Barnard Collier, better known by the nickname of "Barney," was an IMF technologist who usually did the "dirty work" of the missions, usually in partnership with William "Willy" Armitage. The President of Collier Electronics, a NASA contractor, in civilian life, he was usually the builder and user of the specialized devices that the mission teams used during
missions. In the course of employing such devices, he often found himself down under a house or some such place. He was skilled at television signals,[1] listening devices,[2] model rocketry,[3] and pyrotechnics.[4]
Collier had been married and was a father. His son, Grant Collier (Phil Morris), was also a member of the I.M.F.
Personality[]
Barney had a close friendship with Jim Phelps (Peter Graves), and he believed unwaveringly in his colleagues. During "The Short Tail Spy," when Dan Briggs (Steven Hill) expressed concern that Cinnamon Carter (Barbara Bain) was in too deep, Barney immediately dismissed the notion.
M.O. (Method of operation)[]
When the Impossible Missions Force began to employ grand-scale confidence tricks on its mission targets as its modus operandi, it was Collier, most often working together with Armitage, who usually assembled the falsified environments (called "big stores" by confidence artists) against which backdrops the missions would be accomplished. One of his favorite such methods, first employed in "The Train Mission" and later in such missions as "Submarine(The Submarine Mission)," was "falsifications of journeys," by which mission targets were led to believe themselves in transit when they were actually neither moving nor going anywhere at all. Another favorite falsified environment of his was "(NOT) ending this world," first used in "The Photographer Mission," by which means mission targets were led to believe that Earth, as they knew it, had been almost totally destroyed and that they were among the handful of survivors of the (FALSIFIED) carnage.
Appearances[]
Actor Greg Morris played Barney throughout the original series run. He guest-starred in the episodes "The Condemned" and "The Golden Serpent" of the 1988 series.