You may be asking yourself, why is he reviewing episodes of MacGyver? Good question. I thought it'd be fun and something to do. That's all. And I don't really consider it a review, so that's why I put it in the other Features category.

Episode title: The Heist
Plot summary: MacGyver must recover $60 million in diamonds from an ingenious con man.

Ah.. this episode is directed by Alan Smithee, a pseudonym used by the director of a movie or TV show if he wants to disown it. That's always a good sign. There's a lumberjack looking guy telling a fat bald paranoid man he needs to relax. The lumberjack opens a bulging sack to reveal diamonds. Apparently 60 million dollars worth. Then he says "You're an accountant Sims, figure it out, ha ha ha ha ha." And he shoots the fat man. We see a shot of the man's glasses with a bullet hole in one of the lenses. Hah, cute.

We cut to Washington D.C., where MacGyver is talking to a senator who says he hired the fat man. The 60 million dollars was supposed to be used to help suffering Africans. But the fat man ripped off the senator. Wait.. so he had 60 million dollars and he bought.. 60 million dollars worth of diamonds? Don't crooks usually exchange diamonds for money, not the other way around? Whatever. Apparently the senator has a daughter who was working with the cause in Africa, but now that the money is stolen she's just going to leave them all behind and try to find the lumberjack. Well, we can see where this is going. MacGyver talking to older man who has a daughter that does good deeds? I sense some sticky situations for both of them ahead.
Now we cut to the Virgin Islands, where the senator's daughter has been researching the lumberjack villain. The daughter who goes by the name of Chris Rodes meets MacGyver at the airport. She's holding up a big sign that says MacGyver. MacGyver casually walks up to her and uses the cheesiest line ever: "Your name is MacGyver? It's amazing, so is mine!"

She tells him all she knows about lumberjack villain, he has a small army and owns a hotel/casino in the Virgin Islands. Alrighty then. Apparently he's not a lumberjack, but a former mercenary. "They call him 'The Butcher' in Angola."
Lumberjack villain is talking to a group of generic attractive women. The extras in this scene are pretty funny. There are two kids on roller skates, one is wearing dress pants and a nice shirt tucked in, the other is wearing shorts with socks up to his knees. That doesn't seem like roller skating attire to me. Also, they're just standing there, looking straight ahead. Shouldn't they be.. you know.. roller skating?
Oh wait, I spoke too soon. They're watching lumberjack villain fight another man. It isn't just some random fight, it appears to be an organized event. What kind of weird hotel is this where they have fights on the front lawn? Anyway, lumberjack villain wins the fight easily. The crowd claps.
He talks to a woman who tells him they've found a buyer for the diamonds. Oh good. Now we can convert the diamonds we bought with cash.. back to cash.
MacGyver comes up with a plan to steal the diamonds from lumberjack villain. Chris claims this is impossible, ridiculous, and illegal.. but then decides it's a good plan after all.
The first step in the plan is to get a look in the casino's vault and find out if the diamonds are in there. MacGyver will win big in a game of craps and be invited to the vault, giving him ample opportunity to check it out. MacGyver does a terrible James Bond impression while they're getting ready to go to the casino.

MacGyver is walking outside the casino, on his way in. Chris drives past him on a scooter and as she's going by she actually says "I'm in disguise!" What the hell? MacGyver seems puzzled too, but continues walking into the casino.
A waitress accidentally spills a drink on some woman. The woman says "You stupid little fool!" That was terrible. If you're going to insult someone, you need to do a lot better than that. MacGyver walks over to the woman, standing behind her. Then while we hear him narrating a story about fishing, he ties a long piece of string around a paperclip, hooks the paperclip onto the zipper on the back of the woman's dress, then let's the line fall down to the floor and steps on it. Then he bumps into the woman and she walks away, causing the zipper to come undone and her dress to fall off. That pervert MacGyver. No wait, he's using this opportunity to cause a bigger distraction and steal the dice from the craps table.
MacGyver goes into the bathroom. He takes some powdered soap and pours it on the shoe shining machine.

He uses the machine to grind off an edge off each die. He keeps trying until one always comes up 4 and the other always comes up 3. Cut to MacGyver winning at the craps table. He keeps winning. Lumberjack villain starts to take notice and sends his woman over to find out who MacGyver is. MacGyver says his name is James Bond *roll eyes*. Lumberjack villain comes over to the table and starts pressuring MacGyver. MacGyver says he'll stop playing now, and with his final roll he switches his cheating dice with normal dice, and puts the cheating dice in his drink. Sly move. Lumberjack villain hands the dice on the table to a manager to get them checked out.
MacGyver says he'd be nervous carrying around all this money, so can he be taken to the vault. The diamonds aren't there.
They walk out of the vault and lumberjack villain reveals that they discovered the dice in his drink. He asks MacGyver to come up to his private office to "discuss" this. MacGyver obliges, but on the way there Chris causes a distraction and MacGyver runs away. They're already shooting at him as he's running around the back rooms of the casino. Jeez, all he's done so far is cheat at the craps table. That's enough to be shot at? He escapes.
They decide the diamonds must be in lumberjack villain's private vault, in his office. Once again Chris says his plan to get the diamonds out of there is impossible. This girl actually sort of reminds me of Jodie Foster. Jodie Foster if she couldn't act and had a horrible fashion sense. Anyway, she is eventually convinced by MacGyver's chest that the plan will work.

The overall plan is for Chris to cause a "riot" in the casino because MacGyver is going to make a lot of noise while he's getting into the vault upstairs. I guess they want all the guards to be down in the casino area so they won't hear it. He specifies that she should cause the riot at 2:10AM exactly. That sounds difficult.
MacGyver takes apart a phone and removes a small thin circular object. I think it's a magnet. He puts it in Chris' shoe. Ah yes, it is a magnet. The idea is to get to the roulette wheel as close as possible. She says it will be difficult to walk with the magnet in there, but she'll be ok. MacGyver obviously doesn't care. He's popping the stone out of her ring. I'm not sure what they're doing with that.
They're at the casino/hotel. MacGyver grabs a drain pipe and breaks into the handily labelled "Electrical Panel Room." He sets up a timer in the electrical panels so that all the lights will "go crazy" at 2:10AM while narrating something about Thomas Edison. Eh?
MacGyver exists a room labeled Utility with a device that we clearly saw him set up in the Electrical Panel Room. Strange. Anyway, the device is a small mirror dangling from a bent hanging iron. MacGyver sets it up on a camera so the camera sees a reflection of itself. He hopes the security guard will take long enough to come down to allow him to get into lumberjack villains office without being spotted by the camera or guard. He gets into the office and pulls the mirror off the camera just as the guard is walking down the hall. Whew.
He uses the ashes from an ash tray to reveal the lasers that will set off an alarm if he crosses them. He then notices an incredibly cheesy rotating fiber optic plant decoration that no sane person would put in their office unless they were preparing for an incredibly complicated and imaginative plan to get past the lasers.
MacGyver detaches one of the thick fiber optic pieces and carries it over to the lasers. He sticks one end on one of lasers, which I would think would already set off the alarm, but apparently not. Then he sticks the other end on the other side and it lights up. Now he can move it around and go underneath. Genius. Extremely illogical. MacGyver.

MacGyver finds the vault. It's a huge steel door with no visible locking mechanism to bypass. MacGyver can't figure out how to get in. Then he sees a bird in a cage and gets an idea. We cut to the security room and they say someone has set off the intruder alarm in lumberjack villain's office. Lumberjack villain goes to check it out but finds nothing. They don't know what set off the alarm. Until they see the bird is out of it's cage. They assume the bird set it off. Then lumberjack villain decides to go into the vault and check on it. What, in case the bird stole something? We see that it opens by sound. He makes 4 sounds with his remote and the steel door opens. He looks at the diamonds and closes the vault. Nice job.
MacGyver comes out of the closet and grabs four wine glasses and a bottle of wine. He adjust the amounts of wine in each glass until they make the correct sounds to unlock the vault. In one glass he has too much wine, but the other three glasses are all correct, so he decides he has to drink the wine. He makes a face that looks like it's incredibly painful and disgusting to drink alcohol. Oh that MacGyver, it hurts him to be naughty! Chris is starting to set off the riot.
We see lumberjack villain has more cheesy decorations in his vault. MacGyver breaks off a piece.

Chris uses her broken ring to mark the cards and asks another gambler if it means they're cheating. He says it does, then he totally freaks out and causes a scene. Gee, I guess it's good to have insane people when you're trying to cause a riot. Everyone starts punching each other, then the lights start flashing because it's 2:10AM.
MacGyver pours the diamonds down the drain pipe using the piece of lamp he broke off. Chris gets outside and sets up the drain pipe to drain into their trunk just in time. She drives off in her car. MacGyver comes down and drives off with the diamonds in his car. Uh-oh, Chris got stopped by lumberjack villain. They call MacGyver and tell him to come with the diamonds or they'll kill her. Damn women. Always causing problems.
Lumberjack villain's woman gets in the car with MacGyver and tells him to drive into a plane. Inside the plane is lumberjack villain and Chris. MacGyver tells Chris to use her ring. She scratches lumberjack villain's face and MacGyver shuts the door to the cockpit. They're in the cargo bay with the car. The pilots decide to get up to 30,000 feet where the lack of oxygen will kill them in the cargo bay. MacGyver simply says he has an idea, and we sort of see him doing something, but we can't really tell what. They put on helmets and get in the car. They drive out and a gigantic parachute inflates.

Where the hell did they get that? MacGyver and Chris make out in the car, which seems to be remarkably still and stable considering it's flying towards the ground at a high speed. The episode ends. I guess we don't care if lumberjack villain is caught? Ok then. Nice job Alan Smithee.

Written by