Monday, April 9, 2012

MacGyver Mondays: "Nightmares" (Season 1, Episode 11)


Title: Nightmares
Airdate: 1/15/1986
My Age at Airdate: 2 years, 5 months, 30 days
Episode Type: Espionage, MacGyver Impaired

So, I missed last week. I hope you'll forgive me. If everything goes to plan, I should be able to do 2 MacGyver Monday posts. I don't know if it'll be today or next week, though. Maybe I shouldn't, though. Maybe I'll just take the missed week. I know these posts are intense and I wouldn't want to burn anyone out. Ok. Decision made. 1 episode a week, no matter if I didn't post last week.

OPENING CREDITS

We open on a boat called Gemstone.

MacGyver starts talking about how sick he is of being at sea. So I guess he's been on that boat.

Hey look! It's Pete Thornton! In his first episode as Pete Thornton. You'll remember Dana Elcar was in the pilot as some other guy. This is so exciting. Remember this for trivia. Pete Thornton's first episode was "Nightmares".

Ok, so two guys with accents are watching Pete wait for MacGyver.

MacGyver stops to help a young girl who is having trouble fishing. She's trying to use seaweed. Idiot. He comes over and pops a foil gum wrapper on her line. She says she's fishing for food and that she can't pay him. He tells her to just catch something. And then she does. Awww. Heartwarming. :)

Pete greets Mac and Accent and Non-Accent (turns out the driver of the car doesn't have one) get out of their car and approach a guy eating a sandwich. They are paying him to do SOMETHING. And I guess we'll find out what that is in a second.

Pete and Mac are talking and Sandwich is walking behind them. Accent and Non-Accent approach Mac and Pete. Pete tells MacGyver to run while he takes care of them. Pete crouches behind a car and aims. Non-accent crouches behind a different car, aims, and HITS PETE IN THE ARM. See folks? We can't rely on Stormtrooper Aim to save us or our friends.

MacGyver is being chased by Sandwich. He ducks behind a car and when Sandwich runs by, hits him with his bag. Sandwich is out, but Accent is still coming.

MacGyver takes a second to open the concrete casing of a parking lot light and he put the list with "the names and plans of the terrorists" inside. I guess Accent and Co. are East German and affiliated with "the terrorists".

MacGyver runs off and immediately finds a cop writing a ticket. Thank goodness. He starts to tell the cop what's up and then the cop JUDO CHOPS him and knocks him out. Don't trust cops, kids.

Accent, Non-Accent, and Cop drag MacGyver off.

Pete is back at the office with his shot arm in a sling looking through pictures. He identifies Accent. Definitely East German. So they know who they're looking for.

Meanwhile, Accent and Co have MacGyver back at their lair (which has a bulletin board hung on what appears to be another, larger bulletin board, but might just be a brown wall) and are asking him where the list is. He refuses to tell.

They tie his arms down, rolling up one of his sleeves. They pull out a syringe. They tourniquet his arm. MacGyver tries to offer other methods of interrogation, but they aren't amused.

They inject him.

Accent tells MacGyver that the stuff was designed for him. He's going to hallucinate, then be in a lot of pain, then die. Unless he gets the antidote in 6 hours.

So here's our timeline: He's going to start seeing things immediately. Then in 3 hours, be in horrible pain. Then he has 3 more hours to get the antidote or else the effects are irreversible and he's going to die. Dastardly East Germans.

Accent throws Sandwich a watch to put on MacGyver's wrist that will count down the 6 hours. Which is very helpful. Then he shows MacGyver (and us, the audience) that the antidote is a small red pill.

Accent: It's your choice MacGyver. To live.......or to die.
--cut to commercial

Sandwich and Cop are leading MacGyver up some stairs. They push him into a room with a cot and nothing else. Man, how is he going to get out of this one.

Oh wait. There's a sink and a toilet.

And some power outlets.

MacGyver: One time when i was a kid, i built a slingshot out of a couple of broken hockey sticks and an old inner tube. And you know, no matter how hard I practiced, I just could never miss.....my neighbor's window.
--RDA displaying some actually delightful comic timing.

So he's taking a spring off the mattress of the cot, stretching it out and securing it around a pipe near the door. Basically, he's making a slingshot out of the....boxspring? The thing that holds the mattress. He has secured a spring to each corner of this thing.

And he just took a moment to have some sweat and double vision.

He's taking his belt off and using it to connect the sink to the power outlets. He turns on the sink, and the water goes along the belt to the outlets, and down the wires to the power box, which starts dripping.

Sandwich is eating a sandwich. He and Cop hear the dripping. They slowly walk over to the power box, stand there for a second...AND THEN THE POWER BOX SHOOTS OFF A BUNCH OF SPARKS AND STUFF.

They run upstairs, one of them saying that Accent had said MacGyver might try something like this. Haha, so why weren't you more diligently prepared?

MacGyver lets the Boxspring/Slingshot go and it bowls over Cop and Sandwich. MacGyver hightails it outside, but the hallucinations/double vision stuff has started, so he's kind of moving a little slower than usual.

He almost gets hit by a big truck. And he stumbles off.

He looks kind of like a zombie, actually. He's stumbling along a fence. He's having trouble and all of a sudden a couple of teenagers are walking past. One of them is Fisher-girl!

Her friends tell her not to help him because he's a drunk and she's a runaway, but she goes to help him anyway. Her friends leave. Because they're shitty friends.

She sees a cop and starts to go over to him, even though she's a runaway and "the last thing [she] needs is a cop], but he remembers Cop hitting him and tells her not to go over to the cop. And then he falls over. She helps him up and helps him walk off.

Fisher-girl helps MacGyver along while Accent narrates the plan for the serum. Fisher-girl helps MacGyver into the place where she's staying which is like an abandoned building. Not too safe looking.

Accent tells Non-accent to track down who has seen MacGyver stumbling along.

Fisher-girl's place is HUGE. It's like a warehouse or something. She leads him to I guess her main living area and fills a basin with some water. She gives him a cool washcloth for his neck. She shows him that she has hooked up an old car battery so that she can have lights on.

Then she tells him her name and he doesn't remember meeting her. She offers him some of the fish he helped her catch.

She has him debone the fish while she "starts the stove" which is essentially a candle or something.

She tells him about her abusive upbringing. Even drug-addled, he wants to help a kid in need. He is truly the Greatest American Hero.

She has some schoolbooks and plans to get her diploma and all that.

And then the excruciating pain starts in on MacGyver.

Cut to Non-Accent, Cop, and Sandwich (eating again) talking to Fisher-girl's shitty friends. They tell them they don't want to hassle her. They just want MacGyver.

MacGyver is having Nightmares (EPISODE TITLE). He's remembering some of the events leading up to the injection and then he has a hallucination of Accent coming in and trying to smother him with a pillow. He jerks upright in bed as Fisher-girl comes in. She asks him what the matter is.

He has some more memories of earlier that day and then looks down at the watch. There's only an hour and a half left. And he remembers basically everything now.

Unfortunately, Fisher-girl has come to tell MacGyver that Cop, Sandwich, and Non-Accent are snooping around outside.

MacGyver snaps into action. He puts two chairs in a row. He puts one of the car batteries on the back chair. He puts an old cathode ray tv screen on the front chair. He's setting it up so that when the bad guys come in the door, they force the chairs together and short the fuse and blow the tv screen.

Then he turns on a transistor radio to lure them into the trap. Fortunately, there's a rockin' guitar-heavy song playing, so they come right up.

Sandwich opens the door and the tv screen EXPLODES!

Meanwhile, MacGyver and Fisher-girl are upstairs. Mac sees a firehose and starts unwinding it. He goes to a room with a window and Fisher-girl starts to get a little nervous. She says she hopes MacGyver knows what he's doing and MacGyver says he hopes so too.

Non-accent sees the firehose, goes to the window and looks out. He doesn't see anybody either way. They must have escaped! He turns to leave the room with Cop and Sandwich, but Sandwich says WAIT. He goes over to a closet in the room and opens it. Nothing. Ok, so they must have escaped. The three of them run out of the room.

The camera goes to another boxspring (did this warehouse used to be a boxspring storage facility?) and MacGyver and Fisher-girl come out from under it, having successfully misdirected the bad guys.

Now they're walking down the sidewalk and MacGyver is asking Fisher-girl to call Pete and deliver him a message. She doesn't want to leave him. It's a SUPER windy day. I imagine they filmed this in like October or November 1985. It's that kind of wintery wind. Does California get that kind of wind?

So this is actually pretty good plotwork. MacGyver is looking worse and worse, but he's not hallucinating as much and his memory is getting clearer. Which, of course, means he's about to die. We should look at the watch again.

MacGyver is going to go to a warehouse. He sends her off. Sexy saxophone music plays.

1 hr, 7 minutes remaining.

Ok, so the warehouse he's going to is the one that Accent and Co took him to initially. Makes sense. That's where the little red pill is. Oh. Hey I forgot something kind of crucial in Accent's poison layout. The time? It's a general guide. He seriously said something like "if you haven't taken the antidote by then, give or take a couple of minutes...." haha so I'm thinking, the watch alarm is going to go off, the tension will be at an all-time high and THEN he'll get it. Let's watch and find out.

MacGyver is watching Sandwich lean against the car. Sandwich is not eating. He looks hungry, though. He's all antsy. There we go. Sandwich pulls the sandwich he had in his pocket out and starts to eat it. MacGyver uses this opportunity to run across the street and behind the car. He begins to let the air out of one of the car's tires. Sandwich notices immediately and, c'mon, we would have judged him even more harshly if he hadn't. He's leaning on the car while he eats.

Sandwich starts to circle the car to investigate. He sees the leaking tire, bends down to investigate...AND GETS A CAR DOOR TO THE NOGGIN.

Let's hang on a second. He noticed the tire leaking, but didn't notice the door opening and closing? Hmm. I think Sandwich deserves some pretty harsh judgement after all.

Also? LOCK YOUR CARS, BAD GUYS! Seriously, how many times does MacGyver take advantage of lazy villainy?

So Sandwich is out and MacGyver sneaks into the warehouse. He sees silhouettes in the office talking. Accent, Non-accent, and Cop. He looks at his watch: 22 minutes. There's a transition from his watch to the clock Accent set for himself so that they could both know how much time Mac has.

Non-accent is giving Accent grief about losing MacGyver. Accent makes the point that, if MacGyver is the only one who knows where the list is, and he dies, the list is as good as gone. Then he pays Non-Accent.

MacGyver is out in the warehouse, scoping out some rope, a smoke alarm, and some sheets of plywood. He has a plan (of COURSE he has a plan. do you think a little "fast approaching death" would stop him from coming up with a plan?).

We cut to Fisher-girl on the phone, getting hassled by the Feds because they think she's prank calling them. But she gets the message to the receptionist or whoever.

Mac has tied one thing of rope around the smoke detector and then used another thing of rope to bind two of those big jugs of water that you use for water coolers together. He throws the other end of that rope around the rafters and starts hoisting the water jugs into the air.

Meanwhile, Pete is FINALLY getting the message that Fisher-girl sent him. He snaps into action.

Ok, at some point, MacGyver lit the rope around the smoke alarm on fire. So that he had time to set up the jugs and get hidden. The smoke finally reaches the alarm and it starts to go off.

Accent sends Cop and Non-Accent to check it out. They walk closely together and MacGyver calls out to them. He's sitting on the steps up to the room he escaped from. They draw their guns. He tells them that he's giving himself up. We see that he has the rope to the jugs under his foot. THey tell him to come down and he does, releasing the rope, which drops the jugs onto the plywood and that knocks a bunch of barrels onto the bad guys.

Oh. I guess he put the plywood sheets up against the barrels. Probably around the same time he lit the rope.


So that's a neat way to take out your opponents without breaking their necks or skulls, which is what would have happened if Mac had dropped the jugs directly onto their heads, like I thought he was going to.

They're not quite down yet, so Mac jumps down and does one of those "hit you with a fist formed by me clasping my hands together" things on both of them.

He then gets out of sight. Accent comes out of his office, gun drawn. He sees Non-Accent out cold and goes to the front door to look out. MacGyver runs and TACKLES him. They go sailing over the trunk of the car.

Fisher-girl is running.

Mac and Accent are fighting, but Mac is kind of losing. Fisher-girl runs up just as Accent knocks MacGyver to the ground. Accent doesn't know Fisher-girl is there. The sound of sirens appears in the distance. Accent pulls the canister containing the antidote out of his pocket. He tosses it down a sewer grate where Mac can't get it. MacGyver tries to get it, then slowly and weakly approaches Accent. Accent says that MacGyver doesn't have the strength left to hit him. And for a moment, it looks like he's right, and then MacGyver SOCKS HIM IN THE FACE. Accent goes flying. Fisher-girl runs by Accent and asks MacGyver what he meant by "Antidote". MacGyver explains that he's been poisoned and needs to get that vial and fast.

MacGyver runs over and grabs a metal rod and starts slamming it against a fire hydrant. Fisher-girl plays the obligatory incredulous witness and MacGyver explains that the impact of metal on metal makes a temporary molecular realignment. Mac has made himself a temporary magnet. He runs back to the sewer grate.

He puts the rod through the grate and starts pulling up the antidote. But it falls back down.

You know what I would have done if I was Accent? Not have the antidote pill in that vial. That way, MacGyver uses his last minutes desperately trying to get the vial and then when he realizes it's empty it's too late.

MacGyver tries again. He's almost got it. Almost there....and he's got it! Accent didn't do what I would have done and the pill is there and MacGyver takes it and looks at his watch. He has nearly 2.5 minutes left. So, really he had a lot more time than the music would have had us believe, huh?

Fisher-girl holds him while he recovers.

You know, they could have called back to the beginning and had her use her fishing pole for something. Or her fishing skills. Maybe she could have used what MacGyver taught her that morning in some way.

Also, it's a good thing the vial that held the antidote was magnetic. It almost seems like plastic would have been a better choice. But who am I to judge?

EPILOGUE

MacGyver retrieves the list and goes to talk to Fisher-girl. He shows it to her, throws it around a bit, talks loudly about it. It's a good thing Fisher-girl isn't a secret East German spy. He tells her that it's a bargaining chip that she can use. He's going to talk to Pete about arranging a Government Scholarship! Aww. So heartwarming. :)

That's it for "Nightmares"! See you next week!

NEXT WEEK: DEATHLOCK

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