"Lidar + Rogues + Duty" – MacGyver S03E16 Review

And so we have a new week of the Desi and Team MacGyver show with "Lidar + Rogues + Duty". And Desi still makes a decent Jack replacement. Granted, anyone replacing the former dopey-but-competent military guy would be an improvement, IMO. Or do I need to add IMO since the entire review is my opinion? I guess you could say Jack being a dope is really really my opinion. :)

Also granted, Desi is going through the usual fast-track course to be a semi-guest star who is also a core team member So she's a cold unemotional outsider, but exposure to Team MacGyver is slowly warming her up. And the team is slowly warming up to Desi. Because if she was a truly unlikeable character, she wouldn't last long on the show. How many times did Jellicoe show up on Star Trek: The Next Generation after his one (two-part) appearance? Too bad, because I wanted a Jellicoe spinoff. Which Peter David sorta gave us in his "New Frontier" Trek novels.

The focus was on Desi and Mac, since Desi is still in "introduce the character" mode and the show is named for Mac and he's the central character. That means Matty, Riley, and Wilt were sidelined to peripheral plots. Which is unfortunate for Matty because an episode without Matty is like a day without sunshine, due to Meredith Easton. Wilt is either stuck in the lab with Sparky (who I affectionately call "That #$&*& robot": I get very emotional about cute smartass non-plot essential robots) or in the war room doing tech stuff because Riley is too busy. Riley is busy with her personal life as we get the return of Elwood for the first time this season. Not the Blues Brother, but her father (a Baldwin). Who is preparing for a new job which requires spreadsheet experience. Riley is coaching him at her home, and is interrupted when SWAT breaks in.

And that brings us to the episode. Riley is released pretty quickly because she has a clean background. Or at least cleaner than Elwood. Which seems odd because Riley used to be a fairly infamous hacker. But, oh well, it's a secondary plot. The main plot arrives when Matty breaks the news to Mac that his never-before-seen-before secondary bud Robert Reese (Chad Michael Collins) went down in some Afghanish/Turkish fictional country while testing-piloting a new lidar system which Mac helped design. Reese is considered KIA, the American government have disavowed all knowledge because he was secretly flying in another country's airspace, and Mac insists on bringing the body back home. Matty okays him and Desi doing it.

They soon discover Reese is alive and hiding out in a nearby village. Which is good because I can't imagine them lugging a corpse all over the countryside. Reese has an inflatable life raft with him for some reason: I guess it's part of the survival kit they mentioned he had. Reese mentions later he's surprised it saved his life ten miles from water... so why'd he haul it along with him? It looks bulky and heavy.

Mac inflates the raft with water to break down a door so they can escape. But then two no-goodniks ambush them on the road. After Mac and Desi take them out, it turns out the two guys are CIA agents. There's a local CIA listening post and the agents have gone rogue and are digging up chemical weapons to sell on the black market. Matty sends Mac and Desi to take out the operation and Reese tags along.

They sneak into the dig site and Mac MacGyvers a dart gun out of a first aid kit with morphine syringes, gauze pads (to stabilize the darts in flight); steel spacers (to push the syringe down after the target is shot); a blowtorch and its butane to provide propulsive force; and PVC pipe as a barrel. It's clever, but Mac runs out of butane. Desi and Reese get captured, and Mac uses the laser targeting sight from the lidar he's been lugging around to trick the remaining CIA agents into thinking a squad of Delta soldiers have their laser sights trained on them. Or rather, Mac does the tinkering and Desi, quickly catching on, does the bluffing. The CIA agents surrender.

In the end, the CIA agents give up the name of their buyer and the saboteur who rigged Reese's jet to go down; because having Mac actually screw up isn't the name of the game. Reese is reunited with his wife and twins, the wife invites Mac over for dinner, and Desi remains noncommittal but cracks a smile.

We also find out SWAT came after Riley because a rival hacker made an anonymous call reporting her as a terrorist. Phoenix finds out who and puts him away. But... someone has doxxed the entire team on the dark net, meaning they're all compromised. Which I thought they already had public lives, or at least not very secret ones. Wilt wasn't a Phoenix member until 2-3 years ago, and it was public knowledge at the time he was Mac's roommate. He's living with Leanna now, but still... couldn't anyone find out where Mac was living anyway, by discovering what Wilt's address used to be in the phone book?

Again, I wish I knew how Phoenix worked. I guess they're super-secret agents now. Maybe I'm thinking of the original MacGyver, when someone showed up at MacGyver's houseboat every other episode. Still, Mac's address doesn't seem like that impenetrable a secret.

In a distant subplot, we get more of Sparky the robot (an uncredited Nicholas Guest doing voice work). Desi gives it a riddle which throws it into a logic loop. Wilt can't solve the riddle, and eventually Desi comes back and provides the answer. Sparky comes out of its loop and wants more riddles, and Wilt semi-jokingly tells Desi to get out and stop screwing up his robot. After he says he likes to build things. Since when? For that matter, why does movie F/X and mask-making expertise qualify him to be an AI programmer? I also wonder what the heck Sparky does for Phoenix. It's been three years since it showed up, and all it does is sit around the lab except for that time it went on a road trip with Mac and Jack. I want to see a Sparky vs. Murdoc battle!

Overall, "Lidar" is a slightly-above-average episode. I like the show more now Mac doesn't have Jack's gunmanship to fall back on. Yes, Desi (sometimes) uses a gun. She's still a bit superfluous: she's a better fighter than Mac, but Mac is a decent hand-to-hand fighter as they demonstrate this week. But I suppose Desi is handy when Mac is outnumbered. I also like her picking up on Mac's laser-sight bluff and running with it. I can't imagine Jack doing something like that. So yes, we the audience, are supposed to like Desi. But the creative team is doing a good job of making her likable. Which is something they failed to do with Sam last season.

Wilt is still superfluous to pretty much anything, plot or subplot. This episode was no exception.

I could live without Elwood, and his brief meeting with Matty to tell her to protect Riley came across as rather weak. He tells Matty to protect Riley, Matty promises she does, and the scene ends with the two actors staring at each other. But this week's main plot didn't need Riley's technical expertise except for a few in-the-war room bits. So I suppose they have to give her something to do if they're going to keep Tristan Mays as a main star-

I liked the MacGyverisms: the blowtorch/tranq gun, the water-inflated life raft, and the redirected laser beam that may or may not be a homage to the original MacGyver's credits and scene from the premiere. There's a bit where Mac uses fuel from a military vehicle to power a jet engine which comes across as a bit weak, both because it's never explained and because the jet engine was still functioning after the crash?

Come to think of it, in the original series pilot, MacGyver used water pressure to clear a passageway. Although it was a fire hose rather than an inflatable life raft, and debris rather than a door. Rescuing a downed pilot was a teaser in the pilot, too. Maybe writer Don Perez watched the original pilot first. Given it's his first nu-MacGyver episode, that seems likely.

Overall, it was a decent episode. More focus on Mac, Desi is a likable character who isn't redundant, and a preference for toning down the gun violence. The rogue CIA agents at the end surrender because of Desi's bluff, and Mac tranqs people rather than Desi shooting or putting a sleeper-hold on them. So the tranq gun thing is a lot more of a story-ending "big MacGyverism" like they used to do a lot of on the original series. On the nu one, not so much.

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

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Oh, apologies for the relative lateness of the review. I get a family vacation one weekend a year, and late February is the weekend. It probably won't happen again for a year. But never say never.