Fashion spasm! Mission: Impossible - Crack-Up

Crack-Up is a pretty good Season 7 episode. The premise is interesting – Peter Cordel is a contract killer, and a particularly good one. The IMF are contracted to gain evidence of his killings, and also to discover the identity of his Syndicate boss. Cordel is not only a killer, but also a genius, and a member of a chess club, where Jim, in the guise of a psychiatrist and with the help of Barney’s chess-computer (a device we’ve seen before), challenges him to a match. Jim doses Cordel with a drug which will make him susceptible to hypnotic suggestion, and the team proceed to convince Cordel that his urge to kill has got out of control, leading him to murder on the spur of the moment for no real reason.

The purpose of this blog entry, however, is fashion! Season six and seven bring us some pretty groovy 70s fashions, and Jim’s jacket at the pickup deserves internet recognition.

Jim attempts to look studious while wearing sofa upholstery. Well done, Jim!

Apparently large checks were in in ’72. How Jim thinks he can pull off an apparent knowledge of the necessary fuel mix for a rather lovely motorbike in that jacket and purple-tinted rectangular shades is a mystery. We can only believe that Jim isn’t so good at choosing his clothes at the early hours he’s required to go and pick up the tape, or wasn’t told that he’d have to talk to a hairy biker about fuel mixtures.


Later, fully awake and in ingenious-genius mode, Jim pulls it all back in a slick grey suit reminiscent of the earlier days of Mission. Willy’s looking pretty good too in a heavy suit jacket that looks as if it may be wool.

In his apartment, Jim cannot look anything but chique. It's such a cool-ass apartment anyone would look chique, and no bad suits are allowed through the door.

During the mission, as a crack chess player and psychiatrist he is equally sensible, even down to the thick-rimmed glasses through which he hears his cues from Barney and his chess-computer. The later suit here particularly sets off his eyes.

This photos don't exactly focus on the suits, but they do focus on the dreamy, dreamy eyes.

This concludes our fashion lesson for today… I won’t pretend this has been an incisive episode critique. It hasn’t.