Mission: Impossible (TV Series) Zubrovnik's Ghost (1966) User Reviews

When an episode is about the supernatural, it has a few strikes against it at the outset.

[planktonrules · 5/10 · 4 February 2014]

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.

IMF goes on a séance

[CCsito · 7/10 · 2 April 2013]

This episode was a bit different from the other missions. It involved a female scientist whose husband had died one year earlier and was having communications with his spirit from a medium who has ties to the Soviet Bloc. The mission was to convince the scientist to stay with the Western powers side and that the spirit communications were contrived. The mission only involved Rollin Hand, Barney Collier, and a psychic specialist. One thing that is different in this episode is that both Rollin and Barney did not use fake identities. As they investigate the scientist's house they encounter some unusual things (bees, a tame dog that has gone wild, secrets from the dead scientist being voiced by the medium). The IMF team was planning to use some audio/visual trickery during a séance to try to convince the female scientist about the fake communications with her dead husband. However, the séance event did not work as planned and the team is left wondering if the spirit world does exist.

Zzzzzzilly

[neverenoughgold · 5/10 · 16 June 2021]

Not a big fan of the supernatural, and this episode shows why. Silly woman mouthing the words of a dead guy just doesn't cut it! No wonder Briggs sat this one out!

A "Mission" Like No Other

[Aldanoli · 4/10 · 8 May 2021]

"Zubrovnik's Ghost," an early outing for "Mission: Impossible," is a highly unusual, if not unique, episode. It was the first of several "spook" stories, but unlike all the others, in which anything supernatural was orchestrated by the Impossible Mission Force's trickery, this one displays an astonishing credulousness about séances, communication with the dead, and paranormal phenomena.

Of course, this was a *very* early show - it was only the 11th episode broadcast. One gets the sense that producer Bruce Geller approved the script before few other episodes, except perhaps the pilot, were available for screenwriter Robert Lewin to use as a guide. The plot is fairly straightforward: a scientist, Dr. Martha Richards (Beatrice Straight) is doing largely unspecified, but "important," work in Europe. A year earlier, her husband, Zubrovnik, died in a fire. Because she is already near the Iron Curtain, a foreign government is attempting to lure her across it to defect, using one of their operatives posing as a medium who can communicate with Dr. Richards' deceased husband.

Because this script was written so early, it still relied on one of Geller's weaker concepts: that team leader Dan Briggs would "shuffle the deck" of the agents each week, and only select some of the four series regulars for the mission. (Indeed, because Martin Landau had not signed a contract, despite frequent appearances, he was always billed as a "special guest star" this season.) This made the "dossier scene" more important than later on, and Season One had some interesting "slimmed down" teams - Briggs, Rollin, and Willy in "The Trial"; Cinnamon and Rollin in "A Spool there Was"; or just Rollin and a guest agent in "Elena."

In "Zubrovnik's Ghost," for the only time in the series, the "regular" team is only Rollin and Barney, plus Ariana, a psychic played by guest star Martine Bartlett, who spouts what seem to be genuine beliefs in "spirits." As in other episodes, we're told that Briggs can't participate because he's "too well known" by friends or foes, so Steven Hill draws a full paycheck for just the tape scene, dossier scene, and apartment scene. Hill's contractual right to leave the set for Jewish services early on Friday evenings was likely already causing headaches for the producers, and Geller undoubtedly was beginning to regret agreeing to this clause in Hill's contract.

So Rollin and Barney pose as paranormal investigators who are supposedly investigating whether Dr. Richards' late husband, Zubrovnik, is appearing to her through the supposed medium who works for The Other Side. They're permitted to quite openly rig a variety of "ghost detecting" gizmos in the room where a séance will take place. The only one of Barney's usual "magic gadgets" that the IMF plans to use is a black light projector that can make a ghostly face appear on command. But it soon becomes clear that the team has only the vaguest notion of how it will to use this device.

Indeed, this is the major problem with the whole episode. If this story had been produced later, perhaps when William Woodfield and Allan Balter were supervising the scripts, Barney would undoubtedly have hidden his black light projector among the devices to create the "spook effect" and thereby discredit the fake medium. But instead, the IMF seems to have gone on this mission without any carefully constructed plan, and most of what we see is Rollin and Barney (without much help from Ariana) making it up as they go along - at one point having to ask for a "do over" séance because they didn't have the projector set up the first time!

Tight plotting was usually "Mission's" greatest strength, so the IMF's abysmal planning here is disorienting. And speaking of disorienting, as the show moves on, the team increasingly relies on Ariana's "visions" and, most bizarrely, her apparent "possession" by the spirit of a dead beekeeper (don't ask) to figure out that Zubrovnik's death may have been faked. But later, Ariana suddenly tells Rollin and Barney she "senses" that he's "just been killed" - and they go along with this without complaint!

Perhaps even more remarkably, at one point she refuses to cooperate with Rollin's and Barney's plans for the second séance because it "offends" her to fake something supernatural. In this, she violates two cardinal rules of the show: the team's utter loyalty to one another, and their duty to the mission above all else.

So, to sum up: this episode relies on "tell us, don't show us" (because many important events happen off-screen); much of what does happens is attributed to the paranormal; and there is unprecedented dissension within the team. As a result, most of "Zubrovnik's Ghost" feels more like an episode of "Twilight Zone," or "One Step Beyond." What it doesn't feel like is an episode of "Mission: Impossible."

MARTHA!

[bearieq · 8/10 · 28 March 2022]

All the episodes in season one are Mission Impossible classics. As good as Jim Phelps was, Dan Briggs was better. It's unfortunate that Steven Hill was slowly written out of the series. He is barely in this one, but it's still a classic. The first time I saw the "MARTHA!" scene, I almost screamed.

CREEPY STUFF FOR THE MI TEAM, WITH A REAL LIFE SLANT

[tcchelsey · 10/10 · 26 June 2023]

The supernatural angle is played well in this early episode of the series, and with a superior cast. Veteran actress Beatrice Straight plays the widow of a distnguished scientist, who may be telepathically transmitting secret information? The catch here is that Soviet agents are listening... The IMF team travels to Austria to sort things out, but instead of the usual cut-throat situations, the team employs a medium, extremely well played by Martine Bartlett as Ariana.

Bartlett gives a stunning performance here (she should have had an Emmy nod), and actually is the whole show, attempting to communicate with a supposedly deceased soul, between thunder and lightning strikes.

This is late night, spooky stuff, well directed and acted. Bartlett, who worked in a number of tv shows and movies, including the iconic SPLENDER IN THE GRASS (1961) opposite Natalie Wood for Warner Brothers, shows her talent. She went on to appear in many cops shows, such as CANNON (three times), with WB aluminus William Conrad.

This is a neat episode for those who like a ghost story, with a pre-EXORCIST slant. This may also have been inspired by the real-life exploits of husband and wife team of spiritualists Ed and Lorraine Warren, who at the time were making headlines across the country. SEASON 1 EPISODE 11 1966 CBS dvd box set.