IF YOU LIKE the original Star Trek as much as I do, and you’ve watched all of it, as well as all of the various continuation shows and motion pictures and cartoons and short films and documentaries, you could do worse than to give your attention to Mission: Impossible next. In the mid-1960s, when Star Trek began, Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball’s production company Desilu had been on a roll for some fifteen years, during which time they produced such classic shows as I Love Lucy (and later The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour and later still, The Lucy Show), Our Miss Brooks and The Untouchables. The two shows would later become Paramount properties when it acquired Desilu.
Both debuting in 1966, Star Trek shared a sizable number of its actors with Mission: Impossible. Leonard Nimoy would join Mission: Impossible‘s cast as The Great Paris after Star Trek finished, filling a gap in the cast caused by the departure of Martin Landau, who had been Gene Rodenberry’s original choice to play Spock. Not only that, but the many guest stars on Mission: Impossible over the years included William Shatner (Captain Kirk), George Takei (Sulu), Mark Lenard (Spock’s father, Sarek), Ricardo Montalban (Khan Noonien Singh), John Colicos (the original Klingon, Commander Kor), and so many more.
While these parallels between the shows provide additional pleasure in watching Mission: Impossible as a Star Trek fan, the two aren’t really all that similar. While both shows eschew continuity in favour of one-off storytelling, Star Trek is a work of philosophical and ethical depth, taking place in a mostly-Utopian future as seen from the 1960s, a world in which prejudice and violence have been replaced by reason and progress. Mission: Impossible, on the other hand, focused on an American intelligence agency with no accountability as far as we can tell (it isn’t even clear whether the Impossible Mission Force is a government agency or a private contractor whose biggest client is the government) conducting beyond top-secret operations which are often illegal and often on foreign soil. While Star Trek used its stories to explore political and moral issues, Mission: Impossible‘s creator Bruce Geller was opposed to using the series to explore anything other than the ingenious heist methods utilised by the IMF crew (Geller’s inspiration was the central, dialogue-free heist from Rififi; he originally pitched a series about a heist crew, but concerns over moral standards and the popularity of other spy shows and films in the mid-60s led to a nominal spy series that’s really all about heists). Star Trek explored the formative experiences of, for instance, Spock in “Journey to Babel” and Kirk in “The Conscience of the King”, while Geller was adamant that we learn nothing of his characters’ lives outside of work.
Unsurprisingly, both shows were reimagined as blockbuster movie franchises, Star Trek during a science-fiction film boom inspired by Star Wars, and Mission: Impossible after Brian De Palma’s big-screen version of another Desilu classic, The Untouchables. Both were brought back to television during the writers’ strike of the late-80s; while this iteration of Mission: Impossible lasted for just two seasons, Star Trek: The Next Generation managed to hang on through two highly questionable seasons and become a TV classic, running for seven seasons in all and reinvigorating the Trek franchise. And, in a final twist of fate, both Star Trek and Mission: Impossible were given glossy big-screen reimaginings by J. J. Abrams. Alex Kurtzmann and Roberto Orci worked on the script for Mission: Impossible III as well as various latter-day Trek projects, while Mission: Impossible II‘s script was written by Star Trek: TNG writers Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore.
Fact, Conjecture, & Occasional Jokes 