"Blind" is one of my top ten "Mission: Impossible" episodes.
In the Sixth season it's good-bye to Leslie Warren and Leonard Nimoy. Though a promising replacement for the much-missed Martin Landau, Nimoy proved himself to be one of those actors who gets a role other actors would kill for then whines about it. But then, he basically had an identical role to Landau, right down to his dossier headshot. It reminds me of the story of another perpetual whiner, James Garner. When he left "Maverick" in a huff Roger Moore took his place. The "Maverick" people told Moore not to think of himself just as James Garner's replacement but when he got his costume it had Jim Garner written in it.
In with Lynda Day George, slow to start but good once she got revved up. Prettier than Cinnamon, a better actress than Warren, and certainly easier to cope with than season 4's revolving door of actresses, talented as they all were.
Phelps gets himself blinded to pretend he's a bitter ex-undercover agent with a drinking problem. He has to get rid of a the henchman (frequent guest star Jason Evers, who has a knack for showing up in some of the better episodes) of a mobster ("I'm Spartacus!" Harold J. Stone) while preserving the cover of the government's inside man (rolly-polly Tom Bosley). And they have to side-step Evers' vicious sidekick (Peter Brown) who is happy to steal a quarter from a blind man. How mean can you get!
Once again Jim, Barney, Willy and Casey go their separate ways to work their magic and slowly come together to blind-side (no pun intended) the bad guys. And the viewers. Very tricky this time!
One great thing about M:I is that it would be so easy to write muscle-bound Willy off as the cliched lunkhead, but he's clearly got it upstairs as well as everywhere else.
If this episode has a problem, it's with Bosley. He's not to blame, but it's difficult, in retrospect, to separate him from Richie Cunningham's father and every time I see him I smile as if he's about to say something disparaging about the Fonze.
It's also great to have the old theme back. Some things should not be monkeyed with. The "M:I" theme quickly became one of the most instantly recognizable sig tunes in TV history and changing it was nuts. Throw season five in an ash can and recover the old formula.
It's difficult to get used to the "teasers." But perhaps they were necessary in the early 1970s to draw in viewers who might have switched channels from a show beginning its sixth year and just coming off its worst.
And this was a strong episode to kick off the sixth season and get a good season off to a good start.