The MacGyver syndrome

There’s nothing like an old TV show to make you realize how old you are and nothing dates a TV show as when it uses technology as a prop. I realized this many years ago as I was watching reruns of the old Mission Impossible TV series. The villain is cornered by the MI team and with as much evil as his Eastern European accent could command, he threatens the team with something like: “I have in my hand the codes to launch the world’s nuclear warheads!” — waving a six-inch diskette in the air.

A floppy diskette! It looked so…lame. It wasn’t even one of those hard three-inch diskettes or a CD or a mini-disc and certainly not a microdot like the one used in MI3.

This was a six-inch floppy disk, with a capacity of only 640 kilobytes, holding the world’s nuclear launch codes! I thought it was hilarious. Of course, back when the world was still divided by the Cold War and the Berlin Wall was still a wall — 155-km.-long and sanctioned by the Soviet’s Nikita Khrushchev — and not a museum piece, the floppy diskette was impressive. Seen today in the context of all the spy ware available online, in computer shops and in corner stores that display them alongside Boy Bawang, well, the nuclear codes might as well have been written on a Post-it note and stuck on Mr. Phelps’ refrigerator door.

So what would MacGyver have made of today’s flash drives that contain a gazillion kilobytes? Would he have thumbed his nose down and instead used the filament wire support of a light bulb to make his own data storage? Incidentally, in one of the episodes he used the filament wire to pick a lock in under 60 seconds; the bald dudes on Myth Busters tried it and it took them 50-plus minutes, during which time the villains would have already flown to a private island and started sipping pinacoladas.

That was the beauty of MacGyver though — he wouldn’t have cared for diskettes if he had to break codes or stop a nuclear war. As a matter of fact, he didn’t care about guns either. If he were hanging upside down from a tree and his legs and hands were bound, he would use the button on his shirt to fashion a laser beam that would melt the ropes to free him, do a somersault over the branches, one of which he would later use to pry open a guided missile — all under 60 seconds. Rather than shoot a gun — which distinguished him from the other TV series of covert agents, The A-Team, who certainly liked their firepower — he’d just wrestle his enemies to the ground and use dental floss to secure them...and still make it look believable. 

MacGyver was the worst argument against the right to bear arms. The late Charlton Heston, one-time president of the National Rifle Association, would have shot him in the head and damned him to hell.   

It helped a lot in the believability factor that actor Richard Dean Anderson was hot (and I will not apologize for our tastes in the Eighties, which included hairspray strong enough to turn your hair into Kevlar, glam-rock fashion and, unfortunately, Rick Astley). The only uncool thing about this secret agent was his first name: “Angus,” which is probably why everybody just called him Mac or MacGyver and he never really had a love interest.   

If women suffer from the Martha Stewart Syndrome (you know, making cupcakes the shape of emperor penguins, decoupaging drawers, and wallpapering the doghouse), men suffer from the MacGyver Syndrome. They will attempt to fix the stereo thinking that splicing the wires repeatedly will somehow make Rick Astley sound a lot less gay. Or they will spend half a day taking a busted oven toaster apart and the other half of the day trying to get to the mall, finally realizing that spending P500 on a new toaster is not such a bad idea.  Or they will try to fix the leak in the kitchen sink until you’re standing in ankle-deep water when they could have simply gone outside, walked to any light post on the street and taken note of the dozen signs that said: “Wanted: Tubero. Call 87612.”

My husband R. used to obsess about the remotes in the house. They made him feel like God. Imagine gaining control of a machine from 20 feet away. Like in many households, the TV remote was our symbol of power struggle, the prize for the pissing contest. Naturally, he nearly lost his mind when I accidentally tossed the remote into the washing machine — along with his wallet containing all his credit cards and IDs.

Ah, yes, those were the good old days.

Men liked MacGyver because he gave them a glimpse of what physics and chemistry can do. And because they had no knowledge of these two subjects themselves, they believed it all. Apart from his DYI tricks for saving the world, the show would have been as dull as dishwater; the plotlines were tired and uninspired. Yet, fansites on the Internet and Wikipedia describe in detail what he did and how he did his tricks.

Admittedly, you learn a lot from the show that you can use in your everyday life. Like, say, you wake up one day and suddenly have to carry explosives leaking nitroglycerin across an uneven terrain. How do you keep them from exploding in your face? Well, apparently you can use sand from your rose garden to absorb the shock.

If you want to tap a phone line, you can use a coat hanger’s wires to switch lines in the junction box — never mind if you can simply crawl under the window and listen because the villains are talking too damn loud.

If you need a telescope, use a newspaper, the crystal covering of a watch, and a magnifying lens. Supposing you were under surveillance, what do you do for distraction? Screw up the radio frequencies by using a bowl and a juicer. To fix a broken fuel line, use your ballpen.  To create fog, use a cleaner and ammonia. To repair a spark plug, use a nail. To build an incubator for eagle eggs, use foam and vegetable oil. To create supersonic frequencies, use a metal bottle pourer’s nozzle. 

How does he know all this shit? 

Like a woman trying to balance the budget by scrimping here and there, he was a very low-maintenance secret agent. Just give him a Swiss Army knife and a roll of duct tape and he’s a happy camper. He showed us how to use ordinary objects to solve unbelievably complex and world-changing problems. In the pilot episode alone (the show ran for seven seasons, from 1985 to 1992), he used chocolate to plug a sulfuric acid leak, he turned a gel cold pill into a bomb to blast a hole in a concrete wall, and short-circuited the timing device of a nuclear warhead with a paper clip. 

I wonder if, in the throes of passion, MacGyver could unhook a woman’s bra as easily with one hand.