I was substitute teaching again today, and the instructions the teacher left was to play an episode of MacGyver.  (Usually the instructions are to put on a movie, but this time it was a TV show.)

Some of the students had never heard of MacGyver.  (Of course they hadn't.  This show was way before their time.)  Other students recognized the name MacGyver from Simpsons references.  

As for myself, I actually had never seen an episode of MacGyver before.  I definitely knew about it.  Several of my friends from the church youth group were fans, and I remember some discussion about it.  But I had never seen it myself.  Mostly because my parents exercised tight regulation on my tv viewing when I was young.

In fact, I didn't even realize until I looked it up just now, but MacGyver was actually a 1980s TV show.  I always thought it was from the 1990s, I guess because I remember my friends talking about it in the 1990s.  But it turns out it started in 1985, and ran until 1992 (W).

Anyway, the episode that the students (and me) were assigned to watch for today was Season 2 Episode 21: "D.O.A.: MacGyver".  And because this was the lesson plan for 4 of the classes I was covering today, I ended up watching it 4 times.

If you know anything about MacGyver, you know that his schtick is that he's an action hero who fights crime using science.  This is why teachers generally approved of the show.  (I mentioned before that many of my church youth group friends were fans of the show, and I also remember the youth pastor himself talking approvingly of the show.)

It struck me upon watching my first ever episode that this was a pretty clever idea by someone.  Basically the show seems to play like any other 1980s action tv show, but the episode included a couple brief references to fixing things with some sort of science or mechanics.  It's a very small part of the episode, but it's just enough to get the show recommended by teachers and youth pastors.  And then the rest of it plays out like a normal action show.  Clever marketing.

D.O.A.: MacGyver plays like a pretty by the numbers 1980s action TV show.  In fact, it's SO by the numbers that they include not 1 but 2 TV tropes commonly used in that era: MacGyver has amnesia and can't remember who he is, and also as MacGyver begins to remember his past, they sprinkle in clips from past episodes.  That's right, it's both an Amnesia Episode and a Clip Show Episode.

But as much as I love to poke fun at 1980s TV shows, you do have to admit that it's very watchable.  I mean, you do really have to admire what they were doing in action TV shows in the 1980s--they managed to pull off 22 action episodes a year, on a tight budget, and ended up with a lot of action sequences and stunt work that were actually pretty good.

The ending of this particular episode, however, was anticlimatic.  I'm not sure how typical that is (as this is so far the only MacGyver  episode I've seen.)

Also, I didn't realize it until I went to the IMBD page, but the girl in this episode is played by Nana Visitor, who I, as a huge Star Trek fan, know from Star Trek Deep Space Nine.  (I thought she looked recognizable when I was watching the episode, but didn't realize who she was.)

Bonus: Someone made a fan trailer for this episode:

Check out this show on Amazon: https://amzn.to/43E3BeD           (This is an Amazon Associate's Link.  If you buy anything through that link, I get a commission.)