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The classic IMF cast, starting in season 2note 

Good morning, Mr. or Ms. Troper.

The show you're looking at is Mission: Impossible, a unique Spy Drama based around an ad-hoc covert operations team employed (though not officially) by the US Government for dicey missions requiring maximum deniability. The television series lasted from September 1966 to March 1973; a total of 171 episodes were filmed over the seven season run. It was the longest-surviving of the "spy-fi" genre of US and UK-made TV series of the 1960s based on episode and season count.note  and held the record for longest running spy series by episode count ever until the eighth season of 24 came out in 2010.

The classic episode format as established in the first few seasons went like this:

  • First, the team leader goes to a Dead Drop location to pick up a pre-recorded message, usually with a packet of one or more photos. The leader listens to the message, where his government contact gives him a quick rundown of who the target (or targets) are, what they've done, and what the government needs the team to do about it. Every time, this is followed by a warning that if the team is captured or unsuccessful, "the Secretary" note  will 'disavow' knowledge of their actions (implying they won't be rescued or ransomed) then a warning that this message will self-destruct. Which it does, seconds later, followed by one of the best theme tunes. "Good luck, Jim." . note 
  • Second, the leader assembles his team and the viewer gets to see a selected but mostly uninformative subset of their planning and briefing. note 
  • Third, the mission — usually a caper or con — is executed, sometimes with real or bogus crises along the way. This, of course, is what the bulk of the episode consists of.
  • Finally, in the very last scenes, the team reassembles in a convenient vehicle and makes an escape, as the target(s) see a massive reversal of fortunes occur - either making an inadvertent confession of his crimes, turns state's evidence, discovers his valuable possessions have disappeared or been destroyed, or slowly cools in a spreading pool of blood after his own men kill him. Later seasons did away with some of the traditions, much to viewer chagrin.

The original cast:

  • Steven Hill as Dan Briggs, a cold, cerebral strategist who would be given the mission, formulate a plan, select a team of agents (not always the same ones in early episodes), and put everything in motion.
  • Barbara Bain as Cinnamon Carter, a glamorous Femme Fatale who could wrap men around her finger with a single raised eyebrow.
  • Greg Morris as Barney Collier, a mechanical and electronic genius and reverse Air-Vent Passageway escape artist — the casting of a black actor as this highly accomplished character in 1966 was revolutionary, although the producers insisted race had nothing to do with their decision. While no one appears in each episode, he appears more often than anyone else. Oh, and he was no slouch as a fighter, either.
  • Former bodybuilder Peter Lupus as Willy Armitage, essentially a Gentle Giant. Despite being the muscle of the team, Willy displayed surprising bursts of speed on occasion, in addition to being a gifted actor and improviser, and skilled enough at handyman work to help Barney set up his equipment.
  • Finally, Martin Landau played Rollin Hand, a Master of Disguise, sleight-of-hand, card sharp, and overall Jack-of-All-Trades. He was a guest star in the pilot, but he proved so popular with audiences that he became the Ensemble Dark Horse. He was called back for virtually every subsequent episode, billed as a "special appearance." This billing was actually by his request - Landau was not quite convinced that the show had staying power. After the show was renewed for season two, he agreed to be billed as a series regular for the rest of his time.

When Hill became increasingly difficult to work with,note  he was gradually written out of the series; he was replaced by Peter Graves as stern-faced Jim Phelps in season two and the classic cast was set. Other cast changes followed; when Landau and Bain left at the end of season three over a contract disputenote , Landau was replaced by Leonard Nimoy, fresh from the recently cancelled Star Trek (which also began under Desilu Studios and then became a Paramount Television production), playing master of disguise The Great Paris, and Bain by an assortment of leading ladies, culminating in Lesley Ann Warren as the waif-like Dana. There was an ill-advised attempt made at writing out Peter Lupus in favor of a medical doctor team member played by a pre-cowboy-stardom Sam Elliott, until the producers realized how popular Willy was. An attempt was eventually made to invigorate the leading lady role by casting Lynda Day George as Casey, who was both the leading lady and the Master of Disguise, but by then the series was on its last legs. One final cast tweak in the final season saw George temporarily replaced by Ironside (1967) veteran Barbara Anderson as ex-convict Mimi while George was on maternity leave.

Mission: Impossible was a thinking man's espionage program. Gunplay was kept to a minimum (with a few notable early-series exceptions when the series was still finding its rhythm), and the focus was always on outwitting and outmaneuvering the foe, who usually didn't know he was being targeted at all. The IMF were never dispatched for ordinary tasks that a simple James Bond type could handle with a couple of explosions and a chase scene - they were called upon to accomplish their goals by outplanning and outthinking their opposition, often by playing mind games with them on such a scale that more than one may have been driven into madness. After the first season IMF operatives rarely killed anybody directly, but their targets didn't always survive, as a favored outcome was usually the target being killed by his own organization; one episode established that IMF did not go in for assassinations, however there was nothing saying they couldn't arrange assassination by proxy.

All but invented Latex Perfection and the Master of Disguise, and originated many of its own unique tropes, not the least of which is its most famous and most parodied elements, "this tape will self-destruct in five seconds" and "if you or any member of your IM force are caught or killed, the Secretary will disavow all knowledge of your actions." Interestingly, early seasons only used the self-destructing tape on occasion, with other methods such as melting vinyl records and hidden recordings being used more frequently. A growing number of episodes as the series went on omitted the tape scenes altogether, sometimes featuring missions joined in progress, or "personal missions" where an IMF member goes off-book.

The show won ten Emmys (Two Outstanding Drama awards, one Outstanding Writing in a Drama award, three Outstanding Performance by an Actress in a Drama awards for Barbara Bain, one Outstanding in Art Direction and Scenic Design award, one Outstanding Achievement in Sound Mixing award, one Outstanding Achievement in Makeup award, and one Individual Achievement in Film and Sound Editing award, plus thirty-eight other nominations in various categories), three Golden Globes (One Best Drama, and one Best Actor each for Peter Graves and Martin Landau) and one Edgar (One Best Episode).

The show's distinctive use of what creator Bruce Geller called "a team of specialists" to carry out a complex plan inspired numerous imitators, most notably The A-Team, but also shows such as Charlie's Angels and Leverage (and even a cartoon in the form of DePatie-Freleng Enterprises' The Houndcats).

There was a two-season Next Generation-style continuation of the original series filmed in Australia in the 1980s; Peter Graves returned as Jim Phelps, mentoring an all-new team (including Barney Collier's son, Grant, played by Greg Morris's real son, Phil Morris); originally conceived as a straight-out remake in order to fill a hole in ABC's schedule created by a Hollywood writer's strike, the series ended up being a continuation of the original (though the strike still forced them to remake a couple of original series episodes), while Greg Morris and Lynda Day George made guest appearances as their original characters. The NES game developed by Konami is based on this revival series.

A successful revival occurred with the Mission: Impossible Film Series, a long-running series of blockbusters starring Tom Cruise. The film series substantially differed from its original counterpart, with a Younger and Hipper vibe, a far-smaller IMF team (reflecting the All-Star Cast of one that is, apparently, just Tom Cruise), and most especially with a big boost in action and stunts at the expense of strategy (at least after the first film). Rumors of a TV series based on the movies have been bandied about for some time, but ultimately no solid plans for a revival have surfaced.

Unlike most IPs owned by Paramount that originated on TV at the time of the 2006 CBS/Viacom split, the Mission: Impossible franchise remained under Paramount ownership despite CBS acquiring the rights to the two TV series; this may have been a result of the third film still being in production at the time. This became a moot point when the companies re-merged in 2019.


Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to describe the tropes found in the series. Good luck, Troper.

  • Accidental Astronaut: In the 1980s revival episode "Target Earth" Shannon Reed becomes one of these when the shuttle she is working in is launched into space by a group of terrorists.
  • Action Girl: Inverted usually as the female IMF agents generally use their brains more than their brawn during missions.
    • Indeed, in the 1980s version, one of the few occasions in which a female IMF agent is shown in "Action Girl" mode results in her being killed and disavowed.
  • Actionized Adaptation: Not unreasonably, the NES game wasn't about an elaborate sting operation, but is instead an action game with some stealth and puzzle elements.
  • After the End: The late series episode "Two Thousand" is about capturing a thief who stole some weapons-grade plutonium, then pretending he's woken up in the year 2000 after a nuclear war to trick him into telling them where he hid it.
  • Air-Vent Passageway: Used so often in the series it almost qualifies as a cliche. They did try to justify it once by hiring a contortionist to do it.
    • Subverted in "The Exchange". Cinnamon is caught and her captors use her Claustrophobia against her. When she tries to escape her cell through a vent, the vent is closed off, trapping her in a very small space, leaving her in shock and breaking completely.
  • Agony Beam: Barney is subjected to one that plays on the pain centres of his brain in "The Golden Serpent (Part 1)".
  • All Part of the Show: The bad guys do this in "Gunslinger" (even uttering the exact phrase) as they hustle a spy outside to kill him; making it look like part of the Wild West show at the resort.
  • Amnesiac Liar: At least once added to...
  • Amnesia Danger:
    • Jim in "Trapped."
    • Shannon in "Church Bells in Bogota".
  • And the Rest: The Hartford Repertory Players, a troupe of actors Phelps recruits when he needs background people for a con. (See also: the Globe Repertory Company.)
  • Appease the Volcano God: In "Cargo Cult", a white man is posing as the son of the volcano god in order to use a native tribe as a slave labour force to work a gold mine. After capturing several members of the IMF, he orders his followers to sacrifice Nicholas and Max to the volcano.
  • Applied Phlebotinum: Some of the IMF plots hinged on a gadget, chemical, or gimmick that was beyond the realm of conventional science. Examples included an odorless gas that almost immediately incapacitated a man, a gas-powered machine the size of a metal pipe that could heat a room to over 6,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and a camera that could beam flawlessly animated holographic images into another room.
  • Argentina Is Nazi-Land: In "The Legend", Briggs and Cinammon impersonate a former Nazi and his daughter who are invited to attend a reunion of aged Nazi leaders at the South American home of Nazi fugitive Martin Bormann, who is planning the creation of the Fourth Reichnote .
  • Aristocrats Are Evil: In "The Devils", the IMF stop a British lord who involves foreign and domestic officials in Satanic rituals and human sacrifice for blackmail purposes.
  • Arms Dealer: In "The Cattle King", the IMF has to shut down an arms dealer who is supplying weapons to terrorists.
  • Artistic License – Cars: Frequently, Checker A12 Marathons were used in place of Soviet cars, most likely meant to represent GAZ M-13 Chaikas and M-23 Volgas (M-21 with the M-13's V8 and transmission), which were only available to Soviet and KGB officials and not the common people, and definitely not Hollywood producers. The three cars look nothing alike.
  • Artistic License – Geography: In "Lover's Knot," the Big Bad lives outside London. Fair enough, except that there are mountains in the background - so either he lives way outside London (like, Wales or Yorkshire outside) or...
  • As Long as It Sounds Foreign: Or looks like it on a sign. Since the IMF was frequently hacking into electric, gas, telephone, and other infrastructure, the Ruritania settings always featured appropriate signage. One of the few humorous Running Gags on the show involved the writers coming up with increasingly ridiculous Ruritanian gibberish to put on the signs — like "machinawerke" for machine shop or "zona restrik" for restricted area.
    • In some European countries there really are utility covers that say "Gaz", a frequent example of "Gellerese".
  • As You Know: Sometimes between the scene with the recording of the upcoming mission and actually deploying the agents would share some additional detail about the target and location to set the scene a little more vividly. In the 80's in particular it could get stilted as to who's supposed to know what, and it felt very obviously like it was all just exposition for the viewer's sake and not stuff they really needed to explain to each other.
  • Auction of Evil:
    • Episode "Doomsday". An industrialist sets up an auction to sell weapons-grade plutonium and other items needed to produce an H-bomb to the highest bidder.
    • Episode "Speed". The West Coast's largest drug dealer steals 3 tons of amphetamines and sets up an auction in the criminal underworld to sell it to the highest bidder. The IMF must stop the plan so the drugs don't reach the American public.
    • In another, the baddie auctions off the "antidote" to a computer virus that can cripple military systems. The virus itself was free, since none of the attendees could use it without exposing their own systems.
  • Avengers Assemble: The apartment scene near the beginning of almost all episodes where the team leader meets with the rest of the IMF team to brief them on that episode's caper.
  • Badass in Distress: Barney guest-starred in a couple episodes of the 80s version but inevitably had to be rescued by the current team, his son in particular.
  • Bad Guys Play Pool: "Break!" is all about this as Jim poses as a pool shark in order to locate microfilm in a dead agent's wristwatch.
  • Bad Habits: In "The Cardinal," the Big Bad has taken over a monastery as part of his scheme for power. His soldiers are disguised as monks, and his pistol-packing Major is disguised as a nun.
  • Banana Republic: When it isn't Ruritania.
  • Batman Gambit: The plans invariably depended on near-perfect predictions of how the victims would respond.
  • Bedlam House: In "Committed", Casey gets herself committed to a prison-like mental hospital in order to save the only witness in a murder trial against a Syndicate boss from being driven insane by the corrupt staff.
  • Beware the Nice Ones
    • Barney is quiet, careful, competent, but attack his family or his friends, and you'll discover just how dangerous a Gadgeteer Genius can be. (See "Cat's Paw," in which his brother is murdered.)
    • Grant, his son, is the same way.
    • This also applies to Rollin, who loses it when Dan is shot in "The Legacy" and almost strangles the main villain with his bare hands. And when the Big Bad guns down Nicole (from the episode of the same name) in front of Jim, who's fallen in love with her, Rollin actually kills the villain on the spot. While the IMF basically arranges for the demise of many, many people at the hands of their fellow baddies throughout the series, this is one of the very few times that an IMF member does the job personally.
    • Even Jim, in "The Fortune," shows a moment of being ready to strike the Dragon Lady Big Bad of the episode when she is shown with the proof she killed Casey Randall while Grant and Max aren't that far off.
  • Bifauxnen: One episode of the 80's revival had the protagonists attempting to hunt down a female assassin in a ballroom, using a detector that identified her by scent. Only problem was, they were identifying only the women in the crowd, and the assassin was going undercover as a man.
  • Bloodless Carnage
    • Though less so in the 1980s version, which became more violent and bloody in the second season.
  • The Boxing Episode:
    • "The Contender" is a two-part episode where the plot revolves around eliminating a mobster who was making his money by rigging matches, and Barney imitates a former champion who's making a comeback. The episode has a Special Guest in the form of champ Sugar Ray Robinson, who plays a former boxer who became a mob enforcer.
    • The IMF returns to boxing in "The Fighter" to expose and destroy the criminal boxing operations of the Syndicate handled by its man and his partner who is a corrupt promoter.
  • Bullet Sparks: Copious bullet sparks are kicked during the Railing Kill in "The Pawn".
  • Bullying the Dragon: On more than one occasion, a member of the team would fall afoul of a government totally by accident, bringing the entire IMF down on their heads.
  • Buried Alive: Done twice in "The Cardinal". Barney and Willie use an underground tunnel to enter a monastery, but a cave-in traps them in front of a vault door that must be opened from the inside. Meanwhile, Rollin has allowed himself to be captured by the Big Bad, who plans to suffocate him in a sarcophagus sealed with a 600-pound lid.
  • Bus Full of Innocents: In "Banshee", an Arms Dealer blows up a bus full of old age pensioners in order to stir up The Troubles and increase sales of his product. It is this heinous act that gets the IMF sent to shut him down.
  • Cable-Car Action Sequence: In "The Tram" the IMF must infiltrate a Syndicate financial meeting - held at a mountain resort only accessible by aerial tramway - to discover the group's Swiss bank account number. Naturaly the eponymous tram features heavily in the action.
  • Camera Spoofing: Used a fair number of times, such as in "The Bank."
  • The Caper: Many episodes involved stealing a cache of treasure from a secure location as part of the mission. Examples include "Charity" (with a cache of platinum bars hidden under a pool table) and "The Mercenaries" (a vault of gold in an African jungle).
  • Caper Crew: one in every installment.
  • The Captain: Dan Briggs, initially, and Jim Phelps thereafter.
  • Career-Ending Injury: In "The Contender", Barney impersonates an up-and-coming boxer who had to give up fighting after being sent to Vietnam and wrecking his hands rescuing a man from a burning plane, claiming that he had recovered from said injury and was ready to return to boxing. At the end of the second episode, Barney wins the championship and then switches places with the man he impersonated, who tells the press that he suffered another major injury to his hands during the match and would have to retire again.
  • Cassandra Gambit: Used in "The Diplomat," when enemy spies have found the locations of four key US defense stations. Jim lets himself get discovered as an undercover US agent, so they will distrust their discovery when he confirms its accuracy.
  • Cast as a Mask: When Nicholas, Paris or Rollin needed to totally disguise themselves to impersonate someone else, that person's actor was used to play them for that sequence.
    • "Reprisal" had Peter Graves play an impostor who was killing former IMF agents and framing Jim for the crimes. He's replaced with someone else when the "mask" the imposter was using is peeled off by Lisa.
    • Most notably, in "Shock" (made when Steven Hill's days on the show were numbered), Dan is disguised as guest star James Daly (already playing two roles invoked before the plan goes into action) for most of the episode.
    • "The Contender" has Special Guest Sugar Ray Robinson play both his own character, Wesley, and Barney wearing a latex mask disguised as him.
    • In "The Cardinal," guest star Paul Stevens played three roles — as Cardinal Souchek, an actor in the employ of the Big Bad to impersonate him, and Rollin disguised as the Cardinal.
  • Casting Gag:
    • The 80's sequel series starred Greg Morris's son (Phil Morris, perhaps best known as Jackie Chiles) as Barney Collier's son.
    • Martin Landau turned down the role of Mr. Spock on Star Trek to play Rollin Hand. When he left the show, Leonard Nimoy, the man who got the Spock role instead, took his place in the cast.
  • Catchphrase: Pretty much all the "boilerplate" language in the tape scenes, though some of the iconic phrases took some time to finalize. "Your mission, should you choose to accept it" was first used in the seventeenth episode, and was never the standard phrase in the original series (It was usually "Your mission, should you decide to accept it").
  • Cat Fight: Cinnamon and Crystal stage a prolonged cat fight as a distraction in "Old Man Out".
    • Shannon and a female assassin character credited only as "Big Blonde" do a catfight in a pool of water in the revival episode "The Golden Serpent".
  • Chained Heat: "The Confession", "Nerves".
  • Chekhov's Gun: Generally, a number of these were introduced in each briefing scene, more often than not consisting of odd gadgetry that Barney had bodged together for the other team members. One of the ways the show maintained suspense was by holding back, for as long as possible, The Reveal as to how exactly each piece of equipment figured in the plan.
  • The Chessmaster: In a rare example of a chessmaster being the hero, Jim Phelps often makes complex plans that depend on the intricacies of human behavior and usually - but don't always - work out.
  • Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: Throughout the series, when cast members departed, their characters' departures were never explained. Averted, however, by the revival series with regards to the character of Casey Randall who becomes the only regular IMF agent to be killed and "disavowed".
  • Circus Episode:
    • In the two-part "Old Man Out", the rest of IMF team poses as a traveling circus performing in a city park next to an impregnable prison, while Rollin allows himself to be imprisoned to rescue the physically infirm Cardinal Vossek, the leader of a country’s freedom movement who has been arrested and is being held in the prison for interrogation (and then scheduled for execution).
    • In "Command Performance", the IMF team poses as circus performers to rescue a priest who can bring down a corrupt Baltic defense minister and recover a hidden relic which contains state secrets.
  • Classy Cat-Burglar: The episode "The Seal" has a real cat burglar - Rusty the cat. And the titular character of "Chico" was a dog burglar. The final episode of the original series centered around a more normal cat burglar, who the team had to trick into handing over the goods she had stolen during the opening (The crown jewels of a foreign power that the US was having diplomatic tensions with).
  • Claustrophobia: Cinnamon suffered a severe attack during "The Exchange". A case of Real Life Writes the Plot, as Barbara Bain was claustrophobic.
  • Coffin Contraband: In "The Bride", the team convinces a Syndicate smuggler that the best way to get his employer's dirty money out of the country and into a bank in Switzerland is to declare that his beautiful young Mail-Order Bride (Casey), who had just died from a drug overdose, is to be buried in Europe, and conceal the money in the coffin. The coffin is 'accidentally' dropped while being loaded in the plane, breaking it open to reveal that the body in the coffin is fake and the money is gone (stolen by the team at the funeral parlor). When the smuggler's bosses return to his place and see Casey still alive, they assume that he had been planning on stealing their money and running off with his pretty young wife, and have the smuggler killed.
  • Color Me Black: "Kitara".
  • Comic-Book Adaptation: Dell Comics published a half-dozen issues of a Mission: Impossible-based comic book in the late 1960s and very early 1970s. It was one of the only series of its type not to be adapted by Gold Key Comics.
  • Commercial Break Cliffhanger: Just about every commercial break....something unexpected would happen or a Big Bad will say "You there! What are you doing here?" the IMF member will look worried or go for the Oh, Crap! moment—commercial—Everything's better, the mission goes on.
  • Commie Land
  • Compilation Movie: Although the series had several two-part stories (plus one three-parter, season four's "The Falcon"), there was only one such movie - Mission: Impossible Versus The Mob (from "The Council"). This was released theatrically outside North America.
  • Competence Porn: This trope was the major appeal of the original television series. The Impossible Missions Force (IMF) is an elite team of agents who are tasked with achieving some sort of goal that the government has deemed pretty much "impossible". They use a number of high-tech gadgets, deception, disguises, and other methods to achieve their end goal. Some episodes have the villains figure out the plan or reveal some countermeasure to it, but this always either plays into the IMF's hands or is quickly adjusted for and countered.
  • The Con: The heart of the series. In "Encore" they make their target think he's back in 1937 on the day he carried out a hit.
  • Concealing Canvas
    • Invoked in "The Frame": The team is assigned to stop the rise to power of a murderous Syndicate crime boss. They infiltrate during a big gathering of other bosses. One of the things they do is to install a small round wall safe behind a painting in his bedroom, while at the same time raiding his safe.
    • Episode "Imitation". The target of the team has a safe concealed behind a painting in her office. Barney uses an electronic device to read the safe's combination while she's opening it.
  • Con Man: An entire team of them.
  • Conspicuously Public Assassination: In "Reprisal", a rogue IMF agent is attempting to frame Jim Phelps for murder. He disguises himself as Jim and garottes a woman in a crowded hotel lobby. He slips away from the shocked crowd long enough to strip off the Latex Perfection mask and, when Jim arrives at the hotel to try to stop him, he is immediately pursued by the police.
  • Convenient Replacement Character: In the 1988 series. In the episode where agent Casey Randall is killed, her replacement, Shannon Reed, is already assigned to help the IMF team on that case before they know Casey's dead.
  • Couch Gag: Bruce Geller originally wanted each mission to be given to Briggs and Phelps in a different manner every episode (via nickelodeon, phonograph record, a card handed to him from another agent, a Drive-In Theater speaker, etc.). One of these early methods was a self-destructing reel-to-reel tape. The varying methods were continued until the third season when the tape became the standard and a Mission trademark, though the fifth season attempted to do away with the sequence until popular demand reinstated it. In the 1988 version, the spool tape is replaced with a self-destructing mini-CD player (the CD actually works like a DVD, playing audio and video, even though DVDs hadn't been introduced in real life yet).
    • Early seasons also featured a ritual in which Briggs or Phelps were shown selecting the personnel for the mission. With the fifth season this was declared redundant (as he invariably chose the same people, some earlier season episodes also skipped that scene when Jim/Dan didn't need to pick anyone outside of the main cast)note and this sequence was dropped. It made a one-time return in the first episode of the 1988 revival (as a newly-returned Phelps was choosing who his new team would be).
    • The "couch gag" elements were averted, however, on occasion in the early seasons when an occasional mission was given without the tape scene as it involved Phelps and his team working "off-book" in order to deal with a personal issue.
    • Nearly averted permanently in Season 5 when the production team decided to begin joining missions in progress, eliminating both the tape scene and the apartment briefing sequences. By the middle of Season 5, however, viewer demand led to these being restored. The team-choosing ritual was never reinstated, however.
    • The opening credits of each episode feature random snippets of that episode.
  • Couldn't Find a Pen: In "Command Performance", a thief dying in a church writes "1769" on the floor in his own blood as a clue to the location of his stolen loot.
  • Counterfeit Cash: "The Money Machine", "Fool's Gold."
  • Covert Group: The Impossible Mission Force routinely takes on covert operations while shielding Washington from culpability. "Should you or any of your I.M. Force be caught or killed, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions."
  • Cowboy Episode: In "Gunslinger", the IMF go undercover go undercover in an old west tourist attraction run by a villain with a cowboy fixation. Includes a gunfight between Jim Phelps and both the Big Bad and The Dragon.
  • Crash Course Landing: In "Target Earth", Shannon has to be talked through landing a space shuttle.
  • Crazy-Prepared: The IMF team had a plan, a backup plan, a backup plan for the backup plan, and sometimes one more backup plan for good measure. Even when a mission went wrong, it went right.
  • Creepy Crossdresser: The assassin is "The Princess" is a woman, thanks to Shannon recognizing "Camion" which is a French perfume said assassin wore. However, in the climactic sequence, she poses as a man with short slicked-back hair and a tux.
  • Crossdresser: As part of the plan to rescue young King Victor in "Gitano," the boy has to dress up as a girl.
  • A Day in the Limelight: Occasionally an episode will focus on one particular team member, such as Paris in "My Friend, My Enemy" and (most notably, given how little screen time he usually got) Willy in "Double Dead."
  • Dead Drop: Jim Phelps received the information about his missions via this method.
  • Dead Guy on Display: "The Catafalque"
  • Dead Person Impersonation:
    • Leona in the episode of the same name.
    • In "The Heir Apparent," Cinnamon impersonates a long-lost princess to prevent a regent from taking over a small Baltic monarchy.
    • One episode featured a man who pretended to be the Mouth of Sauron for Nazi leader Martin Bormann through use of a dummy he took care to not allow anyone else to get too close to and pre-recorded speeches. The team took him down by having Rollin impersonate a Bormann who had recovered enough from his injuries to leave his quarters and mingle with his officers for the evening and started undermining his lieutenant's authority, who couldn't prove that Rollin wasn't the real Bormann without admitting that he knew this because there was no real Bormann.
  • Dirty Business: The team explicitly has permission to do absolutely anything they see necessary to complete their mission, so long as they don't get caught. Though they do try to ensure that if the plan involves doing bad things to good people, they will help said people get back out of trouble before they leave.
  • Do Not Adjust Your Set: In "Target Earth", the terrorists who have stolen the space shuttle hijack a communications satellite to broadcast their demands to earth.
  • Drive-In Theater: Where Briggs receives his assignment at the beginning of "The Psychic".
  • Early-Installment Weirdness: The first season contains several oddities that did not appear in later seasons, including missions that focused on a single agent, and one episode ("Zubrovnik's Ghost") that featured genuine supernatural activity. And given the Diagnosis: Murder episode "The Bela Lugosi Blues" established vampires exist in their Shared Universe (see below)...
  • Elite Agents Above the Law: Probably the Trope Codifier. The Impossible Mission Force's command structure is only vaguely defined due to the episodic nature of the series: all that we're ever told, Once an Episode, is that they answer to a mysterious Secretary, who will famously disavow all knowledge of the protagonists' actions if any are exposed.
  • Empathy Doll Shot: In "The Wall", a family attempting to escape East Berlin in caught in no mans land. The little girl drops her rag doll. The East German officer casually steps on it and grinds it into the mud.
  • Empty Quiver: In "Countdown", the IMF has to locate a nuclear warhead stolen from a French test site and smuggled into the centre of a major city by religious fanatics.
  • Endangered Soufflé: In one episode, Barney (in his cover as the villain's cook) used this as an excuse to explain why the guards could not search the kitchen at this time (thus granting him, Willy and Cinnamon time to hide their equipment before the search).
  • Engineered Public Confession: If the IMF isn't getting the villain killing themselves one way or another, it's getting the villain to confess their crimes to a higher power.
  • Enhance Button: Done without a computer, amazingly enough. In "The Bank", Barney is playing back a video recording of a bank vault on a black-and-white cathode ray screen. With the tape paused at a critical juncture, Jim Phelps uses a pocket telescope to zoom in on the CRT(!) and read the number of a safe-deposit box.
    • The 1988 update introduced an IMF device that could recover erased images from a VCR tape, which is a bit more realistic.
  • Even Evil Has Standards: Usually averted to underscore how nasty the IMF's opponents are, but "The Train" has Pavel, the deputy who'll take over command of his country when the leader succumbs to heart disease, regret the necessity to execute jailed enemies and wish there was some other way. Significantly, Pavel is one of the few villains who doesn't set out to kill anyone to get his way.
  • "Everybody Laughs" Ending: "The Princess" has the men of the IMF team in Shannon's hospital room, and she's surrounded by "get well flowers."
    Shannon: Did you guys buy me all these?
    (The guys go "um" "er" and "well" as she shakes her head in a bemused way)
    Jim: Well, now, just how many boyfriends do you need?
    Shannon: (humming as she thinks) Well, I suppose four are enough. (She smiles as the others laugh. This was one time they don't all leave the scene.)
  • Everybody Lives: Happens surprisingly often, such as the (comparatively) Lighter and Softer episode "Charity."
  • Evil Cripple: Jake Morgan in "Bayou". He is a Fat, Sweaty Southerner in a White Suit who runs a white slavery ring and has a wooden leg because a gator bit his leg off.
  • Evil Counterpart: In "Reprisal" (1988 series), the Villain of the Week is an insane former IMF scientist using Latex Perfection to frame Jim Phelps by killing former members of his team while disguised as him. And in the original series, one of the plots involved a battle of wits between Phelps and a master strategist who was his own equivalent from behind the Iron Curtain.
  • Exactly What It Says on the Tin: With only a very few exceptions the episode titles are only one (ex. "Execution", "Kidnap", "Break!") or two words long (ex. "The Code", "The Legacy", "Time Bomb") describing the plan of attack or object of interest.
    • Arguably What It Doesn't Say On The Tin, since episode titles weren't shown on screen. While not unheard of for a 1960s-70s-era series, it was somewhat unusual for a program of this nature not to display episode titles on screen.
  • Failsafe Failure: The season two finale involved the retrieval of a defective failsafe device that didn't self-destruct when it was supposed to. They needed to secure it intact so that the builders could take it apart to figure out why it didn't work and ensure that the rest of their production run didn't suffer a similar defect.
  • Fake Assassination: "Casino" centers on a retired mobster put in charge of a lucrative casino. Jim Phelps and company aim to torpedo this man's loyalty to his Mafia bosses by staging a couple of botched "hits" on him, plus an inconvenient robbery to make it seem as though this man is skimming the profits. By the end of the episode, this man is convinced that he's Marked to Die because he knows too much, and eagerly awaits rescue by the FBI.
  • Fake Charity: In "Charity", the IMF have to shut down a pair of charity scammers and recover the millions they have ripped off from donors.
  • Fake Defector
  • Fake Guest Star: It wasn't until the second season to that Martin Landau name appeared in the show's titles. This was Landau's choice. He was impressed with Geller's pilot script, but wanted to make sure the series would be of the same high quality before committing himself to a multi-year contract. Even at that he insisted on only one-year contracts instead of the customary five-year ones.
  • Fake Town: "The Carriers". In order to stop an expert in American traditions, slang, and customs from conducting his plan of bacteriological warfare against the U.S. and to put him permanently out of business, the IMF team infiltrates a mock-up of an American town located behind the Iron Curtain where enemy agents learn to act as Americans.
  • Faked Rip Van Winkle: Frequently used in later seasons, sometimes combined with Fauxtastic Voyage as one of the excuses given to a mark was that the mark was involved in an accident and was unconscious for a long time.
    • An example of an Faked Rip Van Winkle - Fauxtastic Voyage combination is the episode "The Train" in which the mark was told that he had been unconscious for several weeks after a train crash during a simulated train journey.
    • In "The Execution," a hitman is tricked into believing that he's forgotten the last two years of his life, with him awakening on Death Row awaiting execution later that evening for the murder of two people.
    • Happens as early as the first ten episodes, as "Operation: Rogosh" consists of this with a bit of a twist, as Rogosh is convinced that he has had amnesia hit, is about to be executed for treason, and must reveal a terrorist attack he performed to prove his loyalty.
  • Fakeout Escape: "The Crane"
  • Fanservice: Usually averted, but in "Illusion" such a thing is part of Cinnamon's act as a nightclub singer. Dana also supplies several examples in season five (sometimes as an unintentional side effect of Lesley (Ann) Warren not wanting to wear a bra, much to the disgust of the producers - they compromised that she could go braless when it suited the mission).
    • In the new series, both female leads get quite a bit in the opening credits. Terry Markwell wears a skintight top, and Jane Badler climbs out of a pool wearing a onepiece swimsuit and displaying a lot of cleavage as she faces the camera.
  • A Father to His Team: Jim to the 80's IMF team (though more "uncle" to Grant as Barney Collier was still alive). When Casey died, he said right out, "She was like a daughter to me."
  • Fat, Sweaty Southerner in a White Suit: Jake Morgan, the villain in "Bayou", is a fat, sweaty southern in a white suit who runs a white slavery ring.
  • Fauxtastic Voyage: "The Train", "Submarine"... practically an M.I. staple.
    • A frequent variation was to fake a disaster of some sort. "The Photographer" features a staged nuclear war, and "The Survivors" has a faux earthquake.
  • Five-Man Band: The cast for the first 3 seasons fit the typical five roles perfectly. Dan or Jim as the Leader (master planners who normally took a more background role in the plan itself), Rollin as the Lancer (a charming actor skilled at sleight of hand, contrasting his interpersonal intelligence with Jim's theoretical intelligence), Barney as the Smart Guy (an electronic and mechanical inventor), Willy as the Big Guy (mostly a backup "muscle", though he also showed skill in construction), and Cinnamon as the Chick (the only female member of the team).
  • Fourth Reich: One episode had the team infiltrate a group of neo-Nazis who had a Swiss Bank Account showing the location of a cache of Nazi Gold which they intended to use to create a "Fourth Reich."
  • Frame-Up: Many episodes had the team frame the villain of the week of some misdeed, causing him or her to be dealt with by his 'betrayed' colleagues. On "The Trial", Briggs framed himself, while Rollin framed the villain for framing him.
    • Framing the Guilty Party: There are also cases where they forge evidence of a villain's guilt, and then arrange for the police to find it in such a way that the villain can't dispute its provenance.
  • Freeze-Frame Bonus: If you freeze the "Pilot" at the point when guest star Wally Cox yells in pain as the door slams on his hands (in universe, breaking them), you can see the actor is holding a fake pair of hands.
  • Fright Deathtrap: In "The Killer" - the first episode of the 80s revival - Drake does this to Tom Copperfield; shooting him with a hallucinogenic drug that causes him to think that he is on fire. In panic, he throws himself off the balcony of the penthouse.
  • Futuristic Jet Injector: Rollin Hand and Dr. Selby mention hyposprays as early as S1E24.
  • Gadgeteer Genius: Barney is building weapons and technology sometimes vastly ahead of the time.
    • The 80's revival would have Grant do the same and twice both Collier men would work together for a mission.
  • Gaslighting: A frequent tactic of the IMF is to convince the mark that he is going insane. Often involving visions of someone the mark knows to be dead.
  • The Generalissimo: The IMF would occasionally be tasked with dealing with these (or just to undertake a mission in a country ruled by one). In the pilot episode, the team has to retrieve nuclear warheads being held in the hotel the Generalissimo uses as his party headquarters.
  • Genius Ditz: King Nicolae in "The Falcon". He was an expert on clocks — history, building and repairing them — and focused on this work to the extent that he could be manipulated to pay attention to matters of state (i.e. sign things without reading them) by withholding vital tools and parts.
  • Gentleman Thief: In "For Art's Sake", the IMF have to shut down a murderous gentleman thief and recover his store of stolen art.
  • Get into Jail Free: "Old Man Out"
  • Ghost Story: An occasional theme in their Gaslighting attempts. In fact, one episode in even called "A Ghost Story." Played straight (!) in an early episode.
  • God Guise: In "Cargo Cult", a white man poses as a native god in order to use the native tribe as a slave labour force to work a gold mine.
  • Goggles Do Something Unusual:
    • In "Odds On Evil", the team use special contact lenses to enable them to read marked cards.
    • In "Bayou", Grant poses as a jazz musician and wears sunglasses let him see through the one-way mirror in the club.
  • Gold Fever: Used in "The Mercenaries", when the team tricks a mercenary leader into believing he's found a huge trove of gold bars, prompting him to smuggle it out of the country and cut his men out of their share.
  • Grave Robbing: In "The Catafalque", part of the IMF's plan requires to steal the body of the former leader of a Ruritania while while it is on public display.
  • Gun Twirling: Done by both The Dragon and Jim Phelps in "Gunslinger".
  • Hand Stomp: In "The Golden Serpent: part 1", a ninja attempts to stomp om Max's hand while he dangling from the top of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Max defeats him via some Lodged-Blade Recycling
  • Handy Remote Control: Not only one-function remotes, but at least one episode per season depended on Barney remote-controlling a car; remote controlled elevators were also common.
  • Hanging by the Fingers: Max is left dangling by one hand off the Sydney Harbour Bridge in "The Golden Serpent: Part 1".
  • Hard-Work Montage: Complete with a signature tune called "The Plot".
  • Heroic BSoD: Occurs in the 1988 revival episode "The Fortune" to several IMF members when they learn of the death of their colleague, Casey Randall, with one agent, Max, even questioning his ability to continue with the mission.
    • Also happens to Grant Collier in the 1988 two-parter "The Golden Serpent" when he thinks his father has been killed.
  • Heroic Seductress: The female agents often filled this role. Best summed up by Cinnamon in the pilot episode:
    Terry Targo: This will never work.
    Cinnamon Carter: Yes, it will. Remember what Dan said. People don't look at a crippled old man. They look away.
    Terry Targo: Yeah, but nobody looks less like Rollin than I do.
    Cinnamon Carter: Terry, I'll be wheeling you out. If anybody looks at you, I'll quit the sisterhood of women.
  • Hey, Wait!: Often used to set up a Commercial Break Cliffhanger.
  • Hidden in Plain Sight: On more than one occasion the team captures their mark and then hides him from the parties looking for him someplace within a few hundred yards of where they grabbed him, knowing that the search parties would start by setting up a security cordon several miles out and then slowly tighten it inwards, giving them hours to get what they need from the mark before anyone thinks to search the place where the mark disappeared from.
  • Hollywood Encryption:
    • "The Photographer" featured an encryption technique that would actually work, which involved a fixed substitution, the date of transmission, and a phone book. The team was only able to crack the code by tricking the eponymous photographer into decrypting a message sent by this cipher while Rollin was in a position to watch him do it.
    • The season four premiere involved a real (if executed in an improbably short period of time) cryptanalysis method. Tasked with intercepting and decrypting a coded transmission containing the battle plans for a major offensive, the team first tricked the people who were expecting that transmission to send a message of their own devising using the same encryption method, giving the team a clue on how the encryption worked. This is referred to as a 'known cleartext' attack.
  • Hollywood Satanism: In "The Devils", the team investigates a member of the English gentry who involves foreign and domestic officials in Satanic rituals and human sacrifice for blackmail purposes.
  • Hollywood Voodoo: The IMF indulge in some Hollywood Voodoo as part of their plan to cause a falling out among the bad guys in "Bayou". Their voodoo is meant to be fake, of course, but their ritual does convince someone who is supposed to be a genuine believer.
  • Hologram: The IMF has had hologram projectors since the 60s ("Phantoms", "A Ghost Story") and are part of their gaslighting toolkit, along with hidden remotely-operated tape players. The 80s revival even had a episode named after the trope ("Holograms") and improved the tech to the point where it works underwater ("The Golden Serpent, Part 2", which also featured a Holographic Terminal).
  • Honey Trap:
    • Cinnamon is one in a first season episode which pits her against a male one. He's trying to manipulate her into revealing the location of a man he's trying to kill, while she's trying to manipulate him into a trap in which he will be caught trying to kill his target red-handed so that the IMF can utterly discredit him and his faction of the intelligence service that he works for. The IMF succeeds in their mission, but Cinnamon's last lines leave it ambiguous as to who had seduced who.
    • Max is a male one in "The Fortune." Though with Casey's death, he doesn't know if he can go through with it, knowing she died at the hands of Amelia, the woman he's to seduce. Until Grant points out Max is the best one they have to get the taped proof that Casey died at Amelia's hand (as he'll be the only one free enough to move around the place to where it would most likely be).
  • Hot Gypsy Woman: The IMF employed hot gypsy acrobat Crystal Walker in the two-parter "Old Man Out".
  • How Unscientific!: In an instance of Early-Installment Weirdness, "Zubrovnik's Ghost" featured genuine supernatural activity and a woman with real Psychic Powers.
  • Human Sacrifice: In "The Devils", the IMF stop a British lord who involves foreign and domestic officials in Satanic rituals and human sacrifice for blackmail purposes.
  • Hypno Fool: A number of plots involved hypnotizing the mark into behaving in certain manners in addition to the usual Batman Gambit. These episodes tended to weaker than average, due to the team being able to reprogram people's minds at will coming out of nowhere, and the fact that being able to control the mark's behavior directly defeats the point of a Batman Gambit.
  • I Am Not Left-Handed: In one episode Willy plays a Judo expert, but since he hadn't actually studied Judo before the start of the mission, it's all he can do to keep from losing against his host's champion until the rest of the team finishes what they needed to do while the household was watching the match. Later on he gets into another fight with his opponent, and since it's not a formal match, Willy sees no reason to restrict himself to unfamiliar Judo techniques. He quickly defeats the man using Jujitsu.
  • I Have Your Wife: A recurring aspect of many episodes, where the villain uses a loved one to coerce a victim into doing his bidding.
    • In "The Wall", the villain kidnaps the daughter of a key negotiator in order to sabotage a set of diplomatic talks.
    • In "The Bunker," a missile scientist works for an enemy state because they have captured his wife.
  • I Know You Know I Know: Often occurs when the IMF goes up against an enemy intelligence agency. It usually goes something like this:
    Enemy Spymaster: I know that <Person portrayed by Phelps> is really an American agent, so I will disregard the data he gave me and any duplicate versions provided by my own agents as fakes that the Americans want me to believe is true.
    Phelps: I know that they know that I'm really an American agent, so I gave them the real data. Now they'll never believe it.
  • Impersonating an Officer: IMF members frequently impersonate police officers, as well as soldiers, security personnel and other officials.
  • Impossible Mission: Trope-namer.
  • Improvised Microgravity Maneuvering: In "Target Earth", Shannon is set adrift in space. Shes uses the purge valve on her spacesuit to bleed air out of her air tanks to propel her back to the shuttle.
  • Induced Hypochondria: In "The Counterfeiter", the team gives a manufacturer of counterfeit pharmaceuticals the symptoms of a disease that is treated by the drugs he is forging, in order to set up an Engineered Public Confession regarding the quality of his medicine.
  • Indy Ploy: When Bruce Geller first came up with the show's concept, he imagined every IMF plan to go wrong at some point, forcing the team to improvise from that point on. Luckily in practice this was not established as it most likely would A) get repetitive, and B) make Briggs/Phelps look like he doesn't know what he's doing. Indy ploys did appear occasionally, usually in the 'personal' episodes.
  • The Infiltration: A regular staple of the series, usually by the team's Master of Disguise.
  • Insane Admiral: In "Submarine" (from the revival series, not the episode of the same name from the original) the IMF have to stop a U.S. Navy admiral who sank one of his own subs as a demonstration of a weapons system he was planning to sell on the black market. He did this because he felt betrayed by the government conducting weapon limitation talks with the Russians, which stopped his computer virus attack system ever going into production.
  • Insert Cameo: The original opening credits had creator Bruce Geller's hand as the one striking the match. The eighties revival used Peter Graves'.
  • Instant Sedation: After a while, instead of doing poorly choreographed Tap on the Head techniques to knock people out, the team switched to grabbing people while palming a tack that was apparently coated with some unspecified knockout drug.
  • I Never Said It Was Poison: "Elena".
  • It's Personal: A handful of episodes have Briggs or Phelps plotting a plan to right a wrong affecting someone close to them instead of a mission given to them by the Secretary. In one episode Phelps is kidnapped and the team members are blackmailed into helping his kidnapper commit a crime. Arguably the most "personal" of these comes in the '80s version, when Casey, the new version's initial Femme Fatale, becomes the only regular in either version to be killed off. Note: not to be confused with Lynda Day George's Casey character from the original series. The "it's personal" aspect of the storylines is usually emphasized by there being no tape scene shown.
    • The '80s revival series notably opened with a personal mission - Jim is forced out of retirement when his protegé is murdered, but getting to the killer, his boss and his boss's employee is still an official IMF mission... at least as official as those missions got. The disc's voice in a variant of its usual opening, said sympathetically, "Welcome Back Jim, though I wish it weren't under these circumstances."
    • "The Condemned" is also personal in this run as Barney's falsely imprisoned in Istanbul and the team must not only free Barney, but find out why he was set up.
    • "The Fortune" is also very personal for the team. Casey Randall gets murdered by the Big Bad, Amelia, and the team, now with Shannon Reed taking Casey's spot, is intent on make sure Amelia doesn't get away with Casey's death. When they find out Casey's dead, Jim himself said "She was like a daughter to me." As well as returning the fortune Amelia, an Expy of the late Imelda Marcos, stole from her people. It's also the only time in the whole series we see an agent get "Disavowed" by the Secretary (the team pictures are). The Tear Jerker closing has a picture of Casey, Max, Grant and Nicholas with Jim as a slow, somber reprise of the opening theme plays
    • "Reprisal" is also the most personal for Jim in the '80s revival: Jim himself is framed for the murder of several former IMF agents. It also has the disc's voice go in a second rare variant of its usual opening to Jim: "Your mission, which I feel you must accept, will be to find the person who is framing you, and stop him." The recording is also so upsetting to Jim that he actually rewinds it halfway through just to make sure he heard everything clearly.
    • "The Princess" also applies as to save Jim, Shannon pushes him aside and ends up Taking the Bullet for Jim. She says "Camion"—and it shows she knew there was someone there due to "Camion" being French Perfume, and the assassin is really a woman.
  • Janitor Impersonation Infiltration: A standard tactic. Often, one of the IMF members would get into the target's location, then fake some sort of utility outage. Other members of the team would then pose as repairmen or technicians arriving to fix the problem.
  • Joker Jury: A fake one in "The Flight".
  • Justice by Other Legal Means: At the end of "The Counterfeiter", the titular villain claims that even with a recording of his Engineered Public Confession, the IMF still can't do anything more than slap him with a fine. Then Phelps points out that he didn't just confess to his criminal operations, he also confessed the scope of said operations, which is large enough to sick the IRS on him for tax evasion.
  • Kangaroo Court: Multiple episodes.
  • Kansas City Shuffle
  • Karmic Death: Many, many examples ("The Bride", for instance).
  • Killed Off for Real: Casey Randall in the 1988 series.
  • Latex Perfection: A staple of the series; many episodes involved Rollin (or, later, Paris) using latex masks and makeup to imitate someone else.
    • "The Bunker" has an enemy agent who is a Master of Disguise; he has a portable kit that allows him to cast and make latex masks in a matter of minutes.
  • Law Enforcement, Inc.: Series creator Bruce Geller originally intended that the IMF would be a private group that the good guys would turn to when they couldn't handle a particular bad guy (Virtually every anti-Syndicate episode in the last two seasons included the phrase 'conventional law enforcement agencies have been unable to...' in the briefing tape, reinforcing this interpretation). The movies changed the IMF to an official (though secret) branch of the Central Intelligence Agency.
  • Leave Behind a Pistol: Used by leaders of the People's Republic of Tyranny to eliminate people who have failed while avoiding the publicity of a Kangaroo Court.
  • Literal Cliffhanger: The end of The Falcon, Part 1
  • Living Prop: An in-universe example - when Phelps needed to introduce the mark to a phony place of business or hospital, he would often recruit the Hartford Repretory Players to serve as background workers or doctors.
  • Lodged-Blade Recycling: In "The Golden Serpent (Part 1)", Max gets hit in the leg by a shuriken while fighting atop the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Later he is dangling off the side of the bridge with The Dragon about to stomp on his hands. He pulls the shuriken out of his leg and throws it into The Dragon's chest, killing him.
  • Long-Runner Cast Turnover: The show typically had a five-person cast. Only two members (Barney and Willy) were in every season. Jim was in six out of seven seasons. The next longest was Rollin and Cinnamon at three. And nobody was in every episode.
  • The Mafia: Later seasons tended to use "the Syndicate" as the primary antagonist, after relations with the USSR began to thaw and domestic social issues captured the nation's attention.
  • Magic Plastic Surgery: Played straight in several episodes, but amusingly subverted in one: Phelps is used to stand in for a playboy millionaire he looks nothing like, because the man in question was in a serious accident. The mark swallows that explanation without question.
  • Manchurian Agent: "Mindbend"
  • Manly Tears: In the episode "Nicole", Jim sheds these while cradling the titular character's body after she's been killed by the Big Bad, as he had fallen in love with her.
  • Master of Disguise:
    • Rollin Hand, Paris, Casey and Nicholas Black, though with the assistance of one of these four, any IMF member qualifies. Casey was unusual for this trope in that she usually just made disguises for the rest of the team rather than for herself. In the season seven episodes where she didn't appear due to her actresses' pregnancy, Casey still managed to make and ship masks to the team offscreen.
    • Inverted by Phelps, Willy, Barney, etc. Barney in particular - The Complete Mission: Impossible Dossier notes that Barney's apparent ability to blend in, even in countries where a black man would stand out, was occasionally criticized.
      • The series took that criticism seriously: later seasons feature Barney mostly out of view or in situations where he'd blend in. (Although in the episode "Hunted," set in Africa, Barney is disguised as a white man, as the nation he was in practiced strict apartheid and he needed to enter a whites-only area.)
    • The 80s revival had cases where Max might be already having been seen as he usually is as well, having had to stall for time or play up close to the mark. If still another person was needed, Grant filled that role. Sometimes, though, situations would force the other IMF members to "play themselves" as there was no time to do a mask, at best do the voice of those they needed to impersonate (as Nicholas and Casey had to do in "The Killer").
  • Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: The episode "The Pawn" from the 80s series has Max learning stage magic as part of an elaborate diversion to smuggle a defecting scientist out of Europe. Watching the Training Montage for it, though, there's repeatedly stuff from his instructor about using "the power of the mind" to levitate small objects and suchlike, instead of showing him learning the actual stage illusions behind such feats. It's strange to see them be vague about it on a show whose bread and butter is gadgets and intricately-crafted plans, but it's a pretty minor element in the episode overall, and doesn't stand out as much as say, the supernatural elements in "Zubrovnik's Ghost".
  • Memory Gambit: In "The Spy" (one of the weaker episodes), Jim Phelps has himself hypnotised to forget his actions immediately after he's done them until a specific cue is given, allowing himself to be captured by the enemy without risk of divulging the I.M. Force's plan.
  • Might as Well Not Be in Prison at All: In "Reprisal", a inmate masterminds a scheme to take revenge of Jim Phelps from inside a maximum security hospital for the criminally insane.
  • Mind Control: "My Friend, My Enemy."
  • "Mission: Impossible" Cable Drop: The Trope Namer.
    • In "Doomsday," Barney used a cable drop to steal the plutonium from a nuclear warhead that was surrounded by photoelectric sensors and so could only be approached from above.
    • In "The Lions", Grant gets lowered into the temple and is suspended above the altar so he can tamper with the eponymous lions.
  • Mistaken for an Imposter: In "The Glass Cage", the team rescues a resistance leader from a maximum security prison by convincing the guards that he had already escaped and had been replaced with a double. Then Cinnamon, in her persona as a security officer, offered to take the 'imposter' back to headquarters for interrogation.
  • Molotov Truck: Played straight in "Nitro."
  • Mr. Exposition: The recorded mission-giver.
  • Mr. Fixit: Barney, but often also Willy. Grant would also be this to his team.
  • Nazi Gold: "The Legacy" (in both the original series and the revival) involves the IMF trying to locate a cache of Nazi gold before the descendants (sons in the original, grandsons in the remake) of senior Nazi officers do so.
  • Never Smile at a Crocodile: In "Bayou", white slaver (and Fat, Sweaty Southerner in a White Suit) Jake Morgan uses the gators in the bayou surrounding his plantation as part of his security system to stop his captives from escaping. He is Hoist by His Own Petard when he panics and falls into the bayou while trying to escape the IMF and his eaten by his own gators.
  • Nitro Express: "Nitro."
  • No Celebrities Were Harmed: In his premier episode, Paris gains access to a Banana Republic's presidential palace by posing as a revolutionary leader who is totally not Fidel Castro named "El Leader".
  • No Name Given: The man whose voice is heard giving Briggs and Phelps (and on one occasion Cinnamon) their taped instructions.
  • No One Gets Left Behind: While the IMF as an institution will disavow and abandon any agent who gets caught unless there's a specific need to rescue them, Jim and the gang will always go back and rescue any captured member of the team at the first possible opportunity, well before their superiors realize that they should be disavowing said agent.
  • Not My Driver: In "The Killer", IMF agents drive the first two cabs in the rank so they can guarantee the mark will get into one of them.
  • Not Quite Dead: Justin Bainbridge in "A Ghost Story." He's been contaminated by his own chemical weapon and his neo-fascist father's seemingly killed him in a fight and buried him. It turned out Justin wasn't buried deep enough, but he's still living on borrowed time thanks to the nerve gas; Jim suggests that an antidote may be able to be derived from the gas's formula.
  • Nothing Is Scarier: In one episode, a neo-Nazi banker in East Berlin is pretending to offer defectors a way into West Berlin. What he really does is take their money and send them into a deathtrap. What makes it this trope is that all we hear is a cry and a splash, and have no indication as to whether it's simply a Drowning Pit or something nastier.
  • Obfuscating Disability: Regularly done as part of a mission. In "A Game of Chess", Rollin pretends to be a deaf chessmaster, so he can receive moves from a chess computer offstage. He soon gets discovered by the mark, but that's part of the plan.
  • Obstacle Exposition
  • Oh, Crap!: The Mark's standard expression when they realize they have been had and the plan is shot/there's a visit to the clink in the offing/they're meeting The Grim Reaper.
    • Would also be used in almost every episode by our heroes before a Commercial Break Cliffhanger when something seemingly goes wrong or it looks like someone has discovered them. After we'd come back from the commercial we'd find it was a just part of the plan and the fake 'Oh Crap' just acting to fool the bad guys, or a deus-ex machina comes in to distract the mark. At worst we see the heroes quickly resolve it through Xanatos Speed Chess.
    • One example is in “The Crane”. Junta leader General Yuri Kozani agrees to execute his second in command, Colonel Alex Strabo. He is then deceived into further explaining Strabo’s treachery and unreliable character traits to a disguised Strabo (Strabo is wearing the mask of the rebel leader). Strabo removes his mask and Kozani is barely able to speak before Strabo kills him. This is also an example of Hoist by His Own Petard since Strabo quotes Kozani’s earlier words on the need to execute enemies of the state. [1]
  • Office Golf: In "The Killer", Drake (the eponymous killer) does this while waiting to find out who his target is. It is later shown that his golf balls are actually disguised plastic explosives.
  • Oireland: "Banshee". While it did manage to establish that there Protestants in Ireland, it managed to tick most of the other boxes by being set in a tiny village, have Irishmen who willing to start fighting at the drop of a hat, and the IMF's plan relied on the superstitious nature of one of the main villains.
  • Ominous Latin Chanting: Done by the evil Satanic cult in "The Devils".
  • Omnicidal Maniac: Many examples. In one of the episodes someone is doing human sacrifices due to blackmailing and stuff, and multiple episodes include people who want to cause World War III. Hell, in "The Legacy", the children of a group of World War II war criminals reunite in order to find "Hitler's Treasure", a bunch of gold worth 280 million dollars, hidden at his grave. "Operation Rogosh" includes the titular Rogosh, a political anarchist and mass murderer whose victims are shown on pictures. However, "The Carriers" probably takes the cake, when the Monster of the Week Janos Passik wants to spread a disease over America in order to kill as many people as possible, and according to one of the protagonists, the disease could kill more than five million or so people. Note that this is in the first season.
  • Once per Episode: "This tape will self-destruct in five seconds." (At least, that is the stereotype. In fact there are many episodes in which this is not actually heard, especially in early seasons when another method of messaging is used, or in episodes in which Briggs or Phelps are instructed to destroy the tape themselves.) The 80's revival would have "This disc will self-destruct in five seconds."
    • Also seen above, when the mark appears to be close to discovering The Masquerade or something appears to have gone wrong, right before a major commercial break.
  • Only One Name: Paris and Casey in the original series; however, due to the presence (and recent death) of another character named Casey in the revival series, when Lynda Day George guest starred as Casey, her character was belatedly given a first name, Lisa.
  • Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: The Irish accent Casey adopts as, and in, "The Bride" wavers but at least it's supposed to come and go as per the script. The episode's Big Bad Joe Corvin has no such excuse...
  • Passed-Over Promotion: In "The Glass Cage", Cinnamon plays an enemy official and tells the lieutenant of the Villain of the Week that he hadn't been recommended for promotion to the villain's job when he was due to be promoted. This caused the lieutenant to betray his superior.
  • Pay Evil unto Evil: The IMF's ethos. As Bruce Geller is quoted as saying in The Complete Mission: Impossible Dossier, "In Mission, we do all the things the heavies do, but we've made them the good guys."
  • People's Republic of Tyranny: All the time. Pick any episode at random and there's about a one in three chance that at least one of the villains will be an official of a Ruritanian government with the word "People's" in its name.
  • Persona Non Grata: Invoked in a strange way in "The Amateur". In order to get out of a East Bloc country with a disassembled secret weapon, the team disguises themselves as representatives of a group that had been PNG'ed trying to get in to the country. They promptly get caught, and are told to reboard their airplane and leave the country - and since the guards believed that they were trying to get in rather than out, they didn't bother searching their luggage.
  • Plaguemaster:
    • "Operation Rogash": When an unbreakable foreign agent known as "The Monster" who specializes in mass murder is discovered in Los Angeles, the IMF team needs to break him, only to discover a planned biological attack on Los Angeles area water system.
    • "The Carriers": In order to stop an expert in American traditions, slang, and customs from conducting his plan of bacteriological warfare against the U.S. and to put him permanently out of business, the IMF team infiltrates a mock-up of an American town located behind the Iron Curtain where enemy agents learn to act as Americans.
    • "The Test Case": A "hired gun" bacteriologist is developing a deadly but short-lived virus for the Warsaw Pact; the IMF must eliminate him and his virus.
    • "The Plague": A French terrorist has stolen a deadly bacteria that causes rapid organ deterioration in those infected by it. The IMF must convince her she has been infected herself in order to re-obtain it.
  • Plot Tailored to the Party: Justified. Briggs and Phelps choose their teams to match the things that need to be done to accomplish the mission, though in some cases one member is just an extra pair of hands to help with the tasks that another member needs to perform. This often happens with Willy, as his official skill is his strength, and they don't usually need to move something heavy.
  • Phony Psychic:
    • Cinnamon poses as a psychic to convince a tycoon that his life is in danger, leading to a high-stakes poker game against Rollin in "The Psychic".
    • Dan poses as a blindfolded psychic as part of the team's circus act in "Old Man Out", with Cinnamon as his assistant (feeding him coded prompts).
  • Police Are Useless: Later in the show's run, the IMF got assigned to deal with mafia members a lot, because "conventional law enforcement agencies" were unable to do anything about them.
  • Pop-Culture Pun Episode Title: The title of "A Spool There Was" is a double reference. It's taken from the famous silent movie A Fool There Was, which in turn is a quote from the Rudyard Kipling poem "The Vampire".
  • Pretty in Mink: Casey wears a mink coat while vamping the evil regent in "The Lions".
  • Pseudo-Crisis
  • Pursued Protagonist: Casey at the start of "The Fortune". Leads to her being killed.
  • Qurac: Several times, such as Elkabar from "The Slave" two-parter.
  • Quiet Cry for Help: One episode has Jim secretly held prisoner by a group of townsfolk who are actually all hostile foreign agents. When the other members of the IMF come to visit him in hospital, Phelps has been given a neuro-suppressant that keeps him from moving or speaking. Nonetheless, he telegraphs his plight to his teammates by blinking in Morse code.
  • Quote Mining: Done in "The Elixir," where the team edits a videotape of a dictator suspending free elections into an announcement of her immediate retirement instead.
  • Railing Kill:
    • Happens in The Teaser to "The Pawn". A dissident is shot by the authorities and pitches forward over a fire escape railing.
    • Happens again in The Teaser to "The Golden Serpent (Part 1)". The leader of another IMF is hit in the back by a shuriken. He somehow manages to twist in such a way that he falls over the railing and plunges into the river below.
  • Real Life Writes the Plot: Barbara Bain shared Cinnamon's one weakness: Claustrophobia. Used in "The Exchange" where an enemy psychologist induces it to try and break her will.
  • Recycled Soundtrack: Particularly in the final season, where very few episodes had original scores. In addition, some literal examples when pieces which Lalo Schifrin wrote specially for the show's first soundtrack album were tracked into the show.
  • Red Scare: Many episodes pitted the team against agents of Russia or some Eastern Bloc expy. But the team was never called to escalate the Cold War, only prevent the other side from gaining an advantage or escalating the war on their end. On at least one mission they had to stop an American attempt to heat up the Cold War.
  • Replaced with Replica:
    • Happens in "The Lions," in which reactionary steward Ki of Bajan-Du has already replaced five ceremonial lion figurines with replicas to assure that heir ascendant Prince Mikos fails a critical kingship test. Secret Agent Jim Phelps and his IMF team must burgle the true Golden Lions from Ki, then supplant Ki's replicas with them in time for the ascension ceremony.
    • The series finale had a played-with case, where the team tricked a Classy Cat-Burglar into thinking that the jewels she stole earlier in the episode were fakes and that the batch of jewels that Barney stole later on were the real ones. She had an assistant switch jewel cases while she distracted Barney, thinking that she was invoking this trope for herself, claiming the real jewels and leaving him with high-quality fakes. In truth, she was invoking it against herself, giving away the real jewels and stealing a batch of low quality fakes.
  • Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves:
    • In "Reprisal", an orderly has been helping the villain escape the maximum security mental hospital to commit murders. When the orderly gets cold feet and demands more money, the villain promises him "a big payout" when he makes his final escape. The "payout" is being murdered.
    • In "The Princess", a traitor provides details of the princess' security procedures to a terrorist group. The terrorist leader provides him with a briefcase fill of cash which he handcuffs to his wrist. However, the case also contains a bomb.
  • Ripped from the Headlines: "The Legend" from Season 1 involves a Nazi war criminal who has been released after a twenty-year sentence in Spandau Prison. At the time of production, Albert Speer had just done the same sentence, although in his case, he instead focused on writing memoirs that made himself out to be the "good Nazi", distorting his own actions massively.
  • Rogue Agent: Of the deniable operative kind, as the mission briefing Once an Episode makes clear. They apparently have the option of refusing a mission however.
  • Royal Brat: One episode centered around an attempt to assassinate one that Phelps & Co. must thwart.
  • Rule of Three: The 'Tape Scene/Dossier Scene/Meeting Scene' format. Averted permanently as of Season 5 when the dossier scene is retired.
    • The 80s revival had 'Codephrase Conversation Scene/Disc Scene/Meeting Scene' as it's format, though "The Killer" added 'Team Choosing Scene' in between the first two.
  • Run for the Border: Inverted in one season one episode: A drug dealer had already made it to a country with no extradition treaty with the US, so the team had to trick him into crossing the border into one that did.
  • Ruritania: When it isn't a Banana Republic.
  • Sadistic Choice: "The Ransom".
  • Safecracking: Done regularly. The amount of difficulty the team has depends on whether emptying (Or sometimes filling) the safe is the point of the mission or just another part of the plan.
  • Scarecrow Solution: Used occasionally by the IMF. "Banshee" features perhaps the fullest embodiment of the trope as the plan hinges entirely on convincing the villain that he is being stalked by the souls of those he has killed.
  • Scary Stinging Swarm: "Zubrovnik's Ghost" (probably the oddest episode in the entire series) features a swarm of seemingly supernaturally empowered bees bent on revenge. One of the bad guys is driven out a window to his death by a swarm of bees, and at the end, the spirit of the beekeeper who was murdered in order to fake Zubrovnik’s death (long story) apparently uses smoke to herd the main bad guy into the room where he is attacked and killed by a swarm of bees. And no, these bees are not organized by the IMF and have nothing to do with their plan.
  • "Scooby-Doo" Hoax: Some, like "The Sands of Seth" from the 1988 series. Given the show's gimmick of tricking the villains into defeating themselves with elaborate charades, though, when one does show up it's almost always an example of the good guys doing it. Specific episodes where they do this include "The Visitors" from the original show, where the IMF pretend to be aliens, or "The Haunting" from the revival where they use special effects to make a superstitious family think they're being haunted by a girlfriend the son murdered in a thrill kill.
  • Second-Face Smoke: While posing as a soldier-of-fortune in "Spy", Max does this in order to pick a fight with a mercenary in a bar.
  • Sequel Series: The 1988 revival.
  • Shame If Something Happened: Invoked when members of the mafia appeared, such as the crooked food distributor in "The Execution".
  • Shared Universe: With Diagnosis: Murder, of all shows (thanks to Cinnamon Carter appearing on said series' "Discards"). Then again, Peter Graves made a cameo appearance on another episode and "Discards" has the revival's Phil Morris. Not as Grant Collier, but as the murderer.
  • Shoe Phone
  • Shoot the Builder: In "The Legacy", when the IMF discover the underground chamber containing Hitler's gold, they also find the bodies of the workmen who dug the chamber; killed so they could not tell anyone its location.
  • Shout-Out: The rejected IM Force photos were often cast and crew of the show, as well as one of show creator Bruce Geller (wearing Sinister Shades) that is frequently seen in the early episodes.
    • In "Live Bait," a building called Hagmann Haus (after that episode's director Stuart Hagmann) is seen.
    • "The Double Circle" has one to Casablanca, via a character named Viktor Laszlo.
    • "TOD-5" is set in a town called Woodfield, a belated tribute to one of the show's primary writers William Read Woodfield (he and his partner Allan Balter worked on the series until season three).
  • Showdown at High Noon: "Gunslinger" ends with Jim Phelps holding showdowns with The Dragon and then the Big Bad. Jim's gun was loaded with tranquillizer bullets.
  • Showgirl Skirt: Casey wears one while posing a magician's assistant in "The Pawn".
  • Shown Their Work: When the US cable channel F/X aired Mission in the mid-90s, hosts would provide episode specific trivia at commercial breaks, all of which were gleaned from the book The Complete Mission Impossible Dossier, sometimes read directly from the book.
  • Showy Invincible Hero: An entire team of them.
  • Sigil Spam: In "The Golden Serpent", the eponymous organisation (which - it should be pointed out - is a drug syndicate) for some reason feels the need to decorate its hidden drug processing lab and the uniforms of its armed mooks with golden serpent symbol.
  • Similar Item Confusion: One episode has the team infiltrate a chemical plant where the villain's henchmen are mixing deadly nerve gas. The plant's store room contains two key ingredients in similar containers, differentiated only by their labels. Invoked when the IMF use peel-and-stick labels to confuse the two chemicals. This causes the mixing process to be done in the wrong order, resulting in the anarchists getting Hoist by His Own Petard.
  • Simple Solution Won't Work: The Impossible Missions Force is tasked with performing impressive con jobs against America's enemies because, as mentioned at least Once an Episode, because of a "standing order" by the U.S. government, agents of the IMF are not allowed to assassinate or torture their targets. Occasionally additional explanations are given and they mostly come down to the fact that the enemy will be turned into a political martyr if they die and/or the enemy will immediately suspect that it was the Americans if it's a simple smash-and-grab.
  • Simulated Urban Combat Area: In "The Carriers", in order to stop an expert in American traditions, slang, and customs from conducting his plan of bacteriological warfare against the U.S. and to put him permanently out of business, the IMF team infiltrates a mock-up of an American town located behind the Iron Curtain where enemy agents learn to act as Americans.
  • Spanner in the Works:
    • In one episode, Dana is masquerading as a Soviet spy—but happens to look like a lunatic asylum escapee's fiancée, and the madman kidnaps her when she's in the middle of giving Jim a warning.
    • "The Amateur" gets its name from a random civilian who ends up with up with part of the disassembled MacGuffin of the episode and decides to butt into the spy game himself for personal profit instead of simply returning it to the authorities, who are hunting for the team and the rest of the pieces.
  • Special Guest: Done from time to time, such as in the third-season episode "The Contender" with former middleweight boxing champion Sugar Ray Robinson.
  • Special Effect Failure: This is done in-universe deliberately in the 88-89 series episode "Submarine". After the IMF team tricks the villain into giving a confession and a computer program they need by making him think he's on a sinking sub, they leave him in there to make his way out of the "sub" alone...with the wind and rain machines and projector off, he gets to see that the sub is in fact a studio set, right before he's arrested.
  • Splitting the Arrow: In "The Golden Serpent (Part 1)", the Bodyguard Babe of one of the villains is shown doing this while practicing with her pistol crossbow, to show how deadly she is.
  • Spotting the Thread: Since many of the team's plans involved some form of elaborate deception, this was a problem that sometimes came up. For instance, one episode centered around tricking a Eastern Bloc spy that he was in his home country being tried for treason, but during the trial a chair is knocked over, revealing a manufacturer's label from a Los Angeles furniture company. Of course, in many of the episodes, the team deliberately left loose threads to be spotted as a way of tricking their target into thinking that they know what's going on.
  • Spy Drama
  • Spy Speak: At the start of many episodes, Dan Briggs and later Jim Phelps would hold a seemingly innocuous conversation that provided the signs/countersigns to be given the mission briefing.
  • Staged Shooting
  • Strategy, Schmategy: In "The Killer", the target was a hitman who chose the method of assassination at the last moment, making him impossible to anticipate.
  • Strapped to an Operating Table: Happens to Barney when he is tortured in "The Golden Serpent (Part 1)".
  • Suddenly Always Knew That: The team are often revealed to be skilled in something in an episode where they need that skill, after which said skill is never used or brought up again (This generally tended to happen in later episodes - in the early seasons, if the team needed a specialist in some skill the cast regulars didn't have, they'd introduce a guest star who played a specialist in that skill for the episode). Examples include Barney being revealed to have boxed in the Navy when they need to take down a crooked boxing promoter, Willy knowing martial arts when they are up against a man who sponsors martial arts tournaments (Where he still has problems because he's trained in Jujitsu and he has to compete in a Judo match) and Jim being an expert pool player in an episode where they go up against a Syndicate boss who owns a pool parlor. The episode where it makes the most sense is halfway through season six when Willy plays a crooked card dealer in a casino owned by their target - by that point Willy had spent five years working alongside former entertainers Rollin and Paris, and could have easily learned sleight of hand tricks from them.
  • Suspiciously Similar Substitute: There were changes to the team almost every season, with the exception of between Seasons 2 and 3 where stability was maintained. Probably the clearest invoking of this trope was the replacement of Martin Landau's Master of Disguise character Rollin Hand with Leonard Nimoy's Master of Disguise character The Great Paris.
  • Swiss Bank Account: In "The Council," the mobsters are using a Swiss bank account.
  • Take That!: When Briggs pulls into the Drive-In Theater in the first season episode "The Psychic", the marquee reads, "Geller and Solow in Spend the Money". This was an in-joke reference to the producers' tendency to go over-budget as seen by Desilu/Paramount.
  • Take a Third Option: In "The Lions", the new king is chosen with a puzzle in which they must place five lion statues, each of which corresponding to a different virtue, on a floating platform in order of importance. Placing them in the wrong order will trigger the blades underneath to kill the applicant. The solution is to place them all at the same time, as they are all equally important.
  • Tap on the Head: This is done to guards and the like regularly. Unfortunately, the typical implementation of this trope makes it look like the team can knock people out by slapping them between the shoulder blades.
  • A Taste of the Lash: In "Bayou", white slaver Jake Morgan whips any girl who attempts to escape.
  • Technobabble: In addition to some of the gadgets used on the show, team members would sometimes use technobabble in universe as part of their plan. (Usually as a distraction or way to fool the target into going along with a plan.)
  • Temporary Blindness: Barney in "The Falcon", Cinnamon in "The Heir Apparent" and Jim in, appropriately enough, "Blind." In the latter two episodes, the person in question deliberately arranged to be temporarily blinded so that he/she could impersonate someone who was blind (Barney's run-in with blindness was the result of a head injury).
  • Temporary Substitute: When Lynda Day George became pregnant at the end of season six, ex-con Mimi Davis was written in for a handful of episodes the following season.
  • Theme Tune: arguably one of the most recognizable TV spy themes ever.
  • They Have the Scent!: "Bayou" opens with a girl who has escaped from a white slavery ring being chased through a swamp by a hunters with a pair of dogs.
  • This Page Will Self-Destruct: Most probably the Trope Maker, using a reel-to-reel tape player in most episodes of the original series and an optical disc player in the revival. In some of the original episodes, though, the briefing tape had to be manually destroyed.
    • The villain of "Reprisal," a rogue IMF agent, leaves a recording in which he chortles at Phelps that "This room will self-destruct in five seconds." Oh, Crap! indeed.
  • Those Wacky Nazis: The team thwarted numerous plans to establish a Fourth Reich. Examples include "The Legacy", "Echo of Yesterday", and "The Legend" in the original version and "The Fuehrer's Children" and a remake of "The Legacy" in the 80's update. Rollin impersonates Adolf Hitler in "Echo of Yesterday" and Martin Bormann in "The Legend".
  • Thou Shalt Not Kill: In theory, from about Season 2 onwards. In Season 1 the IMF were occasionally seen using direct deadly force. "In theory" because while the IMF rarely kills anyone directly, their actions often result in the Big Bad being killed by a third party. One episode from the early seasons unambiguously states that the team is undertaking a form of assassination.
    • The revival series tended to follow this "in theory" pattern too, though the season 2 two-parter "The Golden Serpent" averts the trope by having an IMF member kill a thug, and the fact the team orchestrates the assassination of a villain is made non-ambiguous; lastly, the team actually consciously leaves the Big Bad to die rather than attempt to rescue him from an exploding cave.
  • Throwing the Fight: "The Contender" had the team take down a crooked promoter by having Barney impersonate an up-and-coming boxer whose career had been put on hold by a tour of duty in Vietnam. The person Barney impersonated (who had ruined his hands during an act of heroism in the war and could never box again) only gave the team permission to impersonate him if they promised that they wouldn't stain his professional reputation by having Barney cheat in an official match.
  • Time Marches On: Amounts of money that were undoubtedly quite substantial when the episodes were originally aired often seem quite paltry from the perspective of a watcher in the 2010s, thanks to fifty years of inflation.
  • Title, Please!: Neither series ever displayed the episode titles onscreen, which was atypical for the era when the original show was made.
  • Town with a Dark Secret: Woodfield, CA in "The Town".
  • Trapped by Gambling Debts: Deliberately arranging for a member of the team to get into debt so that the villain can invoke this situation is a time-honored IMF tradition.
  • Treasure Is Bigger in Fiction: Done semi-reasonably in "The Diamond" where the team is sent to steal the world's largest diamond from a dictator. The diamond weighs about eight pounds uncut and is about the size of a shoe. That's three times the size of the RL world's largest diamond, but the stone is explicitly stated to be a one of a kind recent discovery.
  • Trick Bullet: In "Gunslinger", Jim uses tranquilizer bullets to allow him to capture the Big Bad and The Dragon by staging a Showdown at High Noon.
  • Tricked into Another Jurisdiction:
    • In "Fakeout", the leader of an international narcotics syndicate is living in a country that has no extradition treaty with the U.S., so Cinnamon romances him in order to get him out of the country so that he can be legally arrested and stand trial in the U.S. (kidnapping him has been ruled out as being politically embarrassing).
    • "Incarnate": When the ruthless leader of a criminal gang flees to a Caribbean island that has no extradition treaty with the U.S., the IMF uses her belief in the occult to induce her to return to the US of her own free will so she can be captured and the gold she stole can be recovered.
  • Tricked into Escaping: In "The Confession", the IMF creates a Chained Heat situation by handcuffing Rollin (posing as a criminal) to a captured assassin for transport. They then provide an opportunity or an escape; knowing that the assassin will head to his backer and drag Rollin along with him.
  • The Trickster
  • Trojan Horse: A common way of sneaking people in or out of a secure area.
  • Trojan Prisoner
  • Trouble Magnet Gambit: A mob boss uses a variant of this in "Hit" to get revenge on his girlfriend for turning him in: he cuts her brake line, lets all the fluid drain out, and sends her to "pick up five grand".
  • The Troubles: In "Banshee", the IMF has to shut down an Arms Dealer who is deliberately inflaming the Troubles in order to sell weapons to both sides.
  • True Companions: Whenever anyone on the team needed help, everyone else would immediately come to provide it the moment they're told. The most telling example is in "The Exchange", when Cinnamon made a simple mistake and got captured on a mission. Knowing that the standard IMF procedure would be to disavow her and leave her in prison unless there was an explicit need to retrieve her (Which there wasn't as Jim and Rollin got away with the intel she had been sent to get), the team came up with a plan to break an enemy spy out of prison and exchange him for Cinnamon, something that would have gotten them in a lot of trouble if they hadn't also gotten said spy to spill the beans on the entire network he'd set up, making said spy and his network worthless to the enemy. In fact, despite the whole 'anyone who gets caught will be disavowed' policy the IMF had, the team would routinely go back to rescue any member of the team who got captured.
  • True Art Is Incomprehensible: Invoked Trope. One episode centers around a piece of abstract art that is essentially several dozen pieces of rebar welded together at the base and twisted into a bizarre shape at the top. When two security guards who didn't know the real reason their employers had bought it (One of the rebar pieces was actually made from a classified alloy, and the sculpture as a whole was just a way to hide it so it could be smuggled to its ultimate destination - Jim's team was there to steal the sample back), their reaction boiled down to "They paid how much for this thing? We should have been artists!".
  • *Twang* Hello: In "The Cattle King", Jim Phelps goes to meet a native tribe. He knows he's arrived when a spear embeds itself in a tree next to his head.
  • Uncommon Time: The memorable theme music, written in 5/4 time.
  • Underside Ride: In "War Games", Max clings to the underside of the military truck accompanying Shannon to her execution.
  • Unknown Rival: A properly executed IMF plot will leave the villain of the week in complete ignorance of the fact that their opponents exist at all until the trap slams shut, much less who they are or what they're after.
  • Unspoken Plan Guarantee: The team never explicitly states what the plan is, only making references to things they'll need in order to pull it off before they're used. Half the fun in watching is trying to figure out the plan from those references and the list of selected agents.
  • Vehicle Vanish: Deliberately invoked in "Leona" to convince a mobster he is going crazy.
  • Vehicular Sabotage: In the episode "The Missile", a psychotic mechanic tampers with the brakes in Dana's car.
  • Villainous Breakdown
  • Virtual-Reality Interrogation: In "Operation Rogosh", an unbreakable foreign agent known as "The Monster" who specializes in mass murder is discovered in Los Angeles, and the IMF team needs to break him (only to discover a planned biological attack on Los Angeles area water system). The team must trick him into revealing the location of his biological devices by convincing him that it is three years into the future, he is back in his own country, and he is on trial for being an American spy.
  • Voice with an Internet Connection: Regularly, particularly in cons that need to take place at the mark's residence. The crew will plant hidden surveillance cameras all over the mark's residence and/or wear a camera brooch and two way radio, and a one of the members (usually Barney in the original or Grant in the revival) will monitor the cameras and conversations the other members have with the marks, and provide assistance remotely through two-way radio.
  • The Voice: Two, in fact. Any disembodied voice you hear that isn't telling Mr. Phelps about the mission is probably professional announcer Vic Perrin.
  • Vote Early, Vote Often: In "Wheels", the IMF has to prevent a case of electoral fraud in a Banana Republic in order to ensure a fair result to the election. Strangely, they only needed to tinker with one voting machine in one district (And only by 2,000 votes, at that) to change which party won the national election.
  • We Do the Impossible: Rather appropriately.
  • Where the Hell Is Springfield?: in the series the team was often sent to the vaguely named People's Republic of Tyranny. Other locations included the nation of "San X" in South America or the Caribbean Sea. Whenever the mission was in The United States, the city or state was rarely named beyond "Western" or "Central". Any named nation, used for a mission in Africa, was never a real nation. Finally, Western Europe was referred to as a friendly or neutral nation.
    • Averted several times in the revival when Australia unambiguously appears as Australia.
  • Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: How the team survives being captured. On several occasions the plan depended on the villain disposing of a captured team member in a specific way.
    • Subverted in one episode of the 1988 remake when one of the regular agents IS killed to help allow a casting change.
    • The team ends up doing this themselves. As a rule, when the team wants somebody dead, they never just shoot them, they manipulate events until their target kills themselves or does something which gets them killed by one of their own associates. The only time they ever tried to do a straight assassination was in "The Legend", and they had to abandon that plan when Dan realized that the target was Dead All Along - The Dragon was using a dummy and prerecorded speeches to convince his followers of his authority.
    • It's also often explained in the first season that they can't JUST shoot the guy, they need to get the McGuffin as well, THEN 'eliminate' the guy. In one memorable episode, they kill the antagonist with a bomb, the second they get the McGuffin.
  • World's Strongest Man: Willy, who had set a world weightlifting record before joining the IMF.
  • Worthy Opponent: In "The Mind of Stefan Miklos", Miklos remarks that he views his unknown opponent (Jim Phelps) to be this. Tellingly, he says it when he thinks Jim's plan has failed to fool him, when it's actually succeeded in tricking him completely.
  • Written-In Absence: When Lynda Day George had to miss several episodes in the final season due to her being pregnant, Casey was said to be on assignment in Europe. The schedule issues which resulted in Dan Briggs not being in many season one episodes after the team briefing scene occasionally had him justify his absence by claiming that the mission would involve investigating someone who knew him personally, and thus would realize that there was an op going on if he was with the team.
    • Averted, however in one episode in which Cinnamon receives the recorded message, and meets with the others minus Briggs. In that case no mention is made of why Briggs isn't there.
  • Xanatos Speed Chess: One of the ways used by the writers to resolve a Commercial Break Cliffhanger.
    • The episode "The Killer" (which was made by both the original series and the revival) entirely revolved around this, because the mark was an assassin (played by Robert Conrad in the original and John de Lancie in the remake) who had completely random patterns. He'd choose a cab at random from the airport (IMF had multiple cab drivers set up) to a hotel selected randomly (IMF took the name he chose and very quickly applied the label to a blank hotel they controlled), with a room selected randomly (they had to renumber the doors quickly to ensure he got the room they'd put a surveillance camera in) had random contact arrangements (which they intercepted) from a random phone (they had to use a directional microphone because he chose one they hadn't bugged) and random assassination methods chosen at the last second (fortunately, they escaped the bomb he created out of C4 disguised as golf balls). The assassin was never directly aware he was being manipulated, but his habit of pulling a swerve on IMF at every turn made it a subconscious battle of wills between him and the team that usually needed to carefully plan out everything.
    • In the first season episode "The Ransom", the IMF team has to kidnap a mob witness because the gangster he's about to testify against has kidnapped and threatened to kill the daughter of one of Briggs' friends. The plan is to poison the tap water in the hotel room he's been put up in, send him to the hospital, and fake his death so that he can be sneaked out. A quick change of plans is needed when he takes two sleeping pills and swallows them dry. Then in the hospital, the detective guarding the witness recognizes that the dead body isn't him. Finally, the fact that the gangster intends to kill the daughter either way isn't a surprise, but it does require some fancy footwork.
  • Zeerust:
    • Both Main Logo typefaces.... A typewriter style font for the 60s series, and a blocky computer style font for the 80s.
    • One first season episode, "A Spool There Was", featured a recording method that was pretty much already on the way of becoming zeerust even at the first broadcast.
    • The ersatz future in "The Freeze"; also, the slide rule in Barney's publicity photo from "Collier Electronics".
    • Lampshaded in the pilot of the remake. Phelps marvels at the mini optical disc player that has replaced the trademark tape recorder of the original series, and again at the computer system he can now use instead of hard-copy dossiers to choose his team members. During the latter scene he remarks to himself, "Time does march on."

As always, should you or any of your IM Force be caught or killed, The Secretary will disavow all knowledge of your actions.


 
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Stocking Mask Test

Cinnamon Carter wears a stocking over her head in front of a mirror to gauge its effectiveness.

How well does it match the trope?

5 (1 votes)

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Main / StockingMask

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