MacGyver: Thief of Budapest (Season 1, Episode 3)

MacGyver goes to Budapest to pick up a watch containing top-secret information.

The Plot (spoilers):

A king's valuable horse has been stolen by a tribal leader, and MacGyver's (Richard Dean Anderson) been sent to recover it. He saddles the horse and makes his getaway from the enemy camp carrying a shepherd's staff, but the tribal leader and his men give chase on horseback. They are armed with guns, but the leader says not to shoot as they could hit the horse. MacGyver finds himself surrounded on a beach. The tribal leader and MacGyver do a couple jousting runs, with MacGyver using the shepherd's staff and the leader using a sword. On the second run MacGyver knocks the leader off his horse and makes a run for it. With the bad guys in pursuit, a helicopter comes up from behind, with a lowered cable and hook. The helicopter comes over MacGyver, who grabs the cable and hooks it to the horse's saddle, and the helicopter lifts them into the sky and flies them to safety. (It appears this was done with a real horse!) The opening gambit ends at 6:40 into the episode.

Pegasus?

MacGyver is in Budapest, Hungary during the Transcarpathian Road Rally to meet colleague Nicholai Grodsky (Nicholas Kadi) who has some top-secret information to deliver to him. While he waits, MacGyver enjoys an ice cream and watches a worker reprogram a traffic light, then casually checks out some of the race cars. A young gypsy girl named Jana (Kelly McClain) picks him as a mark and bumps into him to steal his Swiss Army Knife, but MacGyver catches her. Found out, she offers MacGyver a Gypsy blessing. They part, and MacGyver realized she picked his pocket again as he left her. But there's no time to go after her as MacGyver spots Grodsky, who is checking a pocketwatch. Two Russian agents know Grodsky is a double-agent and have been watching and filming him from a van as he walked around for three hours to find out who his contact is. They also know that the watch contains the names of KGB agents in England.

MacGyver confronts Jana

MacGyver and Grodsky surreptitiously make contact. Grodsky wants to hand over the watch somewhere more private and suggests they meet back at a cafe. They separate, and Jana trips up Grodsky and pick-pockets the watch without Grodsky realizing it. Moments later, the Russian agents try to stop Grodsky, who makes a run for it and get hit by a truck and killed. The Russians search him but don't find the watch. MacGyver sees this and casually walks away.

MacGyver and Grodsky make contact

The Russians review their video of Grodsky and realize MacGyver was his contact and that Jana stole the watch. The lead Russian, Kossov (Bruce Abbott), tasks Hungarian Inspector Messic (Michael Constantine) to find MacGyver and Jana. Messick thinks he can find MacGyver but the gypsy girl Jana will be hard to track.

Inspector Messic and Kossov

MacGyver tracks down Jana, who tries to run but MacGyver catches her. She returns the Swiss Army Knife. Then he asks for the watch. She tries playing dumb but MacGyver knows better. She realizes the watch is important and agrees to get it back, as she gave it to her brother, Bruno. But before they can talk to Bruno, they see Kossov and Messic with the Hungarian police arresting Bruno and the rest of Jana's family.

MacGyver just can't catch a break

Jana's family are taken to the Borza labor camp, and MacGyver and Jana track them there. MacGyver makes a "light-bulb sandwich" from construction/demolition debris, and they use it to cause the prison supply truck to stop so MacGyver can sneak aboard and get into Borza. Inside the truck MacGyver finds uniforms for both prisoners and guards and other supplies. He initially poses as a prisoner as he mixes battery acid, salt, sugar and weed killer to make a time-delay bomb and makes contact with Jana's family, then poses as a guard and rigs a tractor to be unstoppable as it pulls a barbed-wire barrier. MacGyver steals the supply truck and uses it to get Jana's family out. It turns out that Bruno had already sold the watch before he was arrested, so the Russians still don't have it.

Jana's brother had sold the watch to a gypsy woman named Reena (Sue Kiel), who runs a bar. The patrons don't react to well to MacGyver asking about Reena, but she shows up and stops them before things get too out of hand. Upstairs, MacGyver shows Reena the information in the watch, and as they negotiate, Kossov & Messic arrive. MacGyver doesn't have any cash, so Reena gives him the watch as a gift, and he sneaks out.

Jana and her family want to come to America with MacGyver. He comes up with a plan to have them pose as rally teams and steal some of the cars from the race. Jana steals a police radio, while MacGyver slices up a credit card and uses it to reprogram a traffic light. They steal three Mini Coopers (one red, one white, one blue) from a car carrier just as Kossov and Messic show up with the police. And the chase is on...

The race is on!

MacGyver's reprogrammed traffic lights cause a traffic jam as they lead the police on a wild chase through the city (using footage from the 1969 film The Italian Job) frustrating Kossov and Messic. MacGyver has Jana duct tape a transistor radio playing music to the stolen police radio, and once they lose the police for a moment, they tie the radios to a batch of balloons from a street vendor and set them aloft, cutting off police communication.

Hiding in the MINI lot. (I love this part!)

The chase continues and they make it across the border to Austria, where Kossov and Messic can't follow them. MacGyver arranges for the family to come to America after a couple days for processing. He has to go, but he gives Jana his Swiss Army Knife, saying "You earned it" and she gives him her necklace in return.

MacGyver!!!

My Review:

Thief of Budapest is one of my favorite MacGyver episodes. It's just a fun adventure, and that fun comes from the characters and the actors who play them, plus the use of footage from the original The Italian Job. This is perhaps the most obvious of several MacGyver episodes that use footage from an earlier film as a cost-saving measure, but it doesn't hurt the episode. Even without the chase scenes, this was undoubtedly an expensive one, and they did a pretty good job fitting the footage from The Italian Job in with the new footage. The chase wouldn't have been possible if it all had to be fimed new, after all, this is only episode #3, and the chase would've had to be filmed somewhere that could pass for Hungary. There's no way that would've fit in the budget.

One minor issue with this episode is that MacGyver has no problem communicating with anyone in Hungary. I doubt that Jana's family would actually speak English, so we have to assume that Macgyver speaks Hungarian, and since this episode establishes that he's been to Budapest before, that is a reasonable assumption. It's far more reasonable here than it was one episode ago in Burma in The Golden Triangle.

All-in-all, this is a great episode of MacGyver.