#135: Honest Abe

Season: 7

Synopsis in 3 sentences or less:

MacGyver arrives in a small town to attend a college friend’s son’s bar mitzvah.  The boy’s grandfather, Abe, kidnaps MacGyver and takes him to a Caribbean island in a stealth helicopter in the hope of taking the island’s dictator back to the United States.  MacGyver and Abe narrowly escape a hanging and successfully return with the dictator in time for the bar mitzvah.   

Memorable Quote:

"It’s kind of complicated." ~Abe

Highlight: 

The only thing even remotely redeemable about this episode is MacGyver’s escape from the imminent hanging, and it’s actually a pretty cool escape.  As MacGyver is standing on the platform about to be hanged, he asks to borrow a mirror so he can have one last shave.  "If I’m gonna meet my maker, I want to be presentable," he says.  While shaving, he uses the mirror to reflect the sunlight onto the stealth helicopter’s sensor in a morse code pattern that activates the emission of knockout gas.  

Lowlight: 

So many terrible characters to pick from, but I’ll go with Perigot, the dictator.  You have to see him to believe him, though I don’t recommend seeing him, unless you want to see a Latin American dictator who is jovial, silly, French, wears a bright white suit, and does magic tricks.  He speaks English in a goofy accent while awkwardly throwing in little French phrases like "c’est la vie" and "qu’est que c’est."  

Best MacGyverism: 

Covered above in the highlight.  Let’s add it to the big board.    

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

• We're get off to a bad start when Ben Stein appears as a hired gun named Major Sneed.  "BN for Mister Harding," he says.  “BN?” another asks.  “Bad News,” Sneed responds.  Just like this episode.  
• In the next scene, we meet MacGyver’s friend’s son Jeffrey.  He’s turning 13 but looks like an offensive lineman for the Packers.  There’s no listed age for the actor on IMDB but he looks more like 20. 
• Go ahead and reread the synopsis again.  What?  What were they thinking?  And this was a season premiere?
• The Italian-American character (more on him later) seems like a bad guy to us in the beginning but is later revealed to be undercover.  That doesn’t stop him from shooting at MacGyver and Abe as they are driving away in broad daylight.  What’s another plot hole along this bumpy road?
• There’s nothing worse than weird, over-the-top characters that aren’t funny.  On the last season of Numb3rs, another show I liked, they often similarly resorted to zany personas, a sure sign that a show is on its last legs.  This episode has a surplus of goofy, terrible characters:
• The Italian-American undercover agent.  He talks in normal English except when he throws in little phrases like andiamo, paisano, and va bene.  Such as, "Posing as an fbi agent?  Great scamarino, va bene."
• Ben Stein doing his dry Bueller persona as Major Sneed. 
• The town sheriff as the dumb southern lawman.  Fortunately his screen time is minimal.
• Abe, an obnoxiously annoying character who pretends to be so stupid that it’s not believable or amusing.
• Last but not least, the French dictator, covered above in the lowlight.  Fortunately, Time Winters (the actor) will get a chance to play a much better character, Merlin, in "Good Knight MacGyver."  Here's a conversation I did with Time where we talked about this episode.

Final Analysis:
Keep in mind that I love MacGyver, so I don’t lightly throw around words like embarrassment, train wreck, and catastrophe, but in reality Chernobyl was less of a disaster.  At least it has one good highlight which is more than The Mountain of Youth could say – that’s why it’s one spot higher. 

Fortunately we can now move on from the two complete disaster episodes.  Next up, #134, which is only a partial disaster.