Choices - MacGyver

"So... basically we're doing extraordinary rendition now?"

MacGyver; you have failed this blog.

Yeah, so after three episodes I'm calling time on MacGyver. I might watch a few more episodes if there's nothing else grabbing me, but… It's just not very good, and certainly not sharp enough to contend with the current field. Part of it is the aforementioned attempt to be too much like the original, and part is that I just don't remember the original Mac doing quite so much official government violation of sovereign borders. Most of the time he was just doing his thing and had to help someone out, or stumbled on terrorists while back packing. This new Mac... he's all about the illegal, unethical sanctioned on the QT abduction of foreign nationals from extra-territorial locations.

MacGyver - 'Metal Saw'(1)

"My name is Angus MacGyver; I think I'm basically committing one, maybe
two acts of war here."

We open the second episode of the MacGyver reboot with Mac distracted by his ex-girlfriend's escape from FBI custody... while fleeing from North Korean military forces in a crudely armoured truck which appears to have lost none of its acceleration and handling for having half a tonne of steel plate bolted to the sides, and making what appear to be impact detonated Molotov cocktails. Given that he identifies himself as a government agent at the border while handing over aq captive from the trunk of the car, I'm pretty sure he's just been upgraded from covert operative to cassus bellum. Also, huzzah for the violation of foreign sovereignty!

Le sigh.

Anyway, the main mission of the week involves violating the sovereign territory of Venezuela(2), for an adventure I call 'The Fracas in Caracas'. A CIA operative has assembled a dossier on a drug cartel boss, but has been captured before handing it off. The agent in question, Sarah, knew Jack back in his days at the Farm(3), and is of course the lost love of his life. The mission is to rescue her, retrieve the dossier, and exfiltrate.

Amy Acker is wasted on this material.

They manage to rescue Sarah, thanks to a pair of highly unlikely home-made night vision glasses - but hey, that's what we're here for, right? - and a blackout. Sarah refuses to leave, however, since if the cartel boss can't find her and recover the dossier, he'll be in the wind before the DEA can violate Venezuelan sovereignty to arrest him. Naturally the team won't let her go it alone. Mac creates a distraction by setting up a set of mirrors and lenses to burn through an ammo crate like a laser and set off all the powder and they nab their man. Riley tries to send the dossier to the boss lady via dialup. Cartel informants tip off their bosses, but fortunately boss lady turns up in the nick of time to keep her from getting ventilated(4).

Jack stops Sarah executing the cartel boss and they all go home for tea and crumpets, and to meet Sarah's fiance, because fuck you Jack and no woman feels as deeply or as lastingly as a man.

In ongoing personal plot territory, Riley gets Mac's creeper roommate to pretend to be her boyfriend and convince her parole officer that her life is stable and that she hasn't been granted parole on condition that she stay in LA and not use computers in order to be an international hacker, in exchange for one digit of her phone number each week. Mac sits obsessively in Nikki's apartment until he finds a hidden compartment behind an electrical outlet that the CIA somehow missed, where he finds a passport for her alias(5).

I think that ultimately MacGyver's problem is that it is too much like the show that it is remaking. It feels old-fashioned in its gun-ho, globetrotting, covert enforcement of American hegemony, and in its portrayal of female characters and male/female relationships. The original was probably as bad, but it at least had the excuse of being actually made in the 80s. The remake has all the problems of the 80s, without the benefit of genuine, nostalgic charm. The actors are decent enough, but the characters aren't all that likable, again because they are of an earlier age, when men were men and felt deeply without ever showing it, and women could move on because all their emotion was on the surface and even the tough ones got what they wanted through wiles. Riley is definitely wily, and I think we're supposed to cheer for her putting one over on her parole officer. Meanwhile, Mac and Jack shoot hoops to bury their hurt, for they are men. A few lines suggest that they are aware that they are writing problematically old-fashioned characters, but honestly that just makes it worse. It's like Sharknado presenting a shitty movie and saying 'it's okay, because we know it's shitty.'

(1) Each episode - apart from the pilot - is named after one of the attachments on a Swiss Army Knife. I'm looking forward to 'That Thing for Getting Stones Out of Horses' Hooves'. Also, this may be the cleverest thing about the series, which is a bit sad.
(2) Which barely even counts as a separate country, right? It's all America.
(3) CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
(4) I'm really not sure how. Reilly booked 8 hours internet time, the estimated duration of the upload, and was still in the internet cafe when the goons and boss lady arrived within seconds of one another. The direct commercial flight time from LA to Caracas is 7 hours 44 minutes. Assume she shaved a couple of hours off this using a fast private plane, she still needs to get to the plane, board, get off at the other end, get out of the airport with a gun (so probably somewhere well away from Caracas itself) and get to the internet cafe. And Riley claimed that she'd masked her IP or something, so presumably she had to try all of the internet cafes looking for the right one.
(5) Although... presumably not the one she'd be using, right?

MacGyver - 'The Rising'

However cool these guys are, clearly they don't want to get that stuff on their
clothes.

Do you remember MacGyver? If you don't, congratulations; you're young, enjoy it while it lasts. Running from 1985-1992, with a couple of TV movies in 1994, it was an adventure show starring the pre-Stargate Richard Dean Anderson as Angus MacGyver, a gun-averse secret agent and one-man A-Team, who would resolve situations by using available materials to create impromptu tools and weapons with the aid of his trusty Swiss Army knife and roll of duct tape. It was good fun, and it ran for seven years, and the character came back to recover the lost treasure of Atlantis(1) and shut down a British-based nuclear arms industry run by the perfect neighbour from Ever-Decreasing Circles(2).

Anyway, in this age of remakes and reboots, someone decided that we don't have enough Anguses on TV these days, and so we have ex-X-Man Lucas Till taking up Mac's Swiss Army knife and leather jacket, accompanied by ex-Delta Force buddy Jack and hacker with a heart of gold Riley, as he sets out to avenge the murder of his girlfriend and previous hacker, Nikki by ex-Wimbledon midfielder Vinnie Jones in the cold open. Mac's team is part - or possibly all - of super-secret clandestine division the DXS, which masquerades as a 'think tank' and sounds like a courier service. Jack hits things and Riley hacks, while Mac makes things out of other things. To help us along, the show's twist on the formula is that Mac's process is explicated not just through voice over but through screen captions identifying the useful things that he sees.

Either that or he suffers from a bizarre form of synaesthesia in which he literally sees the names of things as labels. It's not entirely clear. Either way, it's not as cool as Cassandra's math-vision in The Librarians.

Picking a handcuff lock with a paper clip is probably really hard, but on T it's
pretty old hat.

'The Rising' sees Mac and his team trying to recover a biological warfare agent that was stolen from them after they stole it, presumably from bad people, although really all we know is that they appeared to be Italian. The shock twist is that Nikki turns out to be the mastermind (and not dead.) They prevent the release of the virus via IED, but the whole thing brings the agency into disrepute, leading to the rebranding of the DXS as the Phoenix Foundation. Nikki herself is arrested, but escapes thanks to Mac teaching her to pick a handcuff lock with a hair grip. Ah, the hazy flashbacks of romance.

So that's MacGyver 2016. Is it good? Not very. Is it bad? Not really. The cast seem likable enough, but I guess we'll find out if the show as a whole has legs. If it does, no doubt they will be usefully labelled.

(1) Spoilers: The real treasure was knowledge.
(2) Rose's dad in Downton Abbey for those too young and hip (or not-British) to know Ever Decreasing Circle.

If I Were MacGyver

Watching the MacGyver reboot, I realised that there are a lot of paperclips in my life...