"Scavengers + Hard Drive + Dragonfly" - MacGyver S03E07 Review

Who knew that "competent" could be so good?

I've been hard on MacGyver since it premiered back in 2016. And with good reason. It seemed to exist for no other purpose than to be yet another remake of a TV "classic". Not that old MacGyver was ever that much of a classic except to the show's fans. Without using the Internet, quick, name ten episodes off the top of your head and describe the plots each in 25 words or less. For extra points, name five episodes beyond the first season. There was the one with the dead rhino, and the one with MacGyver's son showing up. And... uh, anything else? Sure, people remember Murdoc, and Jack Dalton, and a very young Teri Hatcher as Penny Parker. And the cool occasional MacGyverism, like "Hey, MacGyver used a chocolate bar to seal an acid leak!"

Compare that to "It's a cookbook!" and "The doctors and nurses look like pigs and the patient is human!" Or "Kirk goes back in time and falls in love with Joan Collins", or "Spock has a beard in an evil mirror universe!"

Not that there's anything wrong with that. 90% of network television down through the decades falls into the same category. But old MacGyver is more of a concept than a "classic" show, getting by on the concept ("Amateur secret agent MacGyvers stuff") and the laid-back performance of Richard Dean Anderson, than intricate scripting and detailed characterizations.

It's like Hawaii Five-0 and Magnum PI and Charmed. Sure people remember the name, and the concept. But most of them couldn't describe ten plots from any of those shows if you put a gun to their head.

So nu-MacGyver has slowly matured. Lucas Till has become a better actor, they ditched dead weight like Sandrine Holt and Isabel Lucas, they brought on Meredith Eaton as a much better actress and much more sympathetic yet hard-as-tacks boss, and George Eads and Tristan Mays have slowly become more well-rounded and interesting characters.

Okay, Justin Hires is still on the show and his character seems to go one step forward and two steps back. When they bother to move his character forward at all. But nobody's perfect.

"Scavengers + Hard Drive + Dragonfly" is a good example of all of that. It's got a nice basic plot, a couple of decent guest star performances, and some actual acting by Meredith Eaton.

What am I talking about? Let's take a look. Matty shows up at a party and rocks an expensive dress. Senator Steckler admits he invited her there so he could talk to her in private, and there's clearly no love lost between them. Steckler explains he's being blackmailed with photos from his old hard drive, and there's also a mysterious file named "Dragonfly" on it. Dumbass. He wants Matty to retrieve the drive and the photos for him, and the Dragonfly file as well.

Matty calls the team in and tells them they're going on an off-the-books mission to Ghana. Listening to them gripe about having to fly commercial is kind of amusing, because we're always seeing them flying in the expensive supertech Phoenix jet. Matty makes it clear it's a hush-hush mission and a personal favor as such. And it's interesting after a year and a half, we still don't know that much about the character. We've heard about Mac and his family, and Jack and his ex-girlfriend, and Riley and her mother (Jack's ex), and Wilt and Leanna. And lots of other details dropped along the way. But not so much about Matty.

We also get Jack as the guy who works out it's a personal mission for Matty. As I've noted before, season 3 seems to be an improvement for Eads as an actor now that he's not stuck with being the comic relief. There's also not a cultural reference in sight other than a callback to Jack's love of country & western.

The team arrive in Ghana and discuss what Dragonfly is all about. Then they go to a bank in Ghana where they've tracked the blackmail payoff. And yes, there actually is a bank in Ghana. The Nigerian prince no doubt lives right down the street. It looks about like what you'd figure a Ghana bank looks like: a dingy storefront.

There's the usual computer technobabble as Riley hacks into the bank camera, and a girl in a hoodie picks up the money. The team soon traps her in an alley and it turns out the girl, Abina (Joy Sunday) works for a ruthless local businessman, Joseph Musah (Jimmy Akingbola). He runs a teenage gang that salvages tech U.S. recycling companies illegally ship to Ghana to dispose of rather than recycle properly. The gang scavengers data from the computers to use for blackmail, and expensive metal components as well. It's an interesting concept, and I assume it exists in real life. If it doesn't, then kudos to writer Andrew Karlsruher, who no doubt gave some enterprising crooks an idea.

Abina is a decent guest star character. She's a hacker, and she and Riley quickly bond. She's good at parkour, and intelligent, and feisty. Hopefully they'll bring Joy Sunday back.

Anyhoo, Abina takes the team to Joseph's warehouse/landfill. But Joseph and his men show up and take the hard drive and a bunch of others to Joseph's manor in the countryside before the team can steal it. They go there and Abina offers to help if they'll take her to the States. A quick phone call to Matty, and she promises to do it. They then break into the manor and find the hard drive. Wilt tags along for absolutely no reason that I can tell: he doesn't even provide (supposed) comic relief.

Jack shoots at least one guy on the way out, and yay gun violence! The team escapes in a junk truck, and putting Mac with electronic junk is like trapping a penguin in ice water. The Ghana military get involved because Joseph has paid them off, and Mac burns out their jeep attenuators with a microwave magnetron.

Matty has to pressure Senator Sneaky Scum to bring Abina into the U.S. Meanwhile, the team is ready to leave but Joseph holds Abina's fellow scavengers hostage. The team goes back to the landfill, Mac rigs a tape recorder to transmit a "run for it!" message from Abina on a frequency so high that the kid scavengers can hear it but the adult guards won't, and Abina stalls for time with Joseph long enough for Jack to take out some guards. Mac rigs some "battery bombs" they don't even bother explaining, and he and Jack take out Joseph and his thugs.

In the end, Abina decides to stay in Ghana to keep her friends from being taken over by another Joseph type. Joseph gets busted, along with the corrupt Ghana military soldiers working for him. The team gets Dragonfly and gives it to Matty, and Wilt the Stilted admits they wanted to look at it but didn't because they like Matty so much. And again, a lot of this is credit to Meredith Eaton: it's hard to imagine the team giving that kind of loyalty to Pat Thornton back in season 1.

Matty arranges for Abina and her friends to get pre-fabricated shelters next to the landfill so they have somewhere nice to live. And she watches the Dragonfly video file at the end. And hey, it's Superian from The Tick! (Brendan Hines). Okay, not really, but I can dream of the crossover possibilities. And it was originally supposed to be actor Greg Vaughan in the part according to the CBS press release, but I guess they made a last-minute change. What, Vaughan couldn't tape a two-minute video?

Hines' character is Ethan Reigns, who we're to assume is Matty's husband and went deep undercover in 2010 thanks to the expository video log he made. He says goodbye to Matty, who twists her own wedding ring on her finger and looks all sobby.

Like I said, "Scavanger" is a decent episode. Wilt is useless at worst, inoffensive at best. Joy Sunday is a, *ahem*, joy to watch. I like her description of the life she wants for herself at a Boston college when she gets to the States. They need more teenagers on the shows who act like teenagers. She's competent, bubbly, athletic, loyal, and all that good stuff.

Jimmy Akingbola is a lot more threatening than he was as Reiter on Arrow back in season 4 where he was pretty much wasted. His character Joseph doesn't get much to do other than be evil. But that's par for the course for most nu-MacGyver villains who aren't named "Murdoc".

Team MacGyver is all pleasantly free of their personal issues. There's nothing about Oversight, or Billy, or Leanna, or Jack being an idiot with savantism in cultural references for a thousand, Alex. Mac does some MacGyverisms, Riley does some computer technobabble, and Jack shoots a couple of guys dead and beats up a few more. Wilt does ... nothing. Matty gets the lion's share of the character development for once, and she's awfully effective at it. Bringing Meredith Eaton onto the show was the best thing they ever did.

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