The Miracle

This is a nice episode. We get to see Joe Don Baker and Billy Dee Williams as bad guys, and they both are excellent, as is Ron Feinberg as the head bad guy. Lynda is a knockout, as always, and gets a good number of scenes, which will please her fans! Peter Graves, Greg Morris and Peter Lupus do their usual fine jobs. The other reviewer makes some good points. Our MI force is indeed acting more like a super-cop group than CIA-like operatives, but the series producers had decided to focus on USA-set stories for the final two seasons, so we don't get much of the foreign espionage angle in these two final seasons. Check out, as always, the 1970's fashions in clothes, cars and apartments. I was around then and remember it all well! I don't remember this episode from the original run, must have missed it. Good action, pacing and visuals. Some MI episodes fall kind of flat, a few are even duds, but this one holds your interest. A good one, worth your time.

Kearny (Joe Don Baker) is a thug who works as a hitman and fixer for a big time drug dealer. The team plans on getting Kearny and his boss to fight each other...and, of course, the method is VERY complicated. First, a rival drug lord (Jim Phelps) is trying to horn in on the drug territory. Second, Kearny is made to think he's been shot in the heart and has had a heart transplant! And, they then try to convince him his erratic behavior is due to the doner...as the 'new heart' apparently has a mind of its own! As I said, it's really a complicated plan...as well as a strange one.

Like too many mob episodes, you can't help but wonder why the plan is so complicated or even if the team is needed. After all, couldn't the FBI or other law enforcement personnel handle this? And, what about all those evil enemy nations...why have they suddenly stopped being a problem in seasons 6 and 7? Not a terrible episode but one that just is a bit silly and tough to believe...even for this series.

Only two Syndicate men know where $8 mil in heroin will be arriving - narcotics dealer Alvin Taylor and his executioner, Frank Kearney (Joe Don Baker). When Jim approaches Kearney to make a deal and he refuses, Willie ""shoots"" Kearney - Barney as a surgeon then operates providing a heart transplant and covertly uses drugs and hypnotism to make Kearney mild-mannered.

Later, Kearney can't bring himself to shoot Jim and hears on the radio about people taking on the traits of persons they received organs from - with the aid of new girlfriend, the church-hating Kearney finds out the man who donated a heart was a priest!

Realizing he can't do his job and the Syndicate will wipe him out, Kearney leads Casey and the rest of the team to the beach where the heroin drop occurs, and the syndicate arrive there too.

Has intriguing idea regarding organs of another person given to a patient and takes on the character of that person, and Joe Don Baker is very good in his role. Not too striking, but there's some moments of suspense.