Spoilers MacGYVER reboot review thread
- Thread starter Christopher
- Start date
Just watched the "murdoc" episode. Pretty good. The new Murdoc is good. The junkyard was a nice nod to the classic ep and the remote controlled guns was definitely more in the style of the classic Murdoc. The ep did use the "bad guys have terrible aim" cliche a bit though like in the junkyard where it looked like Murdoc had a straight shot at Mac and kept missing badly. Funny how these expert assassins always miss easy shots when the plot calls for it. It is also interesting that Bozer finally knows the truth. That should change the dynamics a bit.
Tonight we had a collection of locations with bombs and the ex CSI dude whose name I forget stepped on a bomb and had to be rescued. Not sure how far behind you guys we are here in Aus.
Agreed, the actor/or his acting (don't know him in other roles, to be fair) was really bland. More over-the-topness would have been the way to go. Still liked the episode though, the show is slowly growing on me.
This new Murdoc was better than I thought he'd be. The actor did well at playing an appropriately sociopathic assassin.
Before I saw the episode, I thought they might do a twist where this guy wasn't really Murdoc and that he was just a stand-in for someone else like Nikki who would turn out to be the real Murdoc.
Before I saw the episode, I thought they might do a twist where this guy wasn't really Murdoc and that he was just a stand-in for someone else like Nikki who would turn out to be the real Murdoc.
That the terrorists could besiege the American Embassy for hours like that was so implausible. Latvia is a NATO country. local police too scared? send in the Latvian military. This would have caused a major international scandal. The US have multiple military bases in Germany, two hours by air from Latvia, reinforcements wouldn't take that long.
Anyway, despite the shows flaws my opinion is that MacGyver isn't a great show, but it's nevertheless fun to watch.
Anyway, despite the shows flaws my opinion is that MacGyver isn't a great show, but it's nevertheless fun to watch.
Last edited:
No more far fetched then Hawaii Five 0 where 5 people storm a secret CIA prison to rescue someone's kidnapped mother, and friend. And they get out alive and hunky dory at the end..
We just had the prison episode where Mac was in prison last night. So how far behind does that put us against the US with episodes?
OK that's pretty damn good for being on the other side of the world....... The gap used to be much longer for us a while back.
Yeah, Latvian police, militaray, Denmark, Swedish. Estonian. German, Finnish militaries...
Last edited:
The last two episodes have really captured the classic MacGyver style of story. First we get an episode where while visiting his old middle school he has to save a little girl and her dad from criminals. Then in tonight's episode we get Rilye's mom kidnapped and Riyle forced to help the bad guys. They've even avoided killing anyone in the last two episodes. Jack didn't even have a gun tonight.
Anyone see the new episode last night "screwdriver" with Nikki? It's a pretty big episode.
Last edited:
Yep, I watched it. Wow! If this had been a continuation or prequel of classic MacGyver, that would have been character assassination of Thornton on the level of what the first Mission: Impossible film did to Jim Phelps. But for a complete reboot/restart, I'm willing to go with it.
I'm assuming if Nikki lives to the end of season one they'll bring the actress aboard full time for season two. I'm just glad they're not dragging this out like some Hawaii Five 0 story arcs.
Not sure I would have used Keep My in Your Heart for that ending song - due to it's placement in the Warren Zevon canon and meaning, I would reserve it for character deaths.
Yeah, considering that it was a completely different Thornton than in the classic show, I did not have any issue with what they did. In fact, I wonder if the writers are planning on bringing in a new leader of Phoenix who will be more similar in personality to the classic Pete Thornton.
I hope they keep Nikki around. I am thinking she will be a semi-regular because I think bringing her back as a full-time regular might make the main cast too crowded. Plus, in the pilot, Nikki was the tech person which is now being covered by Riley. So having both characters as regulars might be redundant. As a semi-regular, Nikki would be very cool. Like in the classic show, she could team up with Mac's team from time to time just for those extra special missions.
Hmm. I'd been vaguely contemplating the possibility of catching up with this show, but this makes me leery. The M:I film was arguably a reboot anyway -- even aside from the ultimate revelation about him, Jon Voight's "Jim Phelps" was written more like the hardnosed first-season lead Dan Briggs than the more easygoing Phelps -- but I still didn't like the way it played out.
Well, I think a big difference is that the Jim Phelps of the original show was a very well established character. And the show had established him as a very patriotic, ethical person. So the reveal in the first M:I movie completely contradicted years of established characterization. Also, fans had grown to really know and care about the character over a long period of time. This Thornton does not have that level of characterization. We barely knew her. And I don't think she was really that beloved of a character either. So revealing that she was traitor does not have the same emotional impact as for M:I. It is more like revealing new info about a character rather than radically changing existing information.
Mmm, not really. The very nature of the show was that the team members spent almost all their time impersonating other people, and so they were deliberately approached as virtual blank slates -- which was why it was so easy to change the cast from season to season. Episodes that actually focused on the characters as themselves were quite rare, except in seasons 1 and 5 and the '88 revival. In the original show, there were maybe 2 or 3 episodes that gave us any insight into Jim's personal life. There was one in season 3, I think, where he had a romance with a defector, and there was one in season 5 where he returned to his hometown and helped to solve some murders that just randomly happened to coincide with his visit.
And I'll give you patriotic, but ethical? Not exactly. The thing to remember about M:I is that it was really more a heist show than a spy show. It was along the same lines as The Sting or the heist sequence in Topkapi, but network standards of the era wouldn't let a show portray criminals as heroes, so they had to be pulling their heists and scams against enemy nations or the mob, in the name of national security. But their methods involved a lot of lying, stealing, fraud, kidnapping, and often tricking or manipulating bad guys into murdering/executing each other. They couldn't have done their job if they'd been too concerned with ethics.
Yeah, but we barely knew Voight's Phelps either. If you're making an analogy with Peter Graves's Phelps and the legacy of his portrayal, then the corresponding character is Dana Elcar's Pete Thornton. And I'd say Pete was very much a beloved character that we got to know and care about over a long period -- much better, in fact, than we ever got to know Phelps.
I stand corrected on the ethical claim but the patriotic claim still stands.
I guess for me the difference is that the Thornton on the new MacGyver being a female with a different first name, I never thought of her as the new Pete Thornton, but rather as a completely distinct character. So I never compared her to Pete Thornton. As a result, I never got upset that she was not portrayed the same as Pete Thornton. Whereas, it was easier to see the two Phelps as being the same character hence the outrage that movie Phelps would act so contradictory to classic TV show Phelps.
It's ambiguous whether the M:I movies are a continuation or a reboot. True, Peter Graves was offered the Phelps role, so the apparent intent was to be at least a loose continuation, but since he turned it down, there's nothing in the film series to make that explicit (although Abrams did talk with Leonard Nimoy about possibly reprising Paris at some point). In fact, Rogue Nation even has a line saying that the IMF is 40 years old, which would put its founding in 1975 and decanonize the entire original TV series if taken literally.
And even if the movies are in continuity with the series, it's easy enough to assume Phelps was an impostor. Those weren't exactly unheard of in M:I. I kind of like to think that the mission Ethan Hunt is assigned at the end of the first movie is the rescue of the real Jim Phelps.
Similar threads
