The Legend
Mission: Impossible

Martin Bormann is alive and collecting old Nazis as they’re released from Spandau. Actually, it’s a dummy kept at a safe distance speaking by tape recorder.

Rollin brings the dummy to life, astonishing its puppeteer to the point of murder. The rest of the Impossible Missions Force carry out the new Führer’s body, and the old Nazis do in the assassin.

The lifelessness of the manikin prepares the shock. Bormann has plans, big plans, which differ from those promulgated by his aide. Hence the violent row and a tearful plea from the resurrectionist, “let me be your Führer!”

The Bargain
Mission: Impossible

The bargain is between a military dictator in exile and the financial backer he accepts in order to effect a return to power. This mobster’s condition for the sizable expenditure is legalized gambling.

An extraordinary, complex and detailed plan has one major thrust and two images, minor and major. Rollin is a European billionaire who shifts his operations to Miami, apparently out to buy the very hotel where the mobster is ensconced. It is then seen that he has a successful counteroffer for the takeover, at the price of development rights.

Phelps is the billionaire’s right-hand man, but also a specialist called in to examine the general. The lesser but highly-significant image is his briefcase, which contains a motorized apparatus that converts it into a doctor’s bag.

The general’s illness is a rare syndrome that gives him precognitive delusions (cf. “The Western”). Barney as his haute-cuisine Caribbean chef brings it on with a sherry flip. Willy the sous-chef superintends the hallucinations.

These include the greater image of the mobster entering to open the general’s wall safe and complain that it’s empty, then turn and fire at the general. Presently he does arrive in much the same way. The general shoots him, Phelps calls the police.

Along Came Joey
Hawaii Five-O

Schlesinger’s The Believers has clarified the metaphorical line here from Mulligan’s Fear Strikes Out (the exhortations of the father not merely destroy the athlete but kill him as well, this is seen as a sacrifice to an Old Testament god identified with Jehovah but actually Moloch). The delicate writing has Joey Kalama take a dive to pay for his honeymoon but get back up again to deliver a knockout, two thugs beat him to death outside the arena.

His father, a police detective, goes lawlessly after the mobster responsible, raising alarms in the Attorney General’s office over a “rogue cop”. The fiancée is a sort of Samaritan Magdalen who turns the tide, the light of day dawns upon Det. Kalama, the mobster is booked at McGarrett’s insistence. The manager who arranged the deal falls like Stevens’ Judas.

Benedict’s direction is very tough in the milieu depicted, handles a photo shoot as background to a police interview (bikinis, palm trees), and maintains a very clear line of calm, cool deception frittering under sustained pressure (Peter Mark Richman, Jean Hale, Jesse White) while Frank de Kova seethes and burns.

The Vault
Mission: Impossible

The industrialization of Costa Mateo depends upon a large fortune in the president’s private vault. The finance minister rifles it, deposits the money in a Swiss bank account, sends the president on a wild goose chase to Chicago for a meeting with a company that doesn’t exist, and arranges for him to be found concealing the account number on his person.

This is the parable of the talents in terms of high finance and espionage, with no doubt where the enemy’s interests lie. Phelps and Cinnamon pretend to be the People’s Trade Commissariat (actually Russian envoys) with industrial backing in exchange for military bases. The president dismisses them, but the minister seeking “power and personal wealth” makes a deal of his own, acing out a neighbor country (San Tomas) for a yearly payment.

It’s arranged for a burglary to take place, nullifying the minister’s scheme. He is found in the vault covering his tracks.

Sweet Terror
Hawaii Five-O

Robert C. Dennis measures precisely the distance between a wartime serial and this, forcing McGarrett and Five-O into unusual haste, and putting Benedict on his mettle in speed and precision.

The Beast is a mercenary of dubious origins working for the Red Chinese. The beautiful comrade from Colombia is a chemist. The plan is to quell sugar cane production in Hawaii for the benefit of a sugar-growing Caribbean isle under embargo, “an evil institution”.

McGarrett is described by his adversaries as “dangerous and ruthless”, and to his face “an oppressor of the people”.

“A second Pearl Harbor” is the goal of this five-year plan, spreading airborne fungus on the cane.

Danny and Chin Ho are following Beauty through an alley, as they go by the camera in an up-angle Benedict follows through to the daylight sky between the buildings, twice, because it’s a good shot that resembles one of Harry Callahan’s photographs.

All the King’s Horses
Hawaii Five-O

A Senate investigation into union corruption centers on a former mobster now legit, as McGarrett can testify. The committee’s legal counsel has himself shot at, crucifies the man in the headlines and thereby brings out old mob rivals to do him in.

The counsel has a private detective try to record McGarrett making a shady deal or something that can be twisted to serve. McGarrett throws the blackmailer out minus his tape recorder.

The detective now tries to frame McGarrett and the man both, from the latter’s office late at night where he himself is killed by a mistaken hit man.

The initial gunman, a former employee of the private detective’s, is brought in to testify. Disbarment proceedings and legal charges are immediately brought against the legal counsel by the committee he’s working for. His campaign for attorney general is finished.

The second hit man kills his target in the hearing room at Iolani Palace, and is killed by McGarrett.

At the opening, McGarrett’s palm is read by a gypsy in a bikini, before the pool and patio are struck with bullets.

The spareness and authenticity of the teleplay by William Robert Yates are well-matched by Benedict’s direction.

Pamela’s Voice
Night Gallery

The meaning of heaven and hell is simply promulgated by Serling here. In heaven, a lady can speak her mind, though that were never “so many hackneyed clichés per minute in a voice like unoiled roller-skates”, forever and ever. Likewise, hell is the place where, having murdered her at last and subsequently dead of his own celebrations, the husband has to listen.