...ex-girlfriend #39 actually turns out to be the bad guy this time. That's about it. There's some kind of story line about an Olympics-type hockey game that we never get to see and a Russian kid (who looks like he's about 30, because he is) who temporarily shacks up with MacGyver solely because the plot requires him to be involved in order for the ending to work out.
Naturally, MacGyver and the Russian kid get in a sticky situation, which Mac skillfully saves them from, by utilizing items in the area that inexplicably happen to be laying around, and being incredibly lucky. At one point, MacGyver rotates a door lock wheel using a rod with a string attached to it. The string is pulled in every direction around the wheel in order to turn it, which is impossible because MacGyver is stuck on the other side of the door with nothing to guide the string but the rod it's attached to.
There's always a certain amount of hand-waving and suspension of disbelief required of any episode of MacGyver, but I think it's very telling as to the amount of effort put into the creation of the episode when the camera blatantly shows Mac doing something downright impossible. Early seasons are a lot more careful about maintaining plausibility and some kind of semblance of realism. Granted, we *know* that Mac will always escape, but the tension evaporates and the show loses all interest when MacGyver turns into nothing more than an extremely lucky guy who can also apparently do impossible things.
Why did the writers suddenly forget how to put Mac into situations that required his intelligence to escape from? Why is it that all the traps in season 6 require little more than picking up something off the ground? Mac no longer combines seemingly useless objects together to create an ingenious escape device. Instead, he grabs a pole off the ground, and then extends it with another pole picked up off the ground when the original pole wasn't long enough. Conveniently, the poles even slip together, as if they were put there expressly for the purpose of providing the escape. This is probably why Mac no longer bothers to explain the contraptions he's making to the other characters around him: there's nothing to explain. It's just a pole that he uses to push something with. There's nothing interesting or unique about that at all.
Season 6 MacGyver has lost all of his ingenuity and problem-solving skills. The show no longer consists of him making cool devices or hatching ingenious plans. Now he just snoops around doing basic detective work (poorly), gets caught over and over again, and escapes via pure luck. On the rare occasion that he does show intelligence, it's more about demonstrating common knowledge (like removing snake venom, although this example is actually a myth itself, and one which MacGyver would have known better of) than demonstrating actual applications of esoteric information.
Naturally, MacGyver and the Russian kid get in a sticky situation, which Mac skillfully saves them from, by utilizing items in the area that inexplicably happen to be laying around, and being incredibly lucky. At one point, MacGyver rotates a door lock wheel using a rod with a string attached to it. The string is pulled in every direction around the wheel in order to turn it, which is impossible because MacGyver is stuck on the other side of the door with nothing to guide the string but the rod it's attached to.
There's always a certain amount of hand-waving and suspension of disbelief required of any episode of MacGyver, but I think it's very telling as to the amount of effort put into the creation of the episode when the camera blatantly shows Mac doing something downright impossible. Early seasons are a lot more careful about maintaining plausibility and some kind of semblance of realism. Granted, we *know* that Mac will always escape, but the tension evaporates and the show loses all interest when MacGyver turns into nothing more than an extremely lucky guy who can also apparently do impossible things.
Why did the writers suddenly forget how to put Mac into situations that required his intelligence to escape from? Why is it that all the traps in season 6 require little more than picking up something off the ground? Mac no longer combines seemingly useless objects together to create an ingenious escape device. Instead, he grabs a pole off the ground, and then extends it with another pole picked up off the ground when the original pole wasn't long enough. Conveniently, the poles even slip together, as if they were put there expressly for the purpose of providing the escape. This is probably why Mac no longer bothers to explain the contraptions he's making to the other characters around him: there's nothing to explain. It's just a pole that he uses to push something with. There's nothing interesting or unique about that at all.
Season 6 MacGyver has lost all of his ingenuity and problem-solving skills. The show no longer consists of him making cool devices or hatching ingenious plans. Now he just snoops around doing basic detective work (poorly), gets caught over and over again, and escapes via pure luck. On the rare occasion that he does show intelligence, it's more about demonstrating common knowledge (like removing snake venom, although this example is actually a myth itself, and one which MacGyver would have known better of) than demonstrating actual applications of esoteric information.
