"No-Go + High-Voltage + Rescue" is episode 20 of apparently 22 of season three of MacGyver, and... not much happened. So, if you tuned in to find out who tried blowing up James last week, or who doxxed the team, or if Mac and Desi give in to their inevitable romantic relationship, tough luck. None of that happened, which means it'll probably all get shoved into the season finale in a couple of episodes.
What does happen? First, we have a DIY where Mac and Desi steal a French Presidential limousine, and drive through the streets of Paris dodging the French equivalent of the French Secret Service. Mac rigs gas masks out of Presidential medical supplies, and the limo is equipped with gas grenades so they drive into an underpass, Mac drop a gas grenade, and sneaks off with Desi via the sewers.
Onto the main adventure, which has James (Tate Donovan) getting coffee at a coffee shop. The Phoenix cafeteria doesn't have great coffee? Color me shocked. James sees a newscast on the Exposition Channel about how two backpackers went missing in Bogota. The U.S. government won't help get them back because they were on a No-Go Challenge and the State Department doesn't want to encourage more people to do it. The parents are on TV, and James' heart grows three sizes. He orders Matty to send Team MacGyver to Bogota to find the missing backpackers.
The team goes there posing as backpackers, and recreates the steps the two missing backpackers, Ben and Isabel, took. First, they have to break into an uncompleted skyscraper to get a map, fight some muggers, and find out the location of the first no-go challenge. Since there are four locations, James and Matty talk to the male backpacker's parents, Julie and Tyler. James bonds with them over the plight of their grown-up child by talking about how he sends Mac out into the field. They suggest Ben would have gone up an electrical tower.
The team goes there, and Mac and Desi have to scale the tower. They both relate their dumbest teenage experiences in a bunch of interminable scenes. They find Ben and Isabel's signatures on the insulator disks, and Mac admits he's afraid of heights.
There are also coordinates, which lead to a soccer stadium. That's a no-go location? The stadium is closed, and three masked baddies show up. They knock out Mac and Desi, but Wilt and Riley rescue them. Riley does some technobabble stuff with a recovered phone, which leads them to a farmhouse where Derek Diresta (David Paluck), the head of a human trafficker ring, is using the No-Go Challenge to abduct English speakers and send them somewhere or another.
The team goes to the farmhouse where Diresta and his men are keeping the prisoners. They knock out the guards using an airtight sleeping bag and some toxic gas. Which seems a lot more complicated than just knocking the guys out from behind. Diresta puts up a fight but Mac and Desi take him down, and they find out Diresta's men are taking Ben and Isabel to the electric tower to kill them and make it look like an accident. Because they're too high-profile.
Mac and Desi ride there on stolen off-road bikes, knock out the abductors, and once again the day is saved! In the end they return to the U.S., Mac and James share a manly hug, and Desi shows up in a dress and says she has a date.
The bit with the dress? Sparky the Damned Robot (tm) is programmed with human behavior analysis and deduces Mac and Desi have the hots for each other. Wilt tells Riley, and they spend some screen time worrying it will take Mac's head out of the game. So when Desi says she has a date with someone else, Wilt breathes a sigh of relief but Riley isn't so sure.
And that's it. We get a mention of Nikki from season 1, and a little bit of backstory on Mac in the seventh grade getting a B in Chemistry because he was distracted by a female student. Wilt ships a name for Mac + Desi: "Messy". Which Riley says isn't right, and should be "Mesi". I got a laugh out of that.
It's a pretty forgettable episode in the scheme of things. It established on-screen Mac and Desi have a romantic attraction, something I've been saying since Desi showed up. There's nothing wrong with any of it: Mac gets some clever MacGyverisms: I prefer his on-the-fly improvisations like using flypaper to snag a windblown map, rather than his working with a near-complete medical lab in the back of a President's limo. The airtight bag + toxic gas seems to be one of those MacGyverisms tossed in just to show how clever Mac is without really being necessary, and in fact overcomplicating things.
Wilt doesn't contribute anything as usual, except punching out a bad guy when Mac and Desi get captured. He's the "comic relief". Riley does some technobabble stuff, Desi kicks ass, and Mac does the thinking. Nothing surprising with any of this.
The whole father-son thing between Mac and James would be more touching if James hadn't spent two seasons being a dick to Mac. What with the abandoning him as a child and then secretly being his boss. Now there's a rush to establish James as a great father, what with the cancer and all the luv for Mac. With the season finale coming up, I suspect James isn't long for this world.
So the episode is okay: nothing special, nothing bad. It just... is. But it's Friday nights on CBS: what do you expect?
But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. What do you think?
Written by Gislef on Apr 27, 2019
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