List of Mission: Impossible (TV series) characters
This is a list of recurring fictional characters in the Mission: Impossible television series.
Overview
The cast changed considerably episode-by-episode throughout the program's seven-year run, so not all of the characters listed above took part in every mission that season. Many missions used one-time agents who were brought in as guest stars. Often, these agents were brought in for a specific skill, such as a pathologist, a psychic medium, or a contortionist.Introduced in season one
Dan Briggs
Daniel "Dan" Briggs’s main role in the team was as a Team Leader; he received the instructions from the 'Voice on Tape', and selected and coordinated the best people for the mission at hand. The team frequently consisted of Cinnamon Carter, Willy Armitage, Barney Collier, and Rollin Hand, although Briggs did not always use all of these team members and often also used other agents. He briefed the team, then if needed, handed out extra disguises or devices. Though Briggs played a significant role in many of the first-season missions, he was not an active participant in seven of the 27 missions he co-ordinated; after the mission briefings for these particular missions, Briggs did not join the team in the actual execution of the plan, evidently confident that his hand-picked team would succeed without his direct involvement.As was the case with most characters in the series, Briggs's background and personal life were never explored in detail. The first mission of the series indicated that he had not worked with the Impossible Missions Force for some time prior to that mission. Another mission, "Old Man Out", revealed that he had once romanced an IMF agent played by Mary Ann Mobley. The only other insight into Briggs's personal life was his one off-book mission, "The Ransom", where the daughter of a personal friend of Briggs', a school teacher, is kidnapped to force Briggs to deliver a mob informant from police custody before he can testify before the grand jury.
Briggs was depicted at times as a cold, calculating character, quite willing to kill to complete a mission. Notably, he was the only member of the IMF shown personally killing a nontarget in anything other than self-defense, when he ambushed and killed a sentry to get through a checkpoint in "The Carriers". At other times, he exhibited a fatherlike attitude towards his agents, and was frequently seen smiling encouragement and patting shoulders as missions progressed. Several episodes, such as "Shock", revealed that Briggs had acting, voice mimicry, and disguise abilities similar to those of one of his agents, Rollin Hand.
At the start of the second season, James Phelps took over as lead of the IMF team, and no on-air explanation was offered for Briggs's disappearance. The real-life reason was that actor Steven Hill's Orthodox Jewish religious beliefs often conflicted with the shooting schedule, making it difficult for the production crew to meet deadlines. By mutual consent, his contract was not renewed for season two.
Rollin Hand
Rollin Hand’s role as an IMF agent was that of an actor and disguise expert. In a theatrical brochure that headed his dossier, he was described as a quick-change artist and billed as "The Man of a Million Faces." As such, he had formidable skills in mimicry and voice imitation, as well as a mastery of make-up. He was also an expert at sleight of hand and pickpocketing, which came into play in several missions where he would pick pockets or hide things on someone else's person without their knowledge. His language and cultural skills were formidable. He regularly passed himself off as a citizen of various Latin American and Eastern European countries, and no one ever questioned his authenticity. He also successfully impersonated well-known public figures, such as the dictator of a fictitious Latin American country, rumored Nazi fugitive Martin Bormann and Adolf Hitler. On at least two missions, he even successfully impersonated a left-handed person, doing all gestures and reflexive actions left-handed when Rollin himself was right-handed. He successfully falsified a wide variety of maladies in the course of missions to dupe targets, including seizures and drug addiction.His abilities as a "ladies' man" were instrumental to the success of a number of missions. On one occasion, his role led to him having romantic feelings for a target who was killed at the end of the mission. In several early episodes, a romantic attachment to Cinnamon Carter was hinted at, if never explicit. While he probably had the least expertise in hand-to-hand combat of the original men on the IMF team, he was regularly called upon to defend himself in it, and usually came out on top. He was skilled with handguns and capable of killing when necessary. Rollin also has displayed incredible endurance several times, as shown by being put under physical torture frequently. He was willing to do solo missions as well as help with personal off book missions for the IMF leader.
The character of Rollin Hand was created specifically for actor Martin Landau, and indeed, as Patrick J. White's book The Complete 'Mission: Impossible' Dossier pointed out, he was almost named "Martin Land". To achieve many of Rollin's acts of mimicry, several of the characters he imitated were either dubbed by Landau or played by him in a double role under heavy make-up. This technique is used prominently in the first episode of the series, where Landau plays a Castro-like dictator of a small island nation whom Rollin must impersonate during a national broadcast.
Cinnamon Carter
Cinnamon Carter’s role as an IMF agent was that of "femme fatale" and "woman in distress". In her IMF dossier, she was noted as being a successful model, and the dossier scenes during her three seasons on the show showed at least three different magazine covers on which she was featured. How a famous international cover model failed to be recognized as such during a mission was never explained. Carter was often used to play on the vanities of powerful men to get them to lower their defenses. Frequently, she played the role of a beautiful American woman on the make to draw the subject in. On occasion, she played a woman in distress to distract someone. Carter rarely adopted elaborate disguises, as did practically everyone else on the program, because Barbara Bain, the actress playing her, suffered from claustrophobia, and could not abide being hemmed in by heavy makeup. In a nod to Bain's condition, Carter, too, was shown to be claustrophobic. In "The Heir Apparent", she is made up as an aging princess, heir to a nation, while in "The Bunker", she is masked as the objective scientist's wife. In episodes where someone was needed to get into tight spaces, another female agent was brought in, but in "The Slave", Cinnamon, in spite of her claustrophobia, is seen being placed into and later coming out of the false bottom of a food carriage as part of the IMF plan. Cinnamon's claustrophobia was used against her in a devastating way in the third-season mission, "The Exchange", when an enemy intelligence service discovers her phobia after capturing her and uses it in an attempt to break her. While Cinnamon was being interrogated, she demonstrated that she had been trained in counter-interrogation techniques, resisting all attempts to get her to give up the team.While Carter was rarely called upon to defend herself in hand-to-hand combat, she was shown to have at least the basic skills to disable a single adversary as evidenced in missions such as "Odds On Evil" and "The Town", and she was confident handling a gun. Like Rollin Hand, her assignments did, on rare occasions, lead to her falling for her target.
She was shown to have feelings for Rollin Hand in a conversation she had with "Crystal", a woman on one mission who had feelings for Dan Briggs, when Cinnamon brought up that Crystal was worried about Dan, who was with Rollin on a risky mission. Crystal replied that Cinnamon was just as worried about Rollin as Crystal was about Dan. Another time, in "The Pilot", where Rollin impersonates a man who has "a real reputation for being a ladies' man", and Cinnamon is supposed to come to his room, he asks her to help him "get in character".
Barbara Bain was married to Martin Landau at the time, and a contract dispute Landau had with the program's producers as the third season wound down resulted in both leaving the cast.
Barney Collier
Barnard "Barney" Collier’s main role as an IMF agent was that of an electronics and mechanical genius, as well as a forgery expert. He also had an extensive knowledge of building infrastructure such as wiring and plumbing standards, including building standards in foreign countries. Generally, Collier was brought in on missions to supply high-tech custom mission support. On occasion, he custom built a computer which was well ahead of its time, such as a computer that could read playing cards face down on a table or could beat the world's greatest chess players. Starting in season five, he was revealed to possess criminology skills that were key to several missions. He was a veteran of the US Navy, specifically the Sixth Fleet. His IMF dossier noted that he owned his own electronics firm. To maintain cover when on personal travel to foreign countries, he once used the alias "Barney Davis", It was a common plot device, throughout the series, for Barney to be smuggled into a building or facility by various means, such as a collapsible filing cabinet, a specially designed crate, or even a janitor's cart, so he could carry out some task in secret.Due to his being black, his role play in earlier missions which took place in Eastern European countries was often as a supporting character. Those missions which took place in Latin America or the United States gave him the opportunity for more visible roles within the mission. Although Barney Collier is primarily remembered as an electronics expert, he was often called upon for his hand-to-hand combat skills. Notably, he was an accomplished boxer, having been the champion of the Sixth Fleet when he was in the Navy. His boxing skills were the centerpiece of a two-part mission in the third season, "The Contenders". He also had the strength and agility to penetrate denied areas going hand-over-hand using grappling lines without any assistance, shimmying up drainpipes, and rapelling down elevator shafts. He demonstrated incredible fortitude even when injured, continuing with missions even after being shot in the back, the knee, or the head, temporarily blinded by a concussion, or poisoned. In the course of seven seasons' worth of missions, on rare occasions, he killed men in self-defense both in hand-to-hand combat and with firearms. A recurring subtheme for Collier was, when a mission was at risk, his unwavering faith in his fellow agents in their ability to come through.
Barney Collier, along with Willy Armitage, was one of only two IMF agents who were regulars on the team for the entire seven-season run of the original Mission: Impossible TV series. Like all of the regular IMF agents, he was not used in every mission, but he was the only character in the opening credits of every episode of the original series. On occasion, he did not appear during the course of a mission, but the characters used devices that were noted as being supplied by him. In later years of the series, that stayed in the United States and dealt with organized crime, Barney, although still supplying gadgets and devices, did less of the physical duties, and began to be a character more in line of the mimic and master of disguise roles played by Hand and Paris in earlier seasons. In later seasons, Barney was also a de facto second-in-command of the IMF team in situations where Jim Phelps was missing or incapacitated. Barney seems to have a strong friendship with Phelps, in particular, referring to him as a best friend in later years.
Barney had a brother Larry who was a newspaper publisher who was unaware of Barney's career in the IMF. Barney's brother was killed in the fifth-season episode "Cat's Paw" for his efforts to bring a ghetto mob to justice. Larry's murder was the catalyst for the off-book mission in that episode to bring down the mob as a way to avenge Larry's death. In that episode, Barney's mother was still alive.
In the series canon, Barney had a son named Grant, born October 3, 1957, in Georgia. However, by 1970, Barney was single in season four when he met and romanced a woman in a foreign country in an off-book mission and brought her back to the States at the mission's conclusion. Barney reprised his role for three episodes across two missions in the 1988 Mission: Impossible series revival, where his son Grant was an agent. In one of those missions, Barney was extremely despondent at the recent death of Grant's mother. Barney returned to the IMF as an agent to work with another team apart from Jim's group as the inside man investigating a drug cartel.