Vic Morrow plays the baddie in Two Thousand. Written by Harold Livingston, this episode debuted 23 September, 1972. Morrow plays Joseph Collins a nuclear scientist preparing to sell nuclear materials to a foreign country.

You know what that means right? We’re not taking on the mob/Syndicate this episode!

In order to get Collins to reveal the location of the material, Phelps (Peter Graves) and his IMF team concoct a plan that has worked for them before. Convince their subject that they have been moved into the future.

In this case they work to convince Collins that the year is now 2000 and that they world is at war. They explain his memory loss of the intervening years as being in a drugged out state of shock that allows men like him to be line workers.

He’s held in a kind of prison camp, Barney (Greg Morris), sporting a moustache and an accent, is his cell mate, who works to cement the idea.

As the war wages around them, they are able to slowly convince Collins of this reality until he offers up the location in an attempt to help them win the war.

Willy (Peter Lupus) runs the tech game, organizing the pyrotechnics to make the scene believable, while the team works to recover the refined uranium before the foreign agents can pick it up.

This one was so much more fun than some of the mob stories we’ve had of late, and the reveal that Collins has been had is just perfect.

The Deal puts us right back in organized crime territory. George F. Slavin and Stephen Kandel pen the teleplay for this one from a story by Slavin. It first aired on 30 September, 1972, and sees Mimi (Barbara Anderson) making another appearance.

This time around, the team have to trap mobsters Larson (Peter Leeds) and Rogan (Robert Webber). It seems they are planning to help back ex-British officer General Hammond (Lloyd Bochner) in his attempt to take over and install himself as leader of a tiny Latin American country.

So there’s a little bit organized crime, a little but international spycraft, it actually feels like a solid balance between the two.

The plan is to capture the two mobsters before they arrive in the Republic of Camagua and learn the location of their funds before they can hand it over to Hammond.

And watch for a brief appearance by the one and only Paul Gleason!

So while the IMF holds the mobster in prison (where Mimi is jailed with one of their molls), they go through their belongings hoping to find a key to a security deposit box, and become convinced it must be on their boat, a boat that Willy has just escaped from, injured, and washing ashore in Camagua.

But that may put Willy in a perfect position to interact with Hammond.

Will the team find the key to the security box (which only contains five million… that’s all you need to take over a small country?!?) in time? And will the mobsters get their comeuppance?

This is a fun one and I’m rather glad it’s not an all out mob vs. the IMF story. Let’s see where the rest of the final season takes us as I explore more of Paramount Canada’s release of Mission: Impossible – The Complete Series on Blu-ray.