IN REVIEW: MACGYVER: SEASON 4 – Right + Wrong + Both + Neither

Synopsis: When Russ’s former love, Emilia, is kidnapped by the same rebels he fought during the military contract days, he takes the Phoenix team to a small, impoverished town to rescue her and rid the town of the rebels for good.

The Story

Picking things up from where last week left off. Maddie is suspected of being Titan. The leader of the secret organization known as Codex. MacGyver and his friends refuse to believe it and after some time find out that their computers were hacked and a photo from last week’s soccer game was tampered with. Meaning that Maddie was not there. Having gotten that drama over and done with. The team doesn’t get much time to breathe as Russ has a mission for them, which involves them taking on a military group that has kidnapped his ex-girlfriend. As they arrive at the town. They find that it has been completely enslaved by a small rebel military group under the command of some dude called Anton. But what starts out as a simple smash and grab rescue mission becomes far more complicated and political.

The Acting

Maximilian Osinski puts in a pretty good performance as the main villain Anton who has had past dealings with Henry Ian Cusick’s Russ Taylor, which makes for some highly dramatic scenes between them. The scene where they first meet each other is brilliantly played out as Russ is reminded of the man he used to be and is finding it rather difficult to link that up with who he is now. We also get some pretty charged scenes between Russ and MacGyver when the team complains about the method that Russ is looking to implement with regards to the mission. This makes for a great scene at the end where Lucas Till’s Macgyver comments that the missions he did before he met Russ were far simpler. They went in saved lives and stopped the bad guys. In this instance, they went in. Saved lives and Russ wound up bribing the bad guys to stay away.

Overall

A pretty decent episode, which adds more layers to Russ Taylor’s character and sort of changes the dynamic of the Phoenix Foundation somewhat. The hunt for Codex continues as the episode closes out with Maddie making an ominous phone call in which she says to the person on the other end, “I think she’s back.” Which has us all asking who’s back? Might it be possible that Maddie has an evil twin?