​ "Bozer + Booze + Back to School" - MacGyver S03E03 Review

Ah, and with "Bozer + Booze + "Back to School" we're back to old school MacGyver. Or at least what passes for old school MacGyver, i.e., the original series. Nobody shot a gun, Mac got to show his stuff in a tech college environment and his teammates mostly brought something to the show that Mac couldn't do on his own. It's hard to imagine either Mac or Richard Dean Anderson's MacGyver doing keg stands. Granted, it featured Justin Hires as comic relief. But he's better at that than romantic bantering and emotional drama.

Also, they seem to have gotten rid of the cold-open teaser. Now if they'd just get rid of those annoying texts: they're not as funny as the creative team seems to think they are. But then again, some people out there say that about me, too. :)

Let's recap. We start with one of those "Let's start with something wacky" openers where Mac is helping Wilt psych up for something dramatic. And then... we find out they're at a kegger at a frat house, and Wilt is going to keg stand while Mac, Riley, and Leanna sneak off.

Cue the 12 Hours Earlier, and we get the return of Billy Colton (Lance Gross). He and Riley are hanging out in LA following a skip, and Riley points out how unromantic it is. She's right. Billy reminds her he's invited her to join the Colton Bounty Hunter team. They're interrupted when Jack jumps into the back seat, and I realize why Jack bothers me so much. It's not just that he's an idiot, but that he's often a rude idiot. I guess that's part of his charm to his legion of fans. Riley decides letting Jack and Billy have some bonding time without her, which suggests she's not that smart, either.

The team gets called into the war room, where Matty (Meredith Eaton) contacts them via super-secret Skype. Is Ms. Eaton sick or busy on another project? They had her on video near the end of last week, too. Someone has blown up Moroccan facilities using "transparent bombs", which are basically clear plastic explosives. Which is either a cutting-edge tech development, or a way to cut down on the budget, or both. The people tied to the bombs were all grads of "Western Tech" and have been subsequently murdered. Phoenix suspects someone is running a spy ring from Western Tech, and sends Mac and his team (minus Jack, who is presumably too old) to infiltrate the place and find out who leads the spy team.

As the group arrives on campus, they exposit about their college lives or lack thereof. Leanna was a bookworm, Wilt was a party guy, Riley spent her time in a supermax for illegal hacking and never went to college, and Mac dropped out to join the Army and never got his diploma. They soon find out that an eevviill college professor, Elliot ("Hey, It's That Guy!" HITG actor Dennis Boutsikaris) may be responsible. Mac shows up late for his class and comes up with an alternate solution to Elliot's slope problem. Elliot keeps him after class, but then swings at him with a microscope. Putting Mac in an engineering lab is like dropping a Marine at an arms show, and Mac knocks the fleeing professor out by MacGyvering some kind of stun bomb.

It turns out Elliot is just an embezzler, not a terrorist. Another email goes out and it's sent to a frat house. There's a party there, and I get the impression the creative team has never been to a tech college. The place is more like Animal House. Riley whips up some kind of technobabble flash drives to check all of the frat bros' computers, and Wilt keg stands to provide a distract so the others can sneak into the bros' rooms and insert the flash drives.

They find the student, knock him out, and interrogate him. Matty is still on video, and rather awkwardly questions the guy. He thinks he's working for the CIA and was supposed to meet with his handler. They go to the location but the terrorist has moved on. Fortunately the meteorology class is scanning a nearby cornfield with a thermal camera on a weather balloon. Mac knocks it down with some MacGyvered electrical cables, in an instance where it would actually be useful and in character for someone to just shoot the damned thing down.

The thermal camera has captured the terrorist's car's heat signature. Fortunately, he's eco-friendly because he drives an easily identifiable electrical car. Matty identifies the guy as another professor who is actually an ex-KGB agent who started his own spy agency after the fall of the USSR. He refuses to talk but tells them to watch the TV at 9 am. This tells them that the third target is the bank of Singapore. The team go there and the bomb can't be defused or moved because it's "too powerful". Fortunately the building is eco-friendly as well, so Mac takes the bomb to the roof, fills a garbage bag with hydrogen from the hydrogen fuel cells, and let's it drift into the sky. It doesn't even seem to clear all of the nearby skyscrapers, but blows up harmlessly.

Meanwhile, Jack being a possessive idiot screws up Billy capturing their skip, Victor (Donald Watkins). They also have a chat about how Billy really luvs Riley, and if Jack loves her then he should let her make her own decisions. Later, Jack corners Victor on his own and Victor gives him a story about how he's doing whatever illegal stuff he was arrested and skipped bail to help his ailing mother. Jack accepts Victor's story and lets him go, and feigns ignorance when Billy shows up. To the show's credit, we never find out if Victor is lying or not. Since the creative team is rarely that subtle, I suspect we might get an answer down the road.

At the end, the team meet at Mac and Wilt's house to play beer pong with soda, because Wilt has a hangover from his earlier keg stand. Jack shows up and says he's okay with Billy and he lost the skip. To actress Tristin Mays' credit, she does a good job of doing suspicion and confusion on her face: confusion that Jack let a skip get away and isn't riding her about Billy, and suspicion that he's not telling her the whole truth.

Matty finally shows up onscreen with everything else, and the cast acts as relieved as I am. Maybe Ms. Eaton did have some kind of off-screen accident? The college gives Mac a graduation diploma, for beating up a student and a professor and catching an embezzler. And I don't think the creative team understands what "secret agent" means, either. They give a "secret" agent a diploma with his name on it?

"Bozer" was a decent episode. It gave Mac some space to strut himself, it gave us little bits of the characters without drowning us in "moments". Justin Hires was mostly harmless and if he has to be on the show, better they keep him to comedy than serious secret-agenting, romance, and emotional angst. Wilt ain't fat, but many TV shows need a sidekick for comic relief, don't they?

We also go the return of Lance Gross as Billy. He seems a bit old for Riley: Gross is 37, Mays is 28. But hey, who am I to judge? I like the Colton family, which is the best thing to come out of the revival other than David Dastmalchian. I just wish we saw more of them.

So "Bozer" was a decent episode that touched on a lot of minor continuity bits, but didn't try to hit us over the head with them or put them into some kind of dramatic season-long arc. It was a decent standalone episode that did the usual stuff, for good or bad. And that's what we want in our CBS homage shows, isn't it

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