Every week I will be posting a new topic titled "Episode Discussion". In this we will discuss an episode, what we liked about it, what we didn't like, etc.


Episode 129 - The Prometheus Syndrome

MacGyver plays detective to try and track down a psychopathic arsonist before he strikes again.

I voted good on this one. An episode in style of Blown Away, a movie that still had to come out. This was a good one with MacGyver only able to defuse one out of the three bombs. The death of his friend Earl was a great scene, also when Prometheus lures MacGyver into his trap.
This episode has also ingredients of what MacGyver is all about. Locked up in a dark place with no windows and only one way to get out. Magic! That's my favourite scene of the episode.

Again some trivia: Prometheus is the same guy that plays Coach Smiley in several earlier episodes of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
Just found out that Kimberly Scott also shows up as a cop in World Trade Center with Nicholas Cage.
Jack McGee shows up in Crash as the owner of gunstore and as a bartender in Breakdown with Kurt Russel.
Jenette Goldstein (Rachel) shows up in Richard Donner's Lethal Weapon 2, in Fair Game with William Baldwin, James Cameron's Titanic and has guest starred in some episode of the third or fourth season of 24.

Oh and can somebody please explain me how it's possible to open up the bomb from the back of the case with a piece of cable, the filling of a ballpoint pen or the pin of a badge. What happened with lock picking?

One of my favourite episodes! This one, along with The Stringer and GKM were the only three Mac eps I had access to for the better part of ten years, so I think it says a lot about this ep (and the others, too!) that I can still watch it over and over again! It's such a nail biter and full of red herrings, plus quite a few moments that make me doubt Mac's intelligence (*ggl*).

Personally, if I was MacGyver's friend, there's no way in heck I would attempt to disarm a bomb with him!!!

Mac

I went with excellent on "The Prometheus Syndrome". I enjoyed the suspense of the episode as MacGyver is trying to track down this maniacal arsonist!
The actor that had for the arsonist did a really good job I think.
And we see one of MacGyver's best friends get killed trying to stop a bomb- and then it gets personal for MacGyver! So you know he's going to get to the bottom of this one. And the MacGyverisms are great of course- anytime you have MacGyver using bombs for his own purposes- like breaking down a door- or later one DEFUSING one- as he's done many times over the series (as opposed to actually making one- which I think he did like, zero times! And no, I'm not counting the fertilizer "bombs" in "Last Stand"- whatever explosions MacGyver has created have always been as a distraction or delayment but never for destruction and dismemberment! - sorry, I was on a roll with "d" words )
Anyway, this episode is a suspenseful one with MacGyver even getting in some nice solid punches at the end! I enjoyed it a lot.

Good ep! Loved seeing Randolf Mantooth again. I used to be such an Emergency! junkie!

I really liked the part with Mac borrowing Mama's mojo powder for his bomb reconstruction... the many uses of saltpeter!

Yeah it was great. By the way it's even pretty freaky, that he actually met the guy after the first bomb blew up.

This just is one of the better episodes. Action, suspense, character development. Defusing the first bomb is great, Earl dies, MacGyver jumps on the fire fighter to cover him up, defusing the second bomb is even better when he realizes he's trapped with only three minutes to spare and defusing the third bomb is like third time's the charm where in he finally succeeds in defusing one.

We've never seen this guy before, or heard any reference to him in any other episode...

I think "best friend" is a bit of a stretch.

okay, good friends then.
Or just a friend of MacGyver.

In which episode does Mac refer to the bomb squad he used to be in? It has a bomb on board of a ship? (aircraft carrier?)
I really suck in remembering names and titles!

it was countdown i love that one

I liked this episode, because it had an early series feel to it. But yet another over the top female cop/type left a bad taste in my mouth. Can't tell if it's bad writing or acting.
The landlord being the baddie was a cool twist, but the baddie himself, "Prometheus" was too forced. He wasn't that sinister. He was just a jerk who was trying to get even.

Well, the how was shown in the episode. The better question should be why? Supposedly, he was disarming the motion detector. I guess we're pretending that the motion detector was set toward the front of the case and lifting off the lid wouldn't set it off? But I gotta say, if MacGyver disarmed my motion detector once, I'd revamp the design on the next go, duh!

I did not like this episode, for several reasons.
First, with Mac's track record of friends getting hurt for him, and his guilt thereafter, he certainly didn't blame himself at all for Earl dying. Out of character for him. And if any of the accidents were ever his fault, this one ranks pretty high on the list.
Second, who cares if an abandoned building blows up? It's worth risking your life for? Didn't make sense to me.
Third, the fires previous to what we see are huge, five alarm fires, yet every time a bomb explodes, it's just a small, contained bomb that does little to no damage to the building.
Hated the ridiculously *moooo*y female cop as well.
Oh, yeah, and Mac and the fire dept/cops are so busy trying to analyze Prometheus as the Greek figure and what he's all about, and it ends up just being some guy getting revenge. Total lack of climax for me.

well it is season 7.. don't expect great things.

Yeah, that is a very good point Rocky . But for season seven it is a really good ep. I really liked this one, because I had no clue who was the criminal, and that guy's voice disguise thing was really awesome (I need one of those ) Any way, I really liked it.

I used to love Emergency! It was great seeing Randolph Mantooth playing off all things a fireman, years after playing a paramedic.

Loved this one with the firemen, it was also interesting to find out the woman wasn't the one who was trying to burn and kill people.

This is one of my favorite season 7 episodes. Of course, considering how bad some season 7 episodes are, that might not be saying much....

Kidding aside, I really enjoy the sinister feel in this one. It reminded me a bit of a Dr. Zito episode, actually. And it continues the trend of focusing on fun action/suspense rather than on moral lessons.

One of the only things I didn't like about it was the fact that Mac had yet another disposable "good friend" whom we've never seen before. I think the episode would have carried more weight if the "good friend" was somebody we'd actually seen before, like that police officer who showed up a few times in season 6, for example (I forget his name). Or the character played by Kim Zimmer (can't remember her character's name either-- she was in the two Dr. Zito episodes and "Mac's Women".)

This episode bears some surprising similarities to the Backdraft movie.

Interestingly both the movie and this episode were made in the same year... conscience?

Question: Who played the guard that showed Mac around the newspaper office? I'm trying to remember, but I can't think.

I know exactly what you mean. This is the biggest issue I have with the show, the generic friendships. I mentioned this before, saying that if Mac had a facebook account these days he'd have a trillion "friends", judging by his loose definition of friendship. I don't think this is what they intentionally had in mind for the character, I just don't think the writers looked at things in a broader scope, or the 'big picture' if ya like. Between the woman issues & butterfly friendships, you'd almost think he had a personality disorder. :-\ But again, I don't think they intended to give that impression.

It's rahter ironic that you use Facebook in a sentence about loose friendship. Considering the majority of facebook "friends" are online online connections whom haven't met, spoken or even live in the same country in real life.

Also I don't see why MacGyver couldn't have met people and made friends through out his career. His job was a people orientated one and he was always meeting new people. Why wouldn't he find people that he got along with and got to know away from work?

And whats wrong with referring to people you get along with and can share a joke and stop and talk to in the street as friends?

Ok, I admit, personality disorder was too harsh, I must have been tired when I wrote that. I'll try to clarify what I meant when I get home.

Ok, thought about what I was trying to say in regards to all Mac's friends, so lemmie try again.

I don't think anyone will argue with you that Mac would meet many people in his line of work and make a good number of friends and acquaintances, that's simply a given. What I find issue with (and I believe Miasma does as well) is the steady stream of "best", "good" and "close" friends which seem to appear out of nowhere and disappear just as quickly. I'm not implying this was a flaw in MacGyver's personal character, but I think it was certainly a flaw with the show's writers, that they didn't step back and look beyond a single episode at a time and try to establish a little better continuity for things like who was close to Mac, and the overall time line.

Picture this. Let's say you know someone named John. One day you're attending a party and John introduces you to his best friend Brian, whom he grew up with, has known his whole life and seems to be really close to. Now six years go by, you and John have hung out together many times, gone to car shows, sports events or whatever, but one day you realize that in all the time you have known him, John has never again mentioned his best buddy, Brian, nor any of his many other friends you've met. At that point you might start to think something was a little odd about John, don't you think? Well that's almost the way the writers made Mac appear. Of course we can read between the lines and assume Mac spent time with all these people outside of events we saw on the show, just assume that because we think Mac is a great guy, but what if we didn't? What if we only went with what they showed us? In that case I think Mac starts to look a little like our oddball friend, John.

The writers could have been a bit more carful with who were his close friends, they should have saved that label for characters they wanted to bring back every now and then (god knows season 7 could have used all the help it could get). Ironically the characters those chose to bring back where ones that seemed to annoy Mac, like Penny and Jack.

My facebook remark was a joke. With the way they had friends constantly popping out of nowhere, I can well imagine they'd have given Mac a new one every single time he sat down in front of his computer.

Eric Close from Without a Trace.

Eric Close from Without a Trace.

Thank you, Rocky.

By the way, I voted excellent.

One of my favourites of Seventh season!
I voted good!

Jenette Goldstein was also in the cast of "ALIENS" by James Cameron (Great movie by a fantastic Director)!
She played "the Private Vasquez".

Well said!
Oddly enough, as a kid, I never noticed it so much. I think the first time it REALLY hit me was when I watched "Trail To Doomsday," and his "good friend Paul" (whom we had never even heard of during 7 seasons of the show) dies. That's when I first thought, "Oh come on... are we really supposed to have any sort of emotional attachment to this?" And then as I started rewatching the series on DVD, I realized how often they did this sort of thing with Mac's "friends".

I agree!!!
It's the thing that I ever hated of Mac's show: a lot of "friends" come out of nowhere!!!
And all the inconsistencies of his past life about the thing he has done and the people that he met!!!!

To be fair, that is an all too common TV trope. Perhaps the most infamous example was the Family Ties episode where Alex's best friend is killed in a car accident, and the audience has never even heard of the guy up to that episode. A related trope is that on some shows, you can tell with some degree of certainty that someone is about to die, i.e. on the original Star Trek when Kirk and Spock head into a dangerous situation with a Lieutenant So-and-so.

MacGyver tended to combine the two: when we met a new character whom Mac described as an old friend, I'm not sure if it was quite a 100% correlation, but that person usually ended up dead within the first half of the episode. "Countdown" is an excellent example of this, and Mike almost counts, having appeared in only one previous episode (and there were inconsistencies between the two regarding her relationship to Mac to boot). "Prometheus" is another such case, although Mac's relationship with the friend is less well defined in this case. (It's ever so tempting to blame that on Season 7 and the writers being bored and/or lazy - and hey, maybe that really is the reason.)

I've also noticed elsewhere that Mac tends to refer to his newer friends as if he's known them a lot longer than he really has. Off the top of my head, I know at different times he talks about Penny and the Woodmans that way, when in both cases the viewer knows he's only known them for a couple of years.

For all that, I liked "Prometheus". Being confronted with the same bomb three times was a good look at why he became so handy in the first place, learning from his mistakes in a field where most people don't get that chance. The antagonist-turned-ally is rather a cliche by this time, but in this case she has a compelling reason for being antagonistic at first. Also, by S7 standards especially, it's a refreshingly straightforward story in which he's just after saving the day. Overall? Not bad.

By the way, it was on watching this episode that I was able to identify two concrete things I don't like about Season 7. First, his new apartment sucks. I loved the first loft and liked the houseboat, so those would be tough acts to follow in any case. But I just don't get why Mac would be happy living in a place like this after those homes. I do get that he had to find a new place in a hurry after losing the boat, but surely he could have done better than that. Secondly, the lack of a voiceover gives the show a whole different feel. I know that many earlier episodes had only one or two lines of voiceover, but that still gave the show a certain warmth other adventure shows didn't have, like MacGyver was actually telling you all about his latest exploit. (Magnum PI also made good use of that trick, come to think of it.) Season 7 already feels like a different show because of the change of scene, inferior storylines, etc, and the lack of voiceovers just adds to the dissonance.

I knew I recognised the woman who played Rachel Bradley. John Connors mum on Terminator 2. Her hair was exactly the same!

I thought either her or the other guy Mac went to see had done it. It was easy to work out seeing they both wore gloves. It wasn't much of a shock to see who it was.