Mission: Impossible -- Episode 34: The Sands of Seth

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Synopsis in 3 sentences or less:

Selim, the head of an Egyptian museum, is killing Egypt's moderate leaders in the hopes of proclaiming himself Pharaoh and returning Egypt to the glory of its ancient past.  He worships Seth, an Egyptian god of chaos and death.  Jim and Shannon get close to Selim by pretending to be a father-daughter archaeology team on the verge of a big discovery and with Max playing the part of the aggrieved subordinate.

Memorable Quote:
The Pharaohs are not dead.  They are only sleeping.  ~Selim

Highlight:
The set design was impressive, as was the temple destruction at the end.

Lowlight:

The premise of a museum curator wanting to become ruler and take the country back 3000 years was ridiculous enough, but it was made worse by the actor playing him with a cartoonish, unmodulated rage.

Other thoughts, observations, and questions I didn’t ask when I was in fourth grade:

• No one ever explains how the mummy strangler in the opening is able to withstand bullets being fired into his body. 
• Is this the first time that the disk narrator in the beginning says "good afternoon" instead of "good morning?"
• If Selim is a museum curator whose life's passion is Ancient Egypt, wouldn't he be able to tell that the scroll was created in one minute on a color printer?
• If the team's end goal was just to take out Selim, they could have tranquilized him at any time and removed him from the country.
• I wasn't clear as to how Jim, Grant, and Shannon get the rays of light to shine brightly in the temple for the first time ever, according to Grant.  Is it just because Jim and Shannon polished the reflector?
• The devotees of Seth sure turn on Selim with haste at the end. 

Final Analysis:

Our last episode!  I was I could say we were going out with a bang, but it's more like a whimper.  I liked the setting, but overall the episode was a chore to get through and had a heavy dose of ridiculousness.  Ranking it 26 out of 34.

So that brings me to the end of the series.  I didn't know what to expect going into it since I had only seen the episodes once when I was young, and overall I was disappointed.  There was little to no character development in the series, and that might have been ok if the plots compensated with a high degree of action or cleverness, but largely they did not.

I thought the actors were fine -- sometimes Penghlis overacted and Markwell (Casey) was not very charismatic, and Graves often had the energy of a pencil -- but they were still likable and worked well as a team.  The set designs and explosive work was impressive (perhaps due to filming in Australia and saving money), and the crew did a good job of convincingly creating the look of many different locales.  The second season was at least slowly moving in the right direction, and maybe the series could have been saved with a more favorable time slot. Neverthless, I'm glad I tackled the project, and next up I'll review MI 3, 4, and 5.