The Thief of Budapest

Season 1 - Episode 3
 

Directed by: John Patterson 
 

Co-Starring:  Bruce Abbott

Michael Constantine

Sid Haig

    

The opening gambit sees MacGyver going after an unnamed king's stolen horse. A tribal leader has stolen the horse to provoke the king into a small war. Mac sneaks into the camp, knocks out a guard, saddles the horse and rides off all while the tribal leader is out playing with his sword. A chase ensues and it seems as if MacGyver is about to be caught for good when a helicopter with a tow cable appears out of nowhere and picks up Mac and the horse.

The main story begins with Mac in Budapest on a mission to retrieve a list of KGB agents from his old buddy Nicolai Grodsky with a road rally being in town as a bonus. While waiting around for his contact to show, a young gypsy girl named Jana picks MacGyver's pocket. He catches her in the act only to let her go and she steals his knife again. Grodsky appears, so he has to forget about it, for now. It turns out the KGB are also watching him. They are waiting to see who he meets to pick up the list of names, which is concealed in an old pocket watch.

They begin to leave to make the exchange when our little friend Jana picks Grodsky's pocket and steals the watch. In the ensuing confusion, the KGB confront Grodsky who takes off and his hit by a truck and killed. The Russians naturally assume that MacGyver has the watch until they review their surveillance footage. The race is on to locate the girl and obtain the list.

Mac tracks Jana down at the same time that the Russians find her family. They are taken to a work camp and Mac has to bust them out as Jana gave the watch to her brother and only he knows where it is. Using this episode's only MacGyverism, Mac uses some salt, sugar and weed killer to cause a chemical reaction which makes an explosion; which is all he needs to steal a truck and break the gypsy family out of the camp.  The only problem is that Jana's brother has already sold the watch.

Needless to say, Mac tracks down the fence who has the watch and is able to talk her into giving it to him. Unfortunately, the KGB has also tracked her down. Mac makes a quick escape out the back where Jana and her brother are waiting to pick MacGvyer up, but they want something in return for helping him. They want to go tot he US.

  

  
Mac comes up with a plan using the road rally as a cover. They steal three Mini Coopers and borrowing footage from the Michael Caine film, The Italian Job, Mac causes a traffic jam and the three cars race about the city while being chased by the police and KGB. A good portion of the chase from the film is used in this episode, only slightly re-edited and a few cutaway shots of Richard Dean Anderson and the other actors in the cars added. Our intrepid heroes manage to cross the border into Austria just as the KGB catch up to them. A short phone call later and the gypsy family has been cleared for entrance into the United States. Mission accomplished.

 

The Golden Triangle

The second episode of the first season of MacGyver opens, like most of the early episodes, with an opening gambit that is reminiscent of the pre-title sequence of a James Bond film. It's the action packed end of our hero's previous mission which has no relation to the main story of our episode. MacGyver has followed a man with briefcase to a junk yard. This briefcase contains top secret Pentagon missile launch codes. He's there to sell the codes to an unnamed party and Mac's got to stop them.

Using a crane with a magnetic lift, he snatches the briefcase, and codes, and takes off. A short chase through the junk yard concludes with Mac being knocked unconscious. He awakens to find himself tied up in the back of a car that is about to be flattened. Thinking quickly, MacGyver rips off the back seat cushion, climbs into the boot and pops the trunk open with a tire iron; all without being seen by the heavies. A short forklift ride later and MacGyver has trapped the bad guys, recovered the briefcase and called in the cavalry. It sounds like a rather good start, but this opening gambit lacks any sense of excitement or danger.

Our main story opens when a highly decorated military officer assigns MacGyver the task of heading off to Burma to recover a canister of poison from a crashed plane. He only has 24 hours to find the canister and make it back to the chopper.

It's not long before Mac runs into a group of villagers who are being used as slave labor to harvest opium for General Narai, the local drug lord. It is also here where we first begin hearing some truly dreadful dialogue. With the help of a boy from the village, Mac locates the crashed plane, but the canister is missing. Worse yet, the drug lord's minions capture MacGyver who are convinced that he's a narcotics agent.

General Narai isn't happy that his slaves are taking too long to harvest his poppies and will return in five days to collect his opium, or else! While he's lecturing the villagers and being shown the weapons from the crashed plane, Mac spots the canister. But here's where Mac's luck runs out. As a warning not to cross the general, MacGyver will be staked out at the head of the trail with no food or water for the five days that Narai will be gone.

The little boy who showed Mac the plane feels badly for him and decides to steal the trusty Swiss Army Knife to help MacGyver escape - which he does. Mac sneaks back to the village and using this episode's sole MacGyverism creates a diversion which helps him recover the canister. Using a signal flare as a fuse and a life raft air pump, the boat inflates, the flare pops and a small explosion is created. Mac kicks the snot out of some thugs, blows up a jeep with another flare and the rest of the baddies run back to General Narai.

The villagers are now in turmoil as they know Narai will return and he won't be too happy with them. Some want to work harder to harvest the rest of the opium while the rest want to fight back for their freedom. MacGyver tells them to decide what they want to do as he takes off to meet the chopper. 

But MacGyver is our hero and he can't abandon the villagers to their fate. He drops off the canister and returns to the villagers who have decided to fight back. They only have a matter of hours before the drug lord will be back. Working together, Mac and the villagers set a number of booby traps for the general's troops - all of which work and the villagers manage to capture all of the general's men.

The general and his chopper are soon back, this time with mounted machine guns. Mac is able to attach a steel cable from a Jeep's winch to the helicopter and force it to land where he proceeds to punch out General Narai. It looks like Mac is in trouble when Narai pulls out a sword, but he trips and falls on it. The rein of terror is over and the villagers are now free. With only a single MacGyverism, some truly terrible dialogue, a weak opening gambit and a weak ending, this episode isn't as good as the pilot - but it's not terrible either. It's a solid early entry into the adventures of MacGver.

 

 

s1e01 - The Pilot Episode

The first episode of the first season of MacGyver begins, like a number of the early episodes, with a James Bond style pre-credit sequence.  Somewhere in Central Asia, a USAF airplane has crash landed and the Communists were able to salvage a classified missile. MacGyver has been sent behind the lines to disarm the missile and rescue the pilot.

After climbing to the cliff-top Mac locates the captured pilot and disarms the missile. To free the pilot, he needs to create a diversion and we get MacGyverism #1. Using an AK-47, some twine, a stick, a tree and a book of matches, MacGyver rigs the gun to fire, creating his diversion. The pilot escapes from his cage and by way of MacGyverism #2, a flare-gun is turned into a rocket thruster to propel the two men off the side of the cliff. MacGyver deploys his parachute and the two men float to safety. And so the pilot episode of MacGyver is off to an action packed start...

Dr. Marlowe has come to a top-secret laboratory in the Arizona desert to visit his friend and colleague Dr. Steubens. After passing through the elaborate security systems, he is escorted down to the lab on level 3 by Barbara Spencer, Dr. Steubens' assistant. About a half hour into their visit, a series of explosions rock the laboratories and an acid tank is ruptured. Since the odds of success are slim, MacGyver is flown in aboard Blue Thunder to break his way into the labs and rescue the people trapped inside.

It turns out that the sulfuric acid leak is working its way down to the aquifer, which leads to the Rio Grande. In a little under five hours, the place is going to be flooded with sodium hydroxide (the stuff used to clean the flesh off skeletons) to neutralize the acid and stop it from contaminating the water supply.

Since this is a high-security lab, MacGyverism #4 comes in handy. The elevator shaft is guarded by an elaborate laser security system. Using three cigarettes to be able to see the laser beams and a binocular lens, Mac short-circuits the system and can now climb down to the level 2 labs. It isn't long before it's time for MacGyverism #5. Using his trusty Swiss Army Knife, MacGyver cuts the end off a fire hose which he ties a knot in the end of and buries underneath a girder that is blocking the way. He turns on the water, the hose fills and lifts the girder a few inches. Hoping his back doesn't give out, MacGyver pushes the girder out of the way and finds a room full of scientists, including Barbara Spencer; who is going to guide Mac down to level 3 of the facility.

Our pair head off down a shaft and are soon caught in an airlock and it's here we learn that in a half hour, the military is going to fire off an underground missile at the base of the lab to fuse the bedrock to stop the acid from leaking into the aquifer. And MacGvyer lost his two-way mic while escaping from the airlock!

Using chocolate bars to stop stop the acid leak (MacGyverism #6), the two make their way to the lab next to the one in which the Nobel Prize nominated scientists are trapped. MacGyverism #7 will do the trick. Emptying a cold capsule and replacing the medicine with sodium metal, and placing that into a quart sized jar of water creates an instant bomb which blows open the wall. Steubens pulls a gun on our heroes as it was he who set off the bomb. He couldn't stand to see his research perverted and used as a weapon. Barbara is shot, Steubens is subdued and Mac races to the power room where he cuts the lights out in the building and uses light pulses as Morse code to let everyone know that the acid leak has been stopped and the scientists have been rescued. The missile launch is aborted in the knick of time and so ends the pilot episode of MacGyver.

As pilot episodes go, this one was quite well done. It co-starred Dana Elcar (in a role other than Pete Thornton) and Darlanne Fluegel as Barbara Spencer. It setup the series nicely and gave us a look at what the series has to offer. It's also one of the few times that MacGyver, played by Richard Dean Anderson, is actually seen firing a gun. A few of the effects are a little dated and Mac slips into an odd Southern accent a few times, but it's a lot of fun and a great start to the legend that is MacGyver.