New Spy DVDs Out This Week: More Missions

Mission: Impossible's Sixth TV Season hits DVD this week, courtesy of CBS/Paramount. The sixth season sees the departures of Leonard Nimoy, Sam Elliott and Lesley Ann Warren from the Season Five cast. Linda Day George comes aboard to take on both Nimoy's duty of being a master-of-disguise and Warren's of being a woman. Nobody takes on Elliott's duties because, good as he was, he never really had any duties. Series star Peter Graves graciously takes upon himself Nimoy's additional duty of being a clotheshorse for hideous Seventies fashions. And electronics whiz Barney adds singing to his own list of skills. This is the season where the IMF team finally turns their attention almost exclusively to taking on crime bosses for "the Syndicate" in America. You'll get sick of hearing the words "the Syndicate" pretty quickly. At some point, Jim must have poured himself a stiff drink and pondered, "A year ago this time I was toppling dictatorships... and now I'm framing crooked record producers. What happened?" I can't pretend that the show doesn't finally start to go a bit downhill this year, but the plots are still generally ingenious (emptying a vault of its money by turning it into a giant vacuum) and outlandish when they need to be (a gangster played by William Shatner is made to believe he's gone back in time forty years, and miraculously de-aged to sell the conceit). The season's best episode happens to also be the only one that's really an espionage story: the team convinces an enemy agent that he's been out cold for days and in the meantime the foreign power he works for has taken over America!