Mission: Impossible (TV Series) Reprisal (1989) User Reviews

Someone's conducting a mission AGAINST the IM Force!

[planktonrules · 7/10 · 11 March 2017]

When the show begins, an old team member meets Phelps on his boat. Suddenly, he attacks and murders her...making it seem likely that either he's having a really, really bad day OR it's not the real Phelps. Phelps' fingerprints are found there by the police and unless he can quickly prove he didn't do it, Phelps is heading to prison.

The purpose of the episode is to determine who's doing this and stop them. It seems likely it's an insane criminal genius, Russell Acker, a guy who sure seems an awful lot like Hannibal Lecter--except he doesn't get around to eating his victims. He'd been a team member but lost his mind and began killing pretty women for kicks. But he's been in a maximum security facility for the criminally insane...and Phelps and his team put him there.

One of the reasons to see this episode is that you get to see an old team member, Lisa Casey (Linda Day George). If you remember, a few episodes earlier, Barney Collier (Gregg Morris) appeared in that one. Plus, it's interesting to see a case where someone performs missions on the team instead of the other way around! Well worth seeing....though I must admit that the ending was kinda dumb.

It's All Done with Mirrors

[JasonDanielBaker · 16 March 2013]

Former IMF agent Laura Ann Wilson (Chelsea Brown) is murdered in broad daylight by Phelps (Peter Graves) or at least it looks that way to witnesses. The feds know that it couldn't have been him because he was on assignment for them elsewhere a long way away from the murder scene. But his fingerprints are there and the police are poised to arrest him. His alibi is a government covert mission which does not officially exist.

Phelps and the feds suspect that a malignantly insane former IMF agent named Russell Acker (David Cameron) whom he put behind bars several years ago has targeted him and other former IMF agent for revenge. Acker - a raving lunatic confined to a maximum security asylum for the criminally insane having been convicted of murdering 8 women, taunts Phelps when he visits and offers a cryptic warning that more is to come.

Laura Ann Wilson was one of three female IMF agents used to trap Acker. Another is Lisa Casey (Lynda Day George - reprising her role from the original series) long since retired and working as a producer of stage musicals. A third one is also a target and Acker has found a way to leave his cell as he pleases.

Acker also knows, from his IMF days, how to make latex masks allowing him to convincingly impersonate anyone of his choosing and he chooses to impersonate Phelps. The Mission: Impossible team members mobilize to clear his name. This was one of the darkest episodes of the 1988-1990 version of Mission: Impossible which found a more balanced tone to the continuing narrative.

It seems like a lot of shows in TV history have an evil doppelganger character as a plot-line. When the writers run out of ideas it is the type of thing they can fall back on because it is easy to stage and the star gets to ham it up as a baddie which few of them ever mind doing.

The cast would be augmented each week by a guest star who was usually an established American star but the bit parts would be filled mostly with Australian actors and its Australianess would shine through. That along with use of aged stock footage to set action outside Australia would tend to clue viewers in to where it was really being shot - Queensland.