Mission: Impossible

About this order

What's on this list

All 171 episodes of the original CBS series, 1966 to 1973; all 35 of the ABC revival, 1988 to 1990; and the eight films, from 1996 to The Final Reckoning in 2025. Two hundred and fourteen entries.

The two series are dated the same way and named apart

Both are called Mission: Impossible and both number their seasons from 1, so they are labelled by the year they started. That is not decoration: the deep links on every page here are built from series, season and episode, so an unsuffixed pair would collide on all 35 of the revival's rows and send half of them to the wrong place.

Nothing here needs a running order, and that is unusual

Most pages on this site exist because two things went out on the same night and somebody has to say which came first. This one has no such night. The two series are fifteen years apart; neither ever ran a double bill; every two-parter went out a week apart rather than as one evening; and the films are one date each. Every entry sits alone on its day.

The broadcast slots are recorded anyway, because they are the sort of thing that becomes hard to find later. The original moved four times: Saturdays at nine, then half past eight, then Sundays at ten for three seasons, then Saturdays at half past seven, then ten, then Fridays at eight for the last half-season. One episode ignores the pattern entirely — The Merchant, the fifth-season finale, went out on a Wednesday in March 1971.

The films are dated to the first American ticket

Seven of the eight carry their wide opening. Ghost Protocol carries 16 December 2011, the start of its IMAX run, five days before the wide release — that was a real release to a paying audience, and this site orders by what an audience could first see rather than by what the studio called the launch.

Four of them opened abroad before they opened in America: the third film by two days, Ghost Protocol by seven against its wide date, Dead Reckoning by four and The Final Reckoning by six. Not one of those gaps reorders a single row, because nothing else in the franchise came out inside any of them, so the American date stands and the foreign openings are recorded against the series instead. Premieres are not releases and are not used, which includes The Final Reckoning's out-of-competition screening at Cannes nine days before anyone could buy a ticket to it.

Dead Reckoning Part One keeps the title it was released under. Paramount quietly dropped the Part One in January 2024, when the second film stopped being Part Two, and its own site now returns nothing for the old address — but Wikipedia, IMDb and Box Office Mojo all still carry it, and it is what was on the poster in July 2023.

No episode is part of a cross-series arc, and seven carry a mark

The story-arc icon appears nowhere on this page, and that is a result rather than an omission. The two series and the films reference each other; none of them runs a story through the other. Seven rows carry a mark, all of them in the revival, and every one of them is either a remade script or a returning face.

The revival is partly a remake, and the flags say which parts

The 1988 series was made in Australia during the writers' strike, which meant no new scripts could be commissioned. The producers went to the Paramount vault instead, and several episodes are the 1960s ones remade almost line for line — including the premiere. Two of the original writers took their names off the results and are credited under pseudonyms.

Those episodes carry the reference icon, with the original and its date in the note, because a viewer who has just watched the first series will recognise them and deserves to know why. Where a returning character appears the guest icon is on the row as well.

Peter Graves came back as Jim Phelps for all 35 episodes, the only regular to carry over, so he is treated as a lead rather than as a guest — the same line this site draws on every franchise where the star transfers. Greg Morris returns as Barney Collier twice, and the revival makes him the father of its own team member, played by Greg Morris's son. Lynda Day George returns once.

What the films borrow, and what they do not

Jim Phelps in the 1996 film is the same Jim Phelps, which is why the casting caused the row it did: Peter Graves was offered the part and turned it down on learning the character would be unmasked as a traitor, and Greg Morris is reported to have walked out of the cinema. Beyond him, no character from either series has ever appeared in a film.

Two later films reach back deliberately as well — Rogue Nation restages the 1966 pilot's vinyl briefing, the only episode where the instructions came on a record rather than a tape, and The Final Reckoning makes one of its characters Jim Phelps's son. Neither carries an icon, because no film on this site does: a film is a cross-over of a sort by its nature, so flagging them would say nothing. They are here in the prose instead.

Everything else the films inherit — the theme, the self-destructing briefing, the IMF itself — is format rather than story, and format is not a cross-over. If it were, every row here would carry an icon and the column would mean nothing.

What is missing, and why it is not backlog

The fan wiki column is empty on all 214 rows. That is a finding rather than an unfinished job: missionimpossible.fandom.com carries 68 episode articles out of 206 — all of the first two seasons, seven of the third, one of the fourth, none of the fifth — and nothing at all for the 1988 revival, whose series page has no episode list on it. What it does have is filed under bare titles disambiguated by year only when two collide, with multi-parters written as "Old Man Out - PART 1", which no rule could match against the titles here. The wiki is overwhelmingly about the films.

Wikipedia has no article for any individual episode of either series either, so every episode row links its own row on the list article rather than an article of its own.

One count is disputed and worth knowing about. Patrick J. White's Complete Mission: Impossible Dossier makes it 168 episodes, not 171, by treating each half of Old Man Out, The Slave and The Council as one production. This page follows Wikipedia's 171 — they were three separate broadcasts, and broadcasts are what this site counts — but Wikipedia's own footnote flags the disagreement, so it is not a settled number.