I like it, but it's Preposterous

I get that it's a TV show, but the thing that always bothered me the most (other than Briggs and Phelps listening to their top secret briefings over the speaker) was the fact that everyone actually got dressed up for the planning meeting. Were they going out to a nice restaurant afterwords? Or coming back from one?

1) we only see the missions where he says yes. sure.. they could do an episode where he decides not to and then we'd see Phelps drive off and get a burger somewhere and pay his electric bill... not a great use of 60 minutes of tv time.

2) they're an IMPOSSIBLE MISSION FORCE... half of these episodes are of guys playing other guys in rubber masks.. you think rounding up blue prints is going to be a major problem?

3) you are mistaken.. these are NOT Eastern Bloc Countries... there are Russians and there are Americans.. but THESE countries are polyglot mixtures of Latin American, Middle Eastern, AND Eastern European dictatorships! If Barney has to hide in a box there are no black people.. BUT if Barney is introduced to the evil Colonel and said Colonel doesn't flinch then we know that this exotic dictatorship DOES have black people.. AND big Greek guys who seem to always have a box truck and a uniform ready to go!!! That's a TV trope for ya.. and aren't we glad as it means John Colicos and Michael Ansara could be on just about every other week. Those were the days... get your glass of Tang kids .. Mission Impossible is on!

4) oh well... that's showbiz.. it would be nice if a team of writers, show runners, and production staff would sit and write 60 brilliant well thought out scripts and THEN approach the network about their great idea for a show. There are some MAJOR clunker episodes throughout.... though the first season with Steven Hill has some great episodes with priceless work by Wally Cox.

1. As others said, it wouldn't be much of an episode otherwise.

2. It's a government agency. Presumably the missions are important enough to have spies scope out the locations and send back work. In some missions they have a vague idea and have to improvise.

3. Usually they're either important (albeit unknown) Americans or unimportant locals. Most episodes where they impersonate someone important require either Rollin to don a face mask or it's someone the target never met before. Sometimes it does happen that they have to pretend to be high-ranking military men, but that's usually after they suffer a setback and have to improvise. And we can probably assume that having everyone speak English is just a dramatic convention to make things easier on the viewers.

4. A mission like that probably wouldn't go to the IMF team. Sometimes they turn to violence when the situation gets hairy, but straight-up assassinations aren't what the show's about.

I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.

1) Jim always accepts the mission, so why does the tape even suggest that he might not?

I watched MI every week as a teen. As a budding technical expert, the show helped me develop a way of thinking of how to pull off difficult ventures. Years later I was able to do a number of things similar to what Barney would deploy.

For a while I was able gain entry to telephone/telex exchanges in several middle east countries. I needed to see first hand how they worked. Then back in the states I developed a system that could remotely monitor telex messages in real time. The only MI technique I never bothered with was the mask.

What your overlooking is the deep planning and social engineering that has to laid out well in advance. The thing with the photos makes perfect sense to me. That's an early step, pick you team members.

Look at it this way, MI is a one hour show about a fictional mission but many elements of the mission plausibly could have happened in real life.

If you watch a one hour show about some real world exploit such as the secret WW2 raids on the Norsk Hydro plant, would you declare it's implausible because they don't explain how the team member knew exactly how to blow up the ferry?

Bear in mind planned events often go badly and you need to improvise rapidly. This is exactly how things are in the real world. Once I was deep in a foreign embassy in NY doing a bug search and telephone tap search. I could have been caught but had more than one card up my sleeve. Risk is never zero. If you want a zero risk job, then your photo will never be in the MI folio.

BTW, blacks are found everywhere. If you take the time to study a local populace, you'll learn how a black team member can fit in seamlessly.

Language skills can be a problem but I learned Arabic and had no trouble in Saudi Arabia and the UAE. What about accent? It's best to not try and adopt a fully local identity. In most countries it's not an issue to be from somewhere else. I'll grant that MI stretches their language skills credibility a bit too far, but it's been done many times in the real world but not with one team every time.

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Those aren't bugs, they're features, @gavbrown01! The precision of their missions is part of the show's charm - that they can plan things so perfectly that they seldom go seriously wonky is why it's so appealing.

Jim always accepts the mission, so why does the tape even suggest that he might not?

I've seen a couple of "lost" episodes where he decided not to accept the mission...apparently they didn't air because they were too short, all of about five minutes apiece.