Trek guest actors in maybe surprising roles

But Rojan is the doctor.

 

Well, why not? Jim did spend quite a lot of time out of town.

 

I sometimes wonder about those operatives whose photos Briggs or Phelps didn't pick for a mission. Did they get picked for other missions we didn't see? Did they go on missions for other IMF teams? Were there other IMF teams? There were by the time of the '80s revival, but in the original, there never seemed to be.

I've long thought the original idea behind M:I was that the IMF was just Dan Briggs (and later Phelps) as a nominally retired professional agent working unofficially for the Secretary and organizing an off-the-book black-ops squad for missions so sensitive or illegal that the government needed deniability, recruiting a group of talented amateurs with no official ties to the intelligence community. In a couple of early episodes, we saw Briggs recruiting the guest agents personally, so I figure the dossiers were meant to be the result of his own research into potentially useful candidates, or were assets that he'd worked with in the past and knew from experience. Even later on, when the series abandoned that early implication and had the IMF working hand-in-hand with various official agencies, the sense was still that Briggs or Phelps did his own research into team candidates and chose them based on the needs of a given mission (until they simplified it and just used the same team every week). But by the movies, the IMF was treated as an integral division of the CIA, and Phelps or Ethan Hunt had his team members picked for him ahead of time.

(Or I shouldn't say "by the movies," since it turns out the movies are probably a reboot rather than a continuation. Rogue Nation claimed in 2015 that the IMF was only 40 years old, and apparently the next movie is rumored to introduce new versions of Rollin Hand, Paris, and Dana Lambert. Which is a load off the minds of all of us who detested what the first film did to Jim Phelps.)

 

I would like to see a reboot that was true to the original idea of a small, deniable, unofficial off-book team of amateur operatives, where the team leader picked out a different set of specialists for each mission depending on its specific needs, rather than using most or all of the same people every time. (For instance, having several different impersonators of different builds, ethnicities, ages, etc. to match the different subjects.) With today's season-arc model, you could cast the whole season's specialists-of-the-week up front and include their photos in the dossier scenes before they actually showed up in a later episode. (Or you could cast them later and then digitally insert their photos in the dossier sequence, which would probably be on a computer screen anyway, unless it were a period piece.)

 

I saw James Gregory today in The Naked City (1948). He was uncredited, but even in his small part as a cop, he was solid and had commanding screen presence. It's his first actor credit on IMDb. I thoroughly enjoyed the film, by the way.

Looking through his other parts, I was surprised to see that he played General Ursus in Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970). (I was pretty unimpressed with the film, or I more likely would have noticed that.)

https://planetoftheapes.fandom.com/wiki/Ursus_(APJ)

 

He had a very distinctive voice - and look for his singing role in a haunting episode of the Twilight Zone.

 

That makes sense, but where were the Bradys while all the mob bosses and crime lords were using their house?

Great movie.

 

Alice had a secret life...

 

Sound effects guest shot! An episode of The Immortal featured Linda Day George as a computer programmer feeding Ben Richards's life into a room-sized UNIVAC to predict his movements. Since real UNIVACs only made massive cooling fan noises, they dubbed Enterprise bridge background sound effects over it.

 

Teri Garr as a backup dancer for the Supremes on 'The T.A.M.I. Show'.

 

James Gregory is great fun as the police sergeant listening to Geraldine Page tell her tale of woe in the Night Gallery two-hander "Stop Killing Me."

 

What's a two-hander?

 

The Immortal episode "Queen's Gambit" featured Lee Meriwether and a LOT of fashionable costume changes!

 

That's probably why the network cancelled it after only one season. They saw that the producers blew the budget on Lee Meriweather's wardrobe and refused to give them any more money.

 

A two-hander is a play for two actors. Gregory and Page are the entire cast of "Stop Killing Me."

 

I should have been clearer. I guess that's why I'm still only a captain.