MacGyver season 2 episode 12 review: Mac, Jack, friendship, and fear
This episode was entitled “Mac + Jack,” and that makes a whole lot of sense given the fact that almost the entire episode was the tale of two guys trying to figure out how to survive and save the day in two different timelines. first, you’ve got the present, where the two parties were trapped in that aforementioned house trying to figure out the Ghost’s motives. Then, in the past we saw the first meeting between the two guys. Let’s just say that they didn’t exactly get off to a great start. There was instant conflict between the two and Jack wasn’t altogether interested in having to spend much of his time working with someone tracking down bombs. It wasn’t exactly his idea of exciting work in his final weeks of deployment.
Yet, it just so turns out that Jack got way more than he bargained for working with Angus. After all, Mac was right with some of his predictions, and it just so turned out that he needed Jack in order to get out of this situation alive just as much as Jack, in turn, needed him.
Who would’ve thought that the two would end up being such good friends? The flashbacks were, to quote Casablanca, the beginnings of a beautiful friendship. Apparently, the two got so close that Jack decided that he didn’t want to go home; instead, he ended up sticking around in the military to keep working with Mac a while long.
Back in the present…
The Ghost clearly had a plan that they’d thought out for a long time. The bomb at Mac’s house was essentially a decoy, given that there was another one planted that could take out a large percentage of Los Angeles. This is what sent the team on the hunt for clues … and they found a pretty massive one in the form of a giant bomb that was hiding within a garbage truck. The Phoenix Foundation had their own specialist working on it in Charlie, and basically what he learned alongside Mac is that the two bombs were linked. In order to stop one, the other needed to be stopped at the same time.
So what could Charlie and Mac do in order to save the day? Basically, it was garbage time! Knowing that it was the only was to disable the bombs simultaneously, Bozer, Charlie, and Riley brought the truck over to Mac’s house. They had to be perfectly synchronized, which was no easy task.
The big surprise
Jack and Mac got a step closer to finding Mac’s dad — after all, the closing of tonight’s episode gave us another small clue in the form of numbers. It’s not much, but it’s a start.
One thing we are confused about
Where was Samantha Cage this week? While we know she survived the cliffhanger at the start of the episode (read more about that over here), at the same time it would have really been nice to be able to see her in some capacity.
Related – Preview what is coming up on MacGyver next week
Final Verdict
While we were slightly bummed about the lack of Cage — especially given the cliffhanger — MacGyver season 2 did a great job focusing on the team working together to resolve a MAJOR crisis. There was a lot of super-tense sequences in the episode and, to go along with that, some great flashbacks. Mac and Jack were obviously the focus of “Mac + Jack,” and that worked because George Eads was so great in the hour as a whole.
Do we know who the Ghost is yet? Not really, other than that he’s one of the smartest, most-infamous adversaries the show has. That’s enough for now.
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