Category: TV
Last article published: 10 April 2023
This is the 205th post under this label
After chugging Season 4 of Mission: Impossible, I sat down to watch Dead Reckoning and shouted at the screen: "When is Ethan Hunt going to employ an animal agent, you cowards?!" Season 4 seems particularly interested in animals as members of the IMF team, and even the villains have critters foiling the team's plans (as above, the episode is "Orpheus", the one with Jessica Walter as the guest agent). Earlier seasons had been more timid about this, but there's the well remembered "The Seal", in which an orange tabby called Rusty is tasked with recovering the Jade Seal using his size and female agility.
Do you know how hard it is to train a cat? THERE'S your impossible mission. Indeed, Rusty gets distracted by fish in an aquarium and almost gives the game away. (For all I know, Rusty also plays Fritzy, the villain's pet in "Orpheus", following the tradition of Mission: Impossible reusing the same actors over and over in different roles).
Season 4 has four episodes with animal agents, although "The Falcon" is a three-parter, so it's really only two missions. "The Falcon" makes use of a highly trained falcon called Lucifer, who plays magician's assistant to the Great Paris, and has a few things to do. Not a whole lot given the episodes are named after him (he only appears in episode 2's recap, in fact), but it's a bird's life.
He's rather cute under the hood, and props to Leonard Nimoy for handling a potentially dangerous bird on set.
The BIG star of Season 4, however, is Chico (from the eponymous episode). His mission, should he choose to accept it, is a lot like Rusty's, but slightly more complicated, so he needs to be guided with sounds only canine ears can pick up. So using Rusty was out.
His task involves crawling through air vents, retrieving a stamp with a microdot on it, then going back to replace it with another. As with Rusty, there are a couple of snags. The villain's German Shepherd senses him and starts barking, giving Chico the shakes, and on the return trip, the air vent fails to open and Chico is stuck in the room with the bad guys and Jim Phelps, just sitting there unnoticed. Again, do you know how hard it is for a dog not to run up to people?! It's one of the most surprisingly tense moments in the entire series.
And Dead Reckoning? Well, it opens with Ethan Hunt on a horse.
My friend and I pointed at the screen at the same time in a sort of half-hearted validation. We'll take it where we can get it.
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