Q is Overrated; Barney Collier is Underrated

Face it, Barney Collier is the be-all, end-all of engineers. As the electronics whiz in "Mission: Impossible" from 1966 - 1973, he was the US response to Great Britains "Q". But he was not simply Q's equal. Barney was the true master. Q was a pompous, beancounting REMF who was not worthy to work Barney's slide rule. Barney didn't put things together, hand them off to the team, and say, "Here ya go. And bring it back in pristine order!" He was right there in the field working them himself. For Q, field work was the exception, not the rule. We never saw Barney in a lab environment, unless it was a field-expedient one. I'll bet Barney didn't even own a lab coat. Q tended to make things that were complex; Barney understood that "complicated" meant "more things that can fail". Barney provided enough technology to solve a problem. Barney, being a field operative, understood all too well that sometimes things go wrong and that the primary law of fieldwork is Murphy's. And if something went wrong, he was there to fix it on the spot. Not sitting back in a lab chiding a field operator for not returning some piece of equipment.

There hasn't been anyone like him since. In the 1980s, "Revenge of the Nerds" premiered. It set back engineering as a respectable profession by two decades. "Nerds" reinforced the stereotype of engineers as spectacle-wearing, pocket-protectored social inepts. Greg Morris, the man who brought Collier to life and a truly underrated actor, refused to play stereotypes. Of any kind. After "M:I", he would fall into obscurity because he refused to play stereotypical black roles. As an engineer, he never played a stereotypical technology buff. He looked just as comfortable in a suit with cufflinks as he did in dirt-covered coveralls. He knew and practiced analog and digital circuit design, electromagnetics, chemistry, physics, and power engineering. But he had no problem with social occasions. I'll bet he knew wines as well as he knew Ohm's law.

You may argue that there are others. MacGyver, for example. He's a tree-hugging hippy liberal, so far as I'm concerned. Doesn't want to pick up a gun? Great. Tell that to a man running at you firing a weapon. Barney never had a problem pulling the trigger if he had to. And sometimes, he did. Put it this way, who would you rather have at your side if you're doing an op? Barney? Or MacGyver?

I thought so.