat, and lose. Lowell finds the fake cards that the IMF has planted. He goes through with the game, intending on cheating Rollin. He succeeds, but as Rollin is tossed out he secretly switches the stock documents with phonies thanks to a automated feeder arm, leaving Lowell with nothing but an unendorsed check for $80 milliion.