The third season has been consistently strong, with winning episodes like "Live Bait" and the two-part "Bunker" building momentum sufficient to send Martin Landau and Barbara Bain off at the crest of the wave. But crash! Then came "Nitro," a dud in more ways than one. Not necessarily bad, but a letdown in the wake of the impossible missions that preceded it.
The first misstep was the script. Laurence Heath's story struggled to fill fifty minutes of screen time, so it was padded out with endless scenes of Barney typing code and replacing on spools the same computer tapes, or of Rollin tooling around on the forklift. I can hear the editor, "We're still down three minutes. I know! Splice in about a dozen cutaway shots to the brake line leaking!"
The second misstep was in casting. Where were the familiar faces of the era's best character actors we've come to expect? Yes, it was great to see Mark Lenard in his third of four series appearances, but he spent the lion's share of his screentime unconscious! Compare his tepid and underutilized appearance here to his outsized and commanding role in "Trek." The featured guest players were Titos Vandis and Sandor Szabo, and neither was especially compelling. Okay, admittedly Szabo's sweating and dissembling as he lay paralyzed watching the truck out the window was entertaining!
Good points were seeing Landau employ his real-life talents as a cartoonist in creating from scratch the face of the legendary agitator he would portray. It was also fun to see Jim and Willy paired as a reporter and photographer. Barney and Cinnamon dutifully did their jobs with little to distinguish them this time out. The dossier scene was also a welcome sight.
One theme I found prescient was the role of the media. When the television cameras stopped, King Said paused his press conference. Even with assembled journalists attending in person, if it isn't being televised, why go on? General Zek takes to the television airwaves to announce his (premature) victory after he was earlier duped by the "fake news" he heard over the radio. "Trust but verify," as Reagan later said, which sage counsel would have saved Zek from the egg on his face (and much worse, it's safe to assume).
The quip about "Mr. Connery" was a nice touch. I took Barney's line about Connery being "on another assignment" as a reference to the actor's abandoning the spy game after quitting (for one movie, anyway) the role of Bond. When ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE came out later in this year of 1969, I'm sure many fans were saying the same thing: "I specifically asked for Mr. Connery!"
Third season MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE was a well-oiled machine and the bar of expectations is set high. These early episodes boasting Landau and Bain stand head and shoulders above the later JV teams Phelps cobbled together (Mimi, Dana, Doug et al.), which teams were reduced to upending the penny-ante plots of two-bit mobsters instead of coup-plotting Muslim-nation military leaders as in this episode. But "Nitro" proved itself a dud despite some flashes and glimmers. In the end, there was a lot of buildup for very little payoff.
