I Watch TV: MacGyver

MacGyver 

Season four on the new MacGyver and the Phoenix Foundation are taken over by a former private military contractor who has become better (he adds the team to his private intelligence agency in order to save lives etc.) They are opposed by Codex, an anti-Phoenix, who even have their own anti-MacGyver, MacGyver’s aunt Gwen (Jeri Ryan). Their take on the oncoming climate catastrophe is that people won’t do anything about it, so there will be some necessary casualties in order to hit a “reset switch”.

MacGyver (the character) has a slightly inconsistent determination to use less-lethal methods to defeat dangerous enemies; he will not kill or sacrifice people, though he’s perfectly happy to have a couple of gun-toting sidekicks follow him around and shoot at people. The point is, necessary casualties is not really something he goes for, and thus Codex’s attempt to recruit him into the family business (the plan they’re following, File 47, was devised by his mother) doesn’t succeed.

This is rapidly followed by MacGyver’s dad sacrificing himself to save MacGyver, and also a nuclear meltdown in which MacGyver has to press the button sealing in to his death a family man (who they had suspected of being behind it all). Moral dilemmas!

Watch This: It’s a short, punchy season of 13 episodes of solving problems, blowing people up and found vs birth families in the shadow of a coming climate apocalypse
Don’t Watch This: It’s just some dumb stuff about improvising tools
Previously: On MacGyver