- Title: MacGyver (1985) – Soft Touch
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Throwback Tuesday takes us back to the original improvisational MacGyver (Richard Dean Anderson) armed only with genius-level intellect, a Swiss Army knife, and whatever he can cobble together to solve the problems of the week. “Soft Touch” offers the return of Penny Parker (Teri Hatcher) who MacGyver finds living in his apartment after bringing a Russian defector (Elya Baskin) to the United States. The trouble from episode comes not from those seeking the defector but instead an assassination plot which Penny unwittingly stumbles upon when starting her new job as a singing telegram girl (mostly due to the fact that every house in the suburbs looks exactly the same).
Aside from Hatcher, who is always fun as the recurring character who seems to trip over trouble at every turn, and Baskin as lovable Yuri, “Soft Touch” also gives us Robert Donner and Vincent Schiavelli as the kooky assassins Vince and Lyle. There’s not much MacGyvering in the episode, the first real inventiveness comes in the second-half of the episode when Mac rescues Penny and Yuri from a locked freezer. After the save, the unlikely pair are able to provide just enough help to stop the assassins from killing a foreign leader with a voice-controlled bomb during a City Hall press conference.