"Mattie + Ethan + Fidelity" - MacGvyer S03E10

I hope you like Meredith Eaton. Because as you might gather from the title, there's a lot of Matty--and thus Meredith Eaton--in "Matty + Ethan + Fidelity".

Which is fine with me. I like Meredith Eaton. She's the best actor on the show, she's attractive and talented and manages to come across as both hard-as-nails and sympathetic. It's hard to imagine her predecessor, Sandrine Holt, pulling off half of what Eaton does so effortlessly. No offense to Ms. Holt's legions of fans.

But even I got kind of tired of all the longing and forlorn looks that Ms. Eaton did for the camera. And it's not like the episode gives her anything to do. She doesn't grab a gun and blow away a few S-Company goons. She doesn't learn from Mac and MacGyvers a few things. Matty... sits in the van and backseat coaches the team. And looks longing and forlorn. A lot. And shoots one guy.

It's also the Christmas episode. But other than some scenes of California in Christmas lights, and Wilt the Stilted blathering on about his Christmas pastrami, that's all there is for Christmas. Which is fine, but it makes you wonder why they bothered.

So what is this delightful mix of CIA undercover shenanigans and Christmas pastrami? Glad you asked. Matty meets with some CIA guy who slips her a flashdrive. She soon calls the team in and this is where we get the bit about the Christmas pastrami. Fortunately, Wilt gets cuts off before he can explain. Maybe I mean "unfortunately", because I smell "running gag of never explain the pastrami" heading for us at light speed.

Matty informs the team she used to have a husband, Ethan (Brendan Hines), but he went undercover two years ago and fell off the radar. Now Samir Verma (Sendhil Ramurthy) is a heroin smuggler who has been imprisoned, and knows Ethan is a mole. He's loudly announcing to any surveillance cameras in sight he knows and will reveal his knowledge unless the CIA breaks him out of prison. The CIA thinks Ethan has turned so they won't help Samir. The guy at the beginning presumably disagrees with this, so he slipped Matty the information about Samir.

Samir is being held in a prison in Croatia, so the team heads there and breaks him out. And this is where the mission is so-standard-spy-stuff and non-MacGyvery that I sometimes wonder why I'm watching the show. It's an okay breakout sequence, but nothing the Mission: Impossible teams haven't done. It just takes them longer because they have an hour to fill.

So Mac slips in and gives Samir a poison pill. He doesn't MacGyver some kind of poison or something to make it look like Samir is dying: he just gives him a standard spy poison pill. Jack, Wilt, and Leanna are posing as ambulance drivers, whisk him away, and Mac rides out on the underside of the ambulance. Congratulations: the creative team has reduced Mac to your basic spy.

Matty pressures Samir into giving up Ethan's location. He's also already hinted to S-Company (i.e., the bad guys) they have a CIA mole, so they're close to putting together Ethan and Samir had contact, so Ethan is the mole. This doesn't seem very smart on Samir's part: he didn't think S-Company could connect the dots?

The team is then off to Cyprus, where Ethan is leading an S-Company team break-in at a biotech firm. For what, we never find out. Mac goes in, gets Ethan out, but has to go back to save a janitor. Ethan goes back and saves Mac from the S-Company goons that are going to kill him. They take him out, but the team then rescues him. Or at least Jack and Leanna (Reign Edwards) do, thanks to some gun play.

However, S-Company now knows Ethan is a traitor. So they head to his spacious country home and Ethan reveals to Matty he has a family, so the team heads after them. There's a big ole fight: Jack fights the guy cutting into the safe room where the mother and daughter are hiding. The guy is wearing a Kevlar vest underneath his jacket (why?), so he and Jack have a hand-to-hand fight. Mac, Leanna, and Ethan get some licks in on the other goons. Wilt and Riley are flying in the Phoenix plane, doing jack-diddly. Matty is doing who knows what.

Once the goons are either dead or unconscious, Mac MacGyvers a way into the safe room . Ethan is reunited with his family, and Matty looks longing and forlorn.

Back at Phoenix, Matty is still looking longing and forlorn. Have I mentioned she does that a lot? I did? Good. She thanks Mac for saving the janitor (the Janitor's Union thanks you, MacGyver creative team!), and then she has a chat with Ethan. Ethan lays the usual spiel on her about how he went undercover and his fake family became his real family, and we find out in the last flashback that Matty encouraged Ethan to go on the assignment figuring they'd have the rest of their lives together.

And yes, there have been flashbacks throughout the episode showing Matty in her younger days, how she and Ethan met when he rescued her, how they got married but kept their relationship secret from the CIA, and Ethan's interest in disco music.

At the end, Matty still looks longing and forlorn. Jack gives her a big ole hug and says the team is her family, and this is one of the better episodes for George Eads. Yes, Jack says some stupid things. But at least he and writer Andrew Karlsruher tone it down a bit, and Eads tosses in an occasional subtle bit of acting that indicates that it's an act. Well, mostly an act. So if it's the episode that Eads has to go out on, at least it's a good one for him.

The problem, if you consider it a problem, is that the entire episode is spy stuff. And fighting stuff. And shooting stuff. What little personality MacGyver has as a unique show, isn't on display here. There are little bits of personality as Mac admits Matty has been going through the same thing with her husband that Mac went through with his father. Sorta. Kinda. But it seems tossed-in.

Why Leanna and Wilt are there, I have no idea. Wilt does absolutely nothing, and Leanna provides more violence to backup Jack with his violence. Yay, gun violence! Riley at least hacks a prison computer and does some telephone-tracing stuff, which Wilt is supposedly helping with, but I suspect he's playing Space Invaders when no one is looking. He also makes a fake phone call to Ethan to tell him they're there, but anyone on the team could have done that.

I suppose Leanna is there to remind us she's on the show, and so she can step in as the gun-and-fight person once George Eads leaves. Which is presumably after the holiday break, which means tonight was the last episode before Christmas. So presumably the show will be back in January, with or without Eads. So we get Wilt and Leanna, but lose Jack? Life can be unfair sometimes.

And in the Christmas spirit, I just want to note that although I give the character of Wilt a lot of grief, I have nothing against actor Justin Hires, who plays Wilt. I'm sure Hires is great on Rush Hour and whatever else he does. But his character on MacGyver stinks on ice. But Hires does what he can do with him: all God's children gotta eat, and I'm sure he does what they pay him to do.

So overall, "Matty" was an okay episode if you wanted to learn more about Matty's background. And Ms. Eaton does a good job with all of it, in the past and present. But that's a pretty low bar. It seems like an episode that was made to a checklist. "It's our last episode before Christmas, so let's throw in some Christmas stuff. We have to resolve the whole Matty/Ethan thing. We have to give Eads a decent episode to go out on. Got all that? Good. Write her down and let's get this one in the can."

But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. What do you think?

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And a Merry Christmas to all of you at home! I'm sure I'll be doing reviews over the holidays. We've got the CWVerse Elseworld crossovers, and the mid-season finales for a few more shows. And the Who's Year Eve Special. And I always do a Christmas retro review or two. TV, like crime, never sleeps.