"Fence + Suitcase + Americium- 241" - MacGyver S03E12 Review

"With a bit of a mind flip, you're into the time slip..."

Wait, what the heck? Last week Jack was joking and jiving with the rest of the team. Or at least Mac, as the two of them were locked up in a fallout bunker by a revenge-seeking captor. And Wilt had asked Leanna to move in with him and she accepted.

But this week in "Fence + Suitcase + Americium-241", Jack is nowhere to be found, and an unseen Leanna is having "second thoughts" about moving in with Wilt (good for her!). So Mac is making Wilt a consolation dinner. Although he's not making mac n' cheese.

There is a vague reference to Wilt sleeper-holding a guard unconscious and Riley saying Jack would be proud of him. Whether that means Jack died, or is on a beach drinking mai-tais, or binging on Bruce Willis movies somewhere, writer Brian Durkin leaves it deliberately unspecified. I assume it's all part of the "how will Jack leave the show" game the creative team has to play since *spoiler alert* George Eads is leaving MacGyver.

So, since we don't know Jack this week, what do we get? Another one of those opening-tag DIYs. I suppose this one is slightly warranted, since it features Mac and Wilt being interrogated by some terrorists. And thus it shows how the "new" partnership works. Which is... just the same as the old Mac + Jack partnership. Wilt grabs a grenade off of the lead terrorist's vest, pulls the pin, drops the pin down a drain, and Mac uses a discarded toothpick to substitute as a pin long enough for them to get out before the grenade explodes. Why they can't throw the grenade out a window, or out into the hallway and then close the door, I don't know.

Like the vast majority of MacGyver DIYs, the events that happen here go down the memory hole and are never referenced again. Instead, the Jack-less Team MacGyver has to impersonate a team of thieves after the real team of thieves is captured during a break-in. The leader of the thieves is Charlotte Cole (Bridget Regan), and it turns out she's a thief by night and a suburban mom by day. Matty uses that to force Charlotte to help the team make contact with her next employer, the Fence (HITG Faran Tahir). He's really, really anonymous so they have to carry out the theft and then arrest the Fence and his unknown buyer once they all come together.

Charlotte is bright and cheerful, and Ms. Regan brings the same charm to the part that she's brought to shows like Marvel's Agent Carter. They do one of those "Here's how the plan will go in our thirty-minute window of opportunity"-type flashforwards, or whatever you want to call them. It's basically the same concept they've used in spy shows in the past, including the 80s Stingray episode "Caper". Of course, the team needs to take Charlotte along to get into the Russian tech company where the item, a dirty nuclear briefcase bomb, is being sold.

When the team gets there, they discover they only have ten minutes to get the bomb because the buyer has activated it. The plan goes to hell in various ways as the team speeds things up. For instance, instead of MacGyvering a wall-sliding device out of a cleaning cart to get past a hallway filled with pressure sensitive plates, Mac just runs down the hallway and sets off the alarms. But we got to see Mac MacGyvering stuff in the flashforwards, so it's a case of have your cake and eat it, too.

Mac manages to defuse the bomb with Charlotte's help. But then Charlotte handcuffs him to a table, takes the bomb, and leaves Mac for the Russian authorities. There's a rather awkward time jump to after Matty has gotten Mac released. Tac teams break into Charlotte's home and discover her family is gone. They also break into a warehouse, and I'm not sure what the heck it's supposed to be. The warehouse where Mr. Cole works? Where the team met the Fence? In any case, Mac MacGyvers a leaky bomb detector out of cell phones and tracks down Charlotte. She's selling the bomb to the Fence, and the buyer, a domestic terrorist named Darren Farragut (David Kallaway, who was just on Gotham last night) shows up.

Riley goes in to claim she's Charlotte like she did during the first meeting with the Fence. This buys time for Mac to MacGyver some tire bombs out of nearby trash. The Fence reveals he's grabbed Charlotte's family, which means he's learned all about her supposedly anonymous double life. And Farragut who isn't on anyone's radar came out of hiding and reveals his identity. I'm surprised the Fence didn't rent a plane to fly overhead with a banner announcing his real name.

The tire bombs explode, Wilt rams the Fence with the team's SUV, and once again the day is saved. Charlotte admits she didn't know who the team was so she decided to take the bomb for herself to guarantee her family's safety. Which doesn't make sense to me: if they were as evil/inhuman as most TV government spy organizations, Phoenix would already have taken Charlotte's family captive and do a lot more than just threaten to reveal her secret to them.

Instead Charlotte tells Phoenix where she hid the bomb. And they put in a good word so that the government will use her to test their security rather than put her in prison. The years of recriminations and eventual divorce between Charlotte and her husband, goes unmentioned.

At the end, Mac makes dinner for the team minus Jack, and they laugh about Mac retiring to be a baker, and everyone seems to be unsure how to end the episode without Jack around to provide some laughs.

"Fence" is an okay episode. Ms. Regan doesn't have much to do, but she does it well. Charlotte is just charismatic enough that you can believe the team would be taken in by her enough so she can get the drop on Mac. There's maybe one plot twist too many, but to each their own.

The absence of Jack is the most puzzling thing. Since he's mentioned in the press release for next week's episode, I assume we'll eventually get some kind of flashback to how Jack died, or retired, or did something to take him out of the show. But the confusion between last week's episode and this week's, not to mention the "Leanna has second thoughts" thing, makes the episode rather confusing. Toss in the aforementioned time jump, and a whole bit while the team describes their plan but it isn't really their plan, and the episode is a bit of a mishmash. Presumably, they showed this week's episode out of order for... who knows what reason.

So I suppose "Fence" is a handy preview of the Jack-less MacGyver we'll get once George Eads officially leaves the show. And... the show does okay without him. It's a bit bland without Jack camping it up: Wilt Bozer is no Jack Dalton, sorry. So if he's going to become the main source of comic relief, lord help us all.

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

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My SO has pointed out that they have no idea who "Wilt" is, and they think of Justin Hires' character as "Bozer". Me, I think of Jack as Jack, Riley as Riley, and Matty as Matty, not Dalton, Davis, and Webber. Yeah, they call Mac "MacGyver", but the whole not-mentioning-his-first-name thing is traditional. So if you have a preference, and enough people reading this let me know so that we have a quorum, feel free to leave your preference in Comments. Thanks!