Episode
Mission: Impossible: A Spool There Was
Overview
Rollin and Cinnamon go it alone to recover a reel of recording wire containing information on a chemical warfare project aimed at the U.S. The courier carrying it was killed by the enemy, and the wire is missing. The two fake a lovers' reunion and then Rollin slips out during a pre-recorded conversation. To duplicate the circumstances of the courier's demise as closely as possible, Rollin lets himself be discovered and then chased along the same route. He finds the wire, hidden in plain sight as part of a fence. He and Cinnamon plan to recover and smuggle out the wire the same way, but it is taken by a young boy looking for fishing wire. Rollin manages to recover it, and they send the wire out disguised as the wire on a balloon.
Details
- Series
- Mission: Impossible
- Season
- Season 1
- Episode
- Episode 9
- Air date
- 1966-11-12
- Runtime
- 60 min
Episode context
A Spool There Was is Episode 9 in Season 1 of Mission: Impossible. It aired on 1966-11-12. The runtime is 60 min.
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Episode 8: The Ransom
Mobster Frank Egan kidnaps the daughter of Dan's friend and uses her as a hostage to force Dan and the team to break out a key witness, Augie Gorman, against him. After several failed ploys, Barney manages to contaminate Gorman's water supply inside the hotel safehouse where the police are keeping him. The team has taken over the hospital room and use a rotating examination table to switch Gorman for IMF member Steve (who resembles him). At the exchange, Egan tries to double-cross Dan, but the IMF team leader has a trick or two of his own to make sure things go smoothly and Gorman gets what's coming to him.
Episode 10: The Carriers
Enemy agent Janos Passik is preparing to train 200 foreign agents to infiltrate the U.S. and engage in some form of bacteriological warfare. The team figures out that Passik has created a replica of a ""typical American town"" so as to train his agents to learn how to blend into American society. Rollin, Cinnamon, Barney, and bacteriologist Rogr Lee replace the new group of recruits and must then find their way to the research lab. They soon realize that the American-trained agents will be infected with a highly contagious plague and then sent into American to kill millions. The group must not only destroy the plague samples but make sure that Passik and his superiors do not find out that the destruction was deliberate.
More episodes from this season
Episode 7: Wheels
In the country of Valeria, the IMF must assure that the corrupt Nationalist party's rigged voting machine doesn't give them the election.
Episode 11: Zubrovnik's Ghost
The wife of a deceased scientist, Kurt Zubrovnik, is being pressured by Eastern forces to work for them. They are using a phony psychic to convince the wife her dead husband wants to defect! Accompanied by IMF ""psychic consultant"" Ariana Domi, Rollin and Barney try to disrupt the fraud and convince her to return to working for the U.S. The psychic, Poljac, is torturing the husband for information to use to convince his wife Poljac's powers are real. Ariana senses a real ghost present. In the end, Rollin sets up a final seance and Barney prepares to use a technological projection of Zubrovnik to decry Poljac. However, a blackout causes his equipment to fail, and Ariana's alleged powers, plus some ghostly phenomena, allow them to complete their mission.
Episode 6: Odds on Evil
Prince Iben Kostas plans to use his money to finance a war. Infiltrating his casino, the IMF team goes to work: IMFer Andre (pretending to be Cinammon's husband) breaks the bank at roulette thanks to a not-so-portable computer worn by Willie underneath his tux. Andre then loses the money to Rollin as another gambler. Kostas tries to get the money back by playing against Rollin and cheating by using marked cards and tinted contact lens. However, Rollin has a similar pair of lens and also deals bad hands to Kostas. Finally Kostas antes up the 1.5 million in war funds, thinking he can't lose. Rollins tricks him, and the team must make a desperate escape.
Episode 12: Fakeout
Anastas Poltroni is the head of an international narcotics syndicate, and has taken refuge in a country with no extradition treaty. The IM Force is assigned to lure him out without kidnapping him (to avoid the publicity). Cinnamon woos Carson until Briggs, pretending to be her husband, interrupts. Carson refuses to bribe Briggs, while Barney plants some of Carson's heroin in his own hotel room and tip off the police. The IMF ambush Carson and steal the heroin, and Carson later escapes. He grabs Cinnamon and follows Briggs to a deserted lodge to retrieve his own heroin. The police are hot on his trail, and he flees with Cinnamon still in his grasp. Thanks to confusing road signs altered by Barney, Carson ends up over the border where he is arrested and the heroin is taken into custody.
Episode 5: Old Man Out (2)
Rollin manages to avoid the guards and escape, but Vossek is moved to a new cell in solitary confinement. Briggs comes up with a new plan and manages to relay it to the imprisoned Rollin. They manage to do so, and manage to rescue Vossek from the prison. With Barney providing distraction as a clown, the team manages to get Vossek over the border before Vossek's captors can catch up to them.
Episode 13: Elena
Double-agent Elena Del Barra is acting bizarrely, sending a microfilm of defense secrets from her own country. Rollin is sent into investigate, and return the microfilm without its theft ever being detected. Complicating matters is that an assassin, Callao, has been sent to kill her if Rollin can't figure things out in two days. Rollin convinces her to meet with teammate Dr. Enero, who hypnotizes her and learns she is suffering from a post-hypnotic suggestion to denounce the President, her good friend. With time running out, Rollin must return the microfilm, figure out the traitor, and save Elena.
Episode 4: Old Man Out (1)
The IMF team goes in as a circus team to rescue Anton Cardinal Vossek, who is being held in the impregnable Seravno Prison. Vossek is the leader of the country's freedom movement, in rebellion against Colonel Scutari, and is awaiting a fake trial before execution. With the aid of circus acrobat Crystal Walker, the team must get Vossek out. To do so, Rollin fakes being a pickpocket so as to be arrested. Once inside Servano, he has to sneak through the prison and get Vossek out of his cell as a test run for the next day...only for the guards to interrupt at an inopportune moment.
Episode 14: The Short Tail Spy
A defector has been targeted by two rival groups from the same foreign country. The team is to discredit the younger group, so that the U.S. can more easily handle the old-line group. The IMF sets it up so that the younger group's assassin, Fetyukov, must seduce Cinnamon to get to the defector. The two play a dangerous romantic game, while Dan convinces the older group's assassin, Shtemenko, that Fetyukov betrayed him to the Americans. They then get pictures of him trying to assassinate the defector, and try to blackmail him to convince him further that Fetyukov is responsible. Cinnamon ""saves"" Fetyukov and convinces him that she wants to defect. As Fetyukov goes after the defector, it's up to Cinnamon to stop him.
Episode 3: Operation Rogosh
Imry Rogosh is a mass murderer who kills to forment political upheaval. He is targeting Los Angeles, so the IMF knock him out in a car accident. When Rogosh ""wakes up"" he is in a cell in a prison in his own country, three years later, and ready to be executed as an American agent. To "prove" his loyalty to the cause, Rogosh has to spill the information on his secret operation, but during the mock trial a slip-up cues him in on the ruse. Briggs has to act fast to get Rogosh to reveal the plan to kill the citizens of Los Angeles.
Episode 15: The Legacy
The IMF must get hold of a horde of Nazi gold through four young men, sons of Hitler's top aides, who are sent to Switzerland to meet for the first time and pool their parts of the ""puzzle"" together. One of the men, the only one known to them, is replaced by Rollin. Each has part of an account number, and the team needs to hypnotize and trick the bank manager into giving them the complete account # and then slip it to Rollin. The bank account contains an envelope with a microdot, which when combined with a slide in each man's pocket watch provides the location of the treasure. After seeing the other men's slides, Rollin fakes the loss of his watch, then he and the rest of the team head to the cemetary. Two of the men figure out the puzzle from their pieces and follow. In a gunfight Dan is wounded, but one of the men is killed and the other runs off rather then face Rollin's wrath. The gold turns out to have been made into a crypt, and is recovered.