- Title: MacGyver – The Golden Triangle
- wiki: link
MacGyver Monday takes us back to another adventure featuring science-adventurer Angus MacGyver (Richard Dean Anderson). Things are a bit rough on MacGyver in “The Golden Triangle” as our hero gets knocked out both in the opening gambit, involving attempting to prevent top secret plans from being sold in a junk yard, and later in the main storyline where afterward he’s strung up to die slowly in the jungle sun. In the main story, MacGyver is sent to Burma to recover a poison cannister from a crashed cargo plan whose contents have found themselves into the control of a local general who makes his money having his minions force villagers to harvest his poppy fields.
MacGyver befriends a young boy (Bryan Price) from the village and even after his escape and completing his mission he returns to the village to help them bolster defenses and take down General Narai’s (George Lee Cheung) soldiers when they return, ultimately freeing them of Narai’s control. Memorable moments from the episode involve MacGyver escaping a trash compactor in the opening gambit, MacGyver’s first escape from the village (using an invention making use various plane debris including flares and an inflatable raft), and seeing the various traps help the mostly unarmed farmers defeat the soldiers.
Some of the aspects of the episode have aged better than others including the simplistic view “The Golden Triangle” takes to the all English speaking Burmese people who MacGyver befriends. While the episode can also get dinged by some for its “white savior” setup, MacGyver is always the savior in every episode regardless of location, nationality or creed. By design, that’s simply the construct of the show, although being the only white man in a foreign land certainly highlights it in the show’s second episode.
