When this series originally aired, I remember watching it with my father. I remember being enthralled by the gadgets.
Now that the series is available on DVD, in two sets, it was a pleasure to watch through the whole thing.
As an adult, I'm much more able to see the weaknesses the show had, but I also can appreciate some of the more responsible approaches that the show had, especially in the sense of being a largely peaceful team.
The budget isn't great. Some sequences appear to have been shot on video. Several episodes use stock footage, especially later ones.
The cast is remarkably attractive.
The area where the show falters is later in the first season, and during much of the second. The writing got lazy. The plots got more linear, more predictable. And in some cases, the gimmick for the episode got in the way of making a decent plot.
Another thing that gradually got on my nerves was the laziness in writing the opening scenes, when Phelps retrieves the mission. In many of these, he winds up retrieving the disc, and watching it, in a place much more public than usual. In one of them, he watches it on an amusement park ride, and we see people walking around in the background. Hardly a secure location.
I've been watching episodes from the original series, and while the writing was more careful, and better plotted, the biggest improvement that the 88 Mission Impossible had was the pacing. The episodes felt like they moved along very quickly.
This series is entirely worth watching. But, especially with the reliance on stock footage, the show looks far more dated than it should.
