Live Bait (Mission: Impossible)

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Live Bait is an episode of the television series Mission: Impossible.

Contents 1 Tape scene: 2 Summary: 3 Cast and details: 4 Stock music:

[edit] Tape scene:

Recycled from the season 2 "The Widow".

[edit] Summary:

East Germany: the IMF works to free a captured courier named Marceau before he breaks and betrays Orin Selby, a high-level friendly operative, that is suspected by Colonel Helmut Kellerman who uses the young military officer Albert Brocke to trap the double agent with fake informations: the blueprints of the Security building and the cell of Marceau. Rollin, as a local secret agent, is officially sent to the Security building of the political police to investigate and pretends to collaborate with Kellerman while Jim and Barney make Brocke and his film-manipulated girlfriend Stephanie believe that his nasty superior is the double agent.

[edit] Cast and details:

Stasi Head Colonel Helmut Kellerman and his young naive assistant Lt. Albert Brocke (carrying spectacles), Brocke's girlfriend actress Stephanie, US operative Orin Selby, courier Marceau are played by Anthony Zerbe, Martin Sheen, Diana Ewing, John Crawford and Edmund Gilbert.

Jim poses as a local OGU Central agent who abducts Stephanie, as an American operative posing as Canadian businessman Dirk Moss and as a Wilhelm hotel receptionist to contact Rollin-as-Komi.

Cinnamon poses as agent Miss Helga Majek who rides a bicycle with high heels and she's run down by Brocke's car.

Rollin poses as OGU Central counterintelligence officer (as in "The Traitor") Eric Komi to save undercover agent Selby's neck; Rollin swallows a pink capsule to be immuned and gases down the Security building during fifteen minutes via the air duct known as "Klimaanlagemaschine Hauptsystem" but with a golden lighter.

Jim, Barney and Cinnamon are dressed as medics to operate Marceau's booby trapped chains: Barney pours liquid nitrogen to freeze the bomb at minus 209 degrees during three minutes and remove the primer from the detonator.

Selby's office is bugged by Kellerman but, later, Brocke removes "the" microphone from his hideout (a cannon artefact) and isolates it with a huge Brandy glass. In the basement (the ventilation room) of the Security building and behind a door camouflaged as a fake concrete wall, Marceau is tied in on a metallic table inside a single cell (between Fritz Lang's "You Only Live Once" and the season 1 "A Cube of Sugar") in the middle of an impressive overlit white room designed by Kellerman himself: this type of underground hiding place reminds the one used by Zerbe's character in "The Photographer". At the room of the Wilhelm hotel, Barney shoots Rollin and Kellerman while Jim records their voices behind a mirror wall. Jim replaces Rollin for the new footages shown to Stephanie. Director Stuart Hagmann plays with distorted props: Barney's thread counter that reveals the extreme close-up of his eye (when he edits footages for a trick film thanks to a splitter device) and Rollin and Kellerman are watched through a portable magnifying glass; Hagmann makes a veiled reference to his name when Cinnamon delivers a parcel decorated with green magnetic reels at the "Hagmann Haus"--the reel is a recording of a Cinnamon-as-Majek report about the manipulation of Brocke to get the blueprints of the Security building to locate Marceau's cell. To show the fear of the phoning young couple (Albert and Stephanie as Mr. Vogel), Hagmann makes a series of tilted dolly shots towards their faces. After escaping from an unknown dark room (Rollin's Wilhelm hotel room) where she witnesses the treacherous Kellerman, Stephanie betrays her own boyfriend because of Rollin-as-Komi finding compromising documents (a forged passport, currency) in the lining of her coat and the authoritarian persona of Kellerman. To depict Kellerman's apparent victory over his threatening Brocke, Hagmann plays with the scale of shots in the same frame: Kellerman's big head in the foreground and Brocke's figure in the background. Rollin wakes Brocke up thanks to an injection and makes a deal with him in order to forget Selby and execute his superior instead. To show the outdoors of the Security building, the film editor recycles a footage from the season 1 "Old Man Out". Featuring no dossier scene, meaning the IMF logo appears at the start of Act I. The episode is closed with a 180° upside down shot of the running IMF's car (in the line of "The Bank"). Willy is absent.

[edit] Stock music:

• "Pilot" (first intervew in the Security building; Rollin goes to the ambulance at the end) • "The Cardinal" (the the nerve gas lighter to knock down the security building; the freezing of the bomb and the outcome) • "The Execution" (small cues; Rollin phones the Wilhelm hotel to order his diner; Rollin interrogates Marceau) • "The Mind of Stefan Miklos" (Kellerman interrogates manipulated Stephanie in front of Komi and Brocke)