In the first production episode, MacGyver frees villagers in Burma from a druglord.
The Plot (spoilers):
MacGyver (Richard Dean Anderson) is watching a man with a briefcase in an auto salvage yard. Another car arrives and two men get out and look over a file from the briefcase. MacGyver's voiceover reveals the file contains missile launch codes stolen from the Pentagon. Mac tips a stack of tires as a distraction, and uses the electromagnet crane to snatch the briefcase (with magnetic hinges, apparently) and gun from the first man. Mac tosses the gun in a wrecked car and takes off with the briefcase, with the 3 men in pursuit (the first man recovers his gun). Mac gets punched out and wakes up tied up in the back seat of the first man's car. The 3 men are outside. A forklift picks up the car and puts in on the crusher. As the crusher comes down, Mac pulls apart the back of the seat and escapes through the trunk at the last minute, unnoticed by the men. They get in their other car to leave, but Mac intercepts them with the forklift, lifts up their car and pins it against a pole. The opening gambit ends 6 minutes into the episode.
Need a lift?
General Hawkins (Angus Duncan) drops in on MacGyver as he relaxes on the beach. He's sending him to Burma to recover a canister of dangerous toxin from a crashed cargo plane. A chopper will pick him up after 24 hours. MacGyver arrives to find villagers being used as slaves to harvest opium. One of the villagers is a boy (Bryan Price) with a red hat with an Air Force insignia on it. Mac rescues him from a guy named Truang (Benjamin Lum).
MacGyver meets Chan
The boy's name is Chan and he leads MacGyver to the plane wreck, and says that Truang works for a General Narai. (Though Chan's hat looks almost new, the wreckage of the plane appears to have been there a long time). The canister is gone. MacGyver turns to see Truang just in time to be knocked out.
The wrecked plane
MacGyver is taken to the village. Truang suspects MacGyver is a narcotics agent. A black helicopter flys over: General Narai (George Lee Cheung) has arrived: dressed almost entirely in black, with a beret and carrying a riding crop. Only half the opium harvest is complete, but they have the plane's cargo (though there seems to be lot more cargo then could have fit in the small plane at the crash site) including heavy machine guns and the canister. General Narai intends to mount the guns on his helicopter and make it a gunship. MacGyver claims to be a tourist, which entertains Narai and Truang. They don't believe him.
General Narai and Truang are amused
Narai gives the villagers five days to finish the harvest, and has MacGyver tied up in the sun until he returns with no food or water, as an example to the villagers. Narai leaves with the guns for the chopper, leaving the rest of the plane's cargo behind until he comes back with his convoy for the opium. MacGyver is tied up in the sun.
Catchin' some rays
Chan arrives with his sister Lin (Joan Chen), who cleans MacGyver's wound from when Truang hit him. Chan reveals he has stolen MacGyver's Swiss Army Knife from the guardhouse and returns it to MacGyver to he can cut himself loose. MacGyver takes out a couple of guards, then releases some of the village's pigs as a distraction to get under the tarp covering the cargo. He improvises a bomb from the cargo and causes enough other chaos and destruction that Truang runs off to get the convoy while the villagers overpower the guards. Chan's sister Lin and brother Ming (James Saito) thank him, but the headmaster (Clyde Kusatsu) says MacGyver has put them at risk of Narai's vengeance. MacGyver goes to meet his rescue chopper and delivers the canister, but stays behind to help the villagers set a series of traps for the convoy.
Chan and his family: Prasert, Lin and Ming
Truang is returning with the convoy. MacGyver warns them, giving them a chance to turn back, but they don't take it. Going forward despite MacGyver's capturing one Jeep and taking out most of the other Jeeps through a hole trap and a blown-out tires. Truang calls General Narai for backup. Truang and company arrive in the village on foot, walking right into Mac's tear-gas trap, and the villagers take care of them. Suddenly, General Narai arrives in his helicopter gunship and opens fire. Mac feeds a cable into the Jeep's winch and on one of Narai's passes he loops the other end of the cable around one of the helicopter’s skids and reels it in, forcing Narai to land. Narai gets out of the helicopter gun in hand but Mac is quick and knocks it out of his hand. Narai pulls a sword from his riding crop but trips over the helicopter's skid and impales himself with his own sword. The villagers are now free.
My Review:
I am not a fan of this particular episode. The premise is OK and the actors do fine, but the characters have no depth. And there are some other problems. In the opening gambit, MacGyver manages to get out of the car in the crusher... WITHOUT BEING SEEN! And in Burma, there should be a language barrier. I can buy that General Narai and maybe even Truang might know English, but the poor villagers? I doubt it. And I don't think MacGyver speaks Burmese, though seeing as how this is only episode #2, there hasn't been anything to say he doesn't, but the exchange with General Hawkins strongly implies that MacGyver's never been to Burma, so it doesn't seem likely that he'd have learned the language, and the original plan (retrieve a canister from a crashed plane) wouldn't have needed someone who could talk to the locals. Some of MacGyver's traps are pretty clever, though the episode doesn't spend enough time on them, and it doesn't seem like they've yet decided that MacGyver will never use a gun, as his only objection is that they don't have time for the villagers to learn to use them. On the other hand, he doesn't carry a gun himself either. And, couldn't the writers come up with better names than the generic-sounding Chan, Lin and Ming?
After the high bar set by the pilot, The Golden Triangle falls short.
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