In this rather weak episode, Beatrice Straight plays Dr. Martha Richards Zubrovnik--a woman recently widowed. She's been working on some important experiments for the US but Sigismund Poljac (Donald Davis) has somehow come to interfere in this. He's a medium and is supposedly using the ghost of Martha's husband to convince her to defect to the East--and the IM Force needs to expose Poljac for what he is.
This episode uses a gimmick that is a bit unusual for this sort of thing--they go on the assumption that séances and the like are real! While you don't know at the beginning if Poljac is phony, Briggs brings in a woman who believes in this sort of crap to advise those going on the mission. Briggs supposedly isn't going with them because Martha knows him, though in a book I read about the series, they started writing Steven Hill (Briggs) into the show less and less because of his religious convictions (he is Jewish and won't work once the Sabboth begins--making things tough if shooting isn't wrapped up exactly on time). Unlike Peter Graves (as Mr. Phelps), Briggs had quite a few occasions when he was barely in episodes.
So is the episode any good? Well, I think a lot depends on you. If you like shows about psychics and don't mind that they act like they might be real, you'll probably enjoy it a lot more than me. I think these people are phonies who prey upon people--so it's not surprising I wasn't a huge fan of this one.
This episode uses a gimmick that is a bit unusual for this sort of thing--they go on the assumption that séances and the like are real! While you don't know at the beginning if Poljac is phony, Briggs brings in a woman who believes in this sort of crap to advise those going on the mission. Briggs supposedly isn't going with them because Martha knows him, though in a book I read about the series, they started writing Steven Hill (Briggs) into the show less and less because of his religious convictions (he is Jewish and won't work once the Sabboth begins--making things tough if shooting isn't wrapped up exactly on time). Unlike Peter Graves (as Mr. Phelps), Briggs had quite a few occasions when he was barely in episodes.
So is the episode any good? Well, I think a lot depends on you. If you like shows about psychics and don't mind that they act like they might be real, you'll probably enjoy it a lot more than me. I think these people are phonies who prey upon people--so it's not surprising I wasn't a huge fan of this one.