By Robert Champ

When I was a kid back in the 1960s, I used to love watching Mission: Impossible, which concerned the adventures of a highly trained group of agents who worked for an unnamed organization in the U.S. government. Lately I’ve been watching the program in reruns on the ALN station on cable, and I started to notice motifs that occur in a high percentage of the programs. I thought you might be entertained by my list, and might even add a few of your own if you remember the show or are watching reruns, too.

• If the mission takes place in a foreign country, don’t worry about not being able to speak the language.  Native speakers communicate in accented English, even when no English speakers are around. (Corollary: to convince a native speaker that you are from his country, put on the appropriate accent.)

• Sophisticated electronic instruments always work.  It may be that the equipment in the days of Mission: Impossible was actually pretty backward by our lights, and perhaps the simpler equipment then did work better—or so we like to think.  But on the show the equipment works every time. Truly God must on the side of the MI force.

• Guards, whether assigned to prisons or to secret laboratories, never notice anything. Where there might be a danger of discovery, either improvise an attention-getting stunt or divert the guards with a pretty girl. (Leslie Ann Warren, Linda Day George, and Barbara Bain did the trick every time.)

• Bad guys can always be tricked into shooting other bad guys.

• All you have to do to convince people that you are someone else is to don a lifelike mask made in the image of that person.  It doesn’t matter how long or how closely these people have known the real person: the mask will fool them every time, as will the heavy accent of the impersonator.

• It always helps, in planning a mission, to have photos of force members squirreled  away in your apartment.  You need to get a good look at the people you are considering, even if you have seen them dozens of times and even if you invariably choose the same ones.

• Women who fall in love with Impossible Missions Force team members are either killed or sent back home to think things over. The episode life of a girlfriend ends at one .

• Always try to get a mission in a border town.  This will make escape much easier when the minions of the tyrannical regime you have just duped start chasing you. Once you smash through the flimsy barriers set up by the border patrol, you are home free, regardless of the politics of the country you have just entered. Otherwise, have a helicopter or small plane securely hidden away. Don’t worry, no one will ever notice it.  Remember, too, that all MI members must be picked up together and must leave in the same vehicle.

• The ideal Impossible Missions Force team requires a leader, a makeup artist and actor, an electronics expert, a beautiful and resourceful woman, and a strong man. With this combination you can bring down whole governments, generalissimos, and mob kingpins.

• Always remember that it doesn’t matter how many extraordinary things other team members may do in the course of a mission: the guy who listens to the self-destructing tape at the beginning is the star.

Robert Champ teaches online literature courses at University of Maryland University College. His third volume of poetry, My Mourning Turned to Laughter, will be published this fall.