WHO IS DAN BRIGGS?
Secrets From The 1967 Book, Mission: Impossible.
By Atlas Bugged, copyright 2006
In 1967, the paperback novel Mission: Impossible was published by "Pocket
Books." Though barely twelve years old at the time, I immediately
purchased
it and read it through, having already become a drop-dead fan of the
series.
It was written by John Tiger, and it was clearly produced as a companion
to
the television show, with a cover pic from The Pilot , a copyright listed
as
Desilu, and cover mentions of the show "created by Bruce Geller."
Between the covers was an original, never-produced-for-TV story based
directly upon the precise characters from the show as it appeared with Dan
Briggs (Phelps neither appears in the story nor is he ever mentioned.)
[If you'd like to read either of John Tiger's two (yes, it appears another
surfaced in 1969, <http://snipurl.com/vwrv>)
IMF books, they are most
assuredly out-of-print. I found the first one, from which this essay
flows,
on E-Bay, very inexpensively, but I see it's not there anymore, so to get
a
copy of either book, just keep checking the site for a used copy.]
The mission recounted therein takes place squarely in the middle of season
one. Several early televised missions are referenced as having this or
that
effect on this or that character. But no late-season episodes are
mentioned
at all.
I must first confess that I never forgot this story because it featured an
adult aspect that neither Desilu nor CBS would ever have touched. In one
important scene in the book, Cinnamon is stripped naked, bound with her
own
pantyhose, and thrown in a bathtub for the featured villain to find (as
part
of the mission, of course.)
The best you ever got in that respect on TV was the stunning blonde
wearing
only a small towel, as in the Pilot. Naturally, a big benefit of reading
books based on TV or films is the very definitive imagery one brings to
the
story. Suffice to say that this escalation in seriousness - and sexiness
-
blew this 12 year-old's mind.
Cinnamon is actually captured and tortured onscreen in a subsequent TV
installment (The Exchange ,) but this was typical of media insanity then
as
well as now. Jack Nicholson summed it up so well when he said, "The
censors
say they're protecting the family unit in America, when the reality is, if
you suck a tit, you're an X, but if you cut it off with a sword, you're a
PG."
Getting back to the novel and its extras, the question naturally arises as
to whether it's all "canon." Allow me to briefly digress once more:
Recently, I fell madly in love with Joss Whedon's sci-fi show and movie,
called Firefly and Serenity , respectively. ["Would you like to know
more?"
<http://snipurl.com/k8ui>]
As the movie was released in September of 2005, I read the "novel" or
"novelization" of the movie. It was not original, and was taken directly
from Whedon's movie script. But the author of the novelization for
Serenity
added considerable detail not included in the film.
Canon? Not hardly. Imagine my surprise when I learned that Joss Whedon
never read the book, and never intends to!
By contrast, I doubt such an arrangement was even imagined in 1967, and I
count all information in the 1967 novel as absolute canon. Honestly,
there
wasn't a lot of "extra;" the novel hewed closely to the various
conventions
established on the show, and it was very short as novels go, spending the
vast bulk of its attention on - you guessed it - the mission.
That said, there were a small few extras, some of which were of first-rank
importance. And there is almost no doubt in my mind that they were
"blessed" by Geller and company. So here forthwith are some additions to
the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE legend that those of you attuned only to the TV
episodes don't know, but ought to.
The 1967 novel's mission itself was a combination of two common themes you
encountered in the show. The two villains are reprehensible former Nazis,
one a power-lusting reprobate trying to resurrect a Fourth Reich (ruled
over
by guess-who,) the other a Nazi scientist who has created a new and
horrifying WMD. The former is infamous for torture/brutality against
women, the latter a monster who experimented on humans.
Dan's mission, should he decide to accept it, is to destroy all vestiges
of
the weapon, which is stored in an impregnable fortress located within a
banana republic dictatorship, and bring the two Nazis to Berlin for war
crimes trials.
In a break in the action, author John Tiger speculates about what kind of
person volunteers for "impossible" missions, a job that always carried a
probability, not mere "possibility," of death, torture, or, on a good day,
imprisonment in a hellhole.
From the novel:
"They cared - more than other people. Not one of them would admit
it...but
each one of them cared a great deal about such square and sentimental
values
as justice, human dignity, decency and peace. It was ironic; they were -
secretly - the most swinging squares on Earth. Perhaps Willy Armitage
might
admit it, if you could get the big man to speak at all. Not the others,
though, for they'd answer with a flip remark or an ambiguous glance.
[...]
"A...psychiatrist might tell you that there was more to the IMF's
motivations than that; that the agents were not simply exceptionally good
or
responsible or brave individuals. He would point out that they had chosen
to live not just nobly, but dangerously, all the time, and he would ask
why." [page 51]
In short, IMF folk were probably intended as both - hi-intensity thrill
seekers who'd "channeled" their compulsive need for excitement into a
patriotic and princpled outlet.
Yet there is an added dimension with respect to my personal favorite
IMF'er,
Dan Briggs. It has been said that the most dangerous man you will ever
meet
is the man who believes he has nothing left to lose. Was this an
important
element of why Briggs was the bad guys' worst nightmare? You decide.
From the novel:
"Briggs was an unusual man, a former high school football coach who'd been
an intelligence officer in Korea for two years - a student of psychology
and
"games" theory, a pacific-coast chess champion, an expert on foriegn
armies
and military equipment, and a master glider and light-plane pilot. He
knew
about as much about Asian religions as he did about karate, a lot, and he
didn't rattle or freeze or blunder under pressure...."
"Just how and why a thoughtful and basically non-violent man such as this
Oregonian had come to direct the IMF was something none of the other
operatives knew, but then they didn't know that he'd been married at 23
and
that his wife and two-and-a-half year-old son had died in an auto crash on
the coastal highway south of San Francisco." [page 81]
The story of Briggs's clouded past segues into a little more detail on
both
Briggs and the team itself.
"So far as the others were concerned, [Briggs] had no past, no existence
before the IMF. He didn't talk about the years before. Briggs knew a
good
deal about the others because he had studied their dossiers thoroughly
before recruiting them."
Then Tiger gives us a brief, formal, and invaluable rundown about the
team,
but going several extra-innings about Cinnamon, and the relationship that
Might Have Been, with Dan Briggs:
"Olympics and circus strongman Willy Armitage was the son of a
Pennsylvania
coal miner, the youngest of five boys; and Rollin Hand, who had run his
own
little theatre company on the Florida Gold Coast, was the offspring of a
Park Avenue doctor's daughter and a genuine Gypsy prince. Barney Collier
had been third in his class at Cal-Tech, an expert water-skier, and so
popular with Laguna "beach bunnies" that he'd signed [begin page 82] up as
an electronics specialist with the hush-hush U.S. Army Security Agency to
avoid difficulties with the more insistent members of the bikini brigade."
Then, Cinnamon:
"Briggs was aware that he was some sort of father figure to most of the
agents in the Impossible Mission Force, but not to Cinnamon Carter. Oh
no,
and not a brother, either. The sleek, canny blonde - the slim trim
Chicago
banker's daughter who'd made it so big as a Vogue and Harper's Bazaar
high-fashion model - had other ideas about Daniel Briggs. Very other and
very definite. This was the man she wanted, handsome, honest, real,
unshakably solid."
"Briggs knew how she felt, and she knew that he knew. She also knew that
she was not just another competent comrade-in-arms to him. He was aware
that she was a beautiful woman, a very desirable woman who was not at all
as
cool as she appeared to be. She played the silky, cynical siren quite
well,
but there was a knowing, needing she-animal about one-tenth of an inch
beneath the pancake make-up. There was nothing tepid, antimale, or
indifferent about Cinnamon Carter, but then she wasn't quite the blase,
immoral seductress that she impersonated either. Neither trollop nor
angel,
she was a flesh-and-blood woman who liked danger and loved Briggs."
"Or was it the other way around? Was it the risks and excitement he
represented that pulled her? Both of them would find out one of these
days.
Perhaps in the next five hours..."
Of course, in the context of this novel, they did not; Tiger's
speculations
about the following hours include the scene (alluded to in my earlier
remarks) where Dan Briggs is assisting the fully unclothed banker's
daughter
into a bathtub, binding her with her own pantyhose, and smearing lipstick
swastikas across her body.
Perhaps the two spies did make a "discovery" in those hours leading up to
this part of the mission, but the only evidence of it exists in our
fevered
imaginations, not in John Tiger's book.
These details about Briggs and Carter seem to be equally applicable to the
view we saw of Phelps and Carter in seasons two and three. In particular,
when Cinnamon is captured in The Exchange , everything described above
perfectly captures the way Jim Phelps seems to feel about her.
In fact, in terms of continuity, neither the show nor any other resource
I've seen ever really discusses the replacement of Dan Briggs with Jim
Phelps. For all the differences between these two characters, it appears
that the producers wanted to insert the new IMF boss with an absolute
minimum of fuss, and the passages I've quoted above strongly suggest that
Phelps was meant to stand in for Briggs in all the same ways relative to
the
team, i.e., a father-figure to most and a frustrated romantic contemporary
to Cinnamon.
Compare this to later, post-Landau/Bain episodes; it seems fairly clear
that
as the show brought in younger leading ladies, there was no longer
romantic
interest between the leader and his charges. By the time of the 1987
shows,
Casey (Terry Markwell's, not LDG's Casey) was killed over the season
break,
and Phelps seemed to mourn a lost daughter, not a romantic interest.
That's all for now, thank you for reading along. I am in hot pursuit
(through E-Bay and similar fora) of a used copy of the 1969 novel by John
Tiger, and if it contains more of this type of background material, I'll
try
to post a follow-on to this essay.
This installment, however, will self-destruct in five seconds...
Atlas Bugged
--
This article was previously originally published in 3 installments on
Thomas
Rucki's great Yahoo group "Mission_Impossible_1966 · The New York
Apartment
of the IMF" which you will find at:
<http://tv.groups.yahoo.com/group/Mission_Impossible_1966/>
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