MacGyver is back with a Fifth Season and we’ve got the review for the DVD set all ready for ya’. How good is it? Is it worth picking up? For true fans of the show the answer is yes, but for the casual observer I don’t think there’s enough here. Read on…
MacGyver – Season Five
2 & 1/2 Stars
I was never a big MacGyver fan. I like the premise (man without gun can invent anything) and how the series was based on the hero outwitting and outsmarting his enemies rather than just punching them or shooting them. The problem I have with the show is the writing is uneven and too many of the episodes have “important messages” hidden in them.
For example in just this one season MacGyver takes on the logging industry, poachers, brings peace to Eastern Europe, teaches a girl to talk to her father, highlights the health problems and the need for medicine and medical funding in Bangkok and the freedom movement in China, learns the importance of jury duty, inspires and uninspired kid, and rediscovers the meaning of Christmas. You can almost hear the announcer the week before “next week on a very special MacGyver.”
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MacGyver (Richard Dean Anderson) is a special agent for The Foundation for Law and Government The Phoenix Foundation, a private organization interested in keeping the peace, solving crimes, and helping those less fortunate. MacGyver is called on to perform all sorts of missions by his boss Devon Miles Pete Thonton (Dana Elcar, the only other regular cast member in every episode) including finding buried treasure and solving any kind of problem with only his brain and ingenuity; MacGyver never uses a gun.
The series is most remembered for MacGyver’s split second inventions and this year has more than it’s share including a plane built from bamboo poles, garbage bags and a cement mixer. His missions this season range from teaching high school science to fighting Nazis to brokering peace states between two warring nations. Wow, this guy really can do it all! One of the problems with the series is MacGyver never has a set job description; while this allows for the writers to do an infinite number of different episodes the show suffers from a lack of continuity and grove you expect from a show in its fifth year. Why is the same agent spending time doing all these different missions including many which could be done by someone with far less skill and importance? Well at least it keeps him busy.
Other highlights of this season include two episodes where MacGyver helps out a young girl (Mayim Bialik, TV’s Blossom), one where he reunites his longtime friend Jesse Colton (Richard Lawson) with the kid he fathered during Vietnam, a dream episode that takes place during the old west, MacGyver’s arch-nemesis Murdoc (Michael Des Barres) returns for an episode looking for help, and a two episode series opener that centers around a hidden treasure that includes a medieval laser.
Longtime fans of the show will surely want to add this set to their collection. Casual viewers may want to check it out, but it was a little too uneven and too preachy for my tastes. There are some good episodes but when the show starts moralizing and teaching everyone a lesson it gets a little too hard to swallow. It might be a better show for younger audiences and makes an okay “good for the whole family” type of show. I just wish it was a little more consistent in both the writing and storytelling and the show didn’t try so hard to shove a message down your throat every other episode.