Kate Capshaw plays a schoolteacher and suburban housewife who happens to be an ex-spy. Nobody knows of Capshaw's previous espionage activities, least of all her somewhat obtuse husband Cliff De Young. When Capshaw's ex-lover Jeroen Krabbe, an intimate of Castro, lands in a Cuban prison, she is swept back into the spy business, leaving her nonplussed hubby in the dust.

After eight months of hyper-sleep, when Christopher 'Chris' McNiel (Jason London) and Theta Kaplan (Missy Crider) of a Mars cargo transport ship the Solar System Shipping Vessel No.17 (Triple S-17) awaken, they find out something has gone terribly wrong. They've woken up from hyper-sleep almost ten months past their scheduled time, find the ship's internals badly damaged, off course and almost no fuel. What's more, it's discovered the first shift killed each other. As the plot unfolds, something truly evil is discovered on board - an alien biological life form which can psychologically manipulate humans.

Based on a 1924 mystery novel by Agatha Christie, The Man in the Brown Suit was the eighth of Warner Bros. Television's Christie-inspired TV movies. Stephanie Zimbalist stars as an American tourist in Cairo (with Spain standing in for Egypt). She runs across a mysterious murder, and an odd encounter with a stranger; all this occurs even before she sets foot on a luxury liner with an all-suspect passenger manifest. It is established that the murderer, who is after a cache of valuable diamonds, is an internationally notorious criminal--but which one of the passengers is he (or she)? Maybe the villain romantic lead Simon Dutton, the "man in the brown suit" of the title...but don't discount such special guest suspects as Rue McClanahan and Tony Randall.