It's not often that a TV show makes a permanent contribution to language, but many people will know what I mean when I say, "I had to MacGyver something together because I didn't have time to order the right parts." To MacGyver means to use whatever is at hand to solve a technical problem that under normal circumstances would take a lot more resources to do.
I first heard the word used that way when I was working on a research project with no funding. The right way to do it would have been to spend $15,000 on custom microwave components, but I didn't have that choice. So instead, I bought a used DirecTV receiver on eBay and took it to a friend's lab and did some minor surgery on it to achieve my own ends. A Korean graduate student of my friend's was watching, and said with a grin to my friend, "MacGyver!" So by the early 2000s, the word had entered the vocabulary even in Korea.
As I quit watching network TV some time in the 1970s, I had never actually seen a MacGyver episode, which aired in its original form from 1985 to 1992. So the other day we checked Season 1 out of the local library's DVD collection and watched the initial episode.
MacGyver evidently lives in the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. In case there was any doubt about this, the producers made no effort to hide the lettering on the side of the domed structure, which clearly gives away its real identity. This was also true of the supposedly secret location of some high-tech underground lab that suffered a massive explosion. Shots showing the above-ground entrance to the lab revealed that it was right next to a California TV station, where the call letters were clearly displayed on the roof.
Maybe these are signals to the viewer that a major suspension of disbelief is required to enjoy the show. With that in mind, let's get to the plot. Ignoring a spectacular rescue scene in Mongolia which had absolutely nothing to do with the main plot but got the pilot episode underway and established MacGyver's frankly superhuman powers, we saw two elderly scientists, one a guest of the underground lab, playing chess, followed by a shot of a bomb underneath the table just before it goes off and wrecks the lab, causing a crack in a sulfuric-acid tank that begins to leak, and cutting off the lower levels of the lab from the surface.
MacGyver responds to the call to fly out to the TV station—excuse me, the lab—and figure out what happened and rescue the people still trapped underground. And by the way, somehow the folks on the surface not only knew about the acid leak, they called some government agency which dispatched several tank trucks full of sodium hydroxide (lye, in other words) to neutralize the acid before it gets into the Colorado River, and these trucks are going to start flooding the whole lab with lye solution as inexorably as a law of the Medes and the Persians which cannot be revoked, at a fixed time. This gives the producers an excuse to superimpose a red countdown clock on the screen showing us exactly how many seconds MacGyver has to get down the elevator shaft while avoiding the CO2-laser security beams that will fry him to bits, rescue the survivors, and fix the acid leak.
Well, he does, of course, with the help of a nice-looking lady scientist (I think she was a scientist—she knew her way around the lab, anyway, but spent most of her time being awed by MacGyver and kissed him at the end). And on the way to all this, he uses such humble implements as a paperclip, a book of matches, some cigarettes (he needed smoke to see the invisible laser beams), and some chocolate bars he gets the lady to stuff in the acid-tank crack to plug it, avoiding the deluge of lye that would otherwise come from a beneficent government tank truck and kill them all. Hey, they were just following orders.
Now see, it sounds like all I can do is criticize the technical shortcomings of the show. But clearly I have the wrong attitude. What you need to do to enjoy it is to have the attitude of, say, a smart eight-year-old boy, who used to have fantasies like the following.
In Fort Worth when I was growing up, a constant reminder of the presence of Carswell Air Force Base was the sound of jet engines as the B-52 nuke-laden bombers took off on their regular patrols during the Cold War of the 1960s. I used to imagine that one day, they would get into some kind of bind at the base involving a nuclear weapon, and they needed somebody who knew electronics, but was also only three and a half feet tall and weighed no more than 80 pounds. As the Air Force doesn't recruit midgets, somehow they would find out about me, and a colonel in full uniform would show up at our door.
"Mrs. Stephan?"
"Yes?"
"You have a son named Karl David? Knows electronics?"
"Yes? Has he done anything wrong?"
"No, ma'am. But he has an opportunity to serve his country, if I could speak with him for a few minutes."
The rest of the fantasy would be essentially a MacGyver episode—I'd go down there, crawl into whatever confined space they couldn't get into, and use a paperclip to fix whatever was wrong.
That's the attitude you need to bring to a MacGyver episode. And judging by the popularity of the show both domestically and in dubbed versions worldwide, a lot of people managed to have that attitude.
In engineering ethics, sometimes we talk about moral exemplars—engineers who do the right thing in ethically fraught circumstances, sometimes at considerable cost to themselves or their careers. It's good to talk about such exemplars, because following in the footsteps of good people is one way we learn to be good ourselves.
I haven't seen much in the ethics literature about fictional moral exemplars, but I would have to say that MacGyver fits the bill. He clearly knows as much engineering as any of the regular engineers he encounters, he makes quick judgments based on incomplete information that always turn out to be the right ones (at least by the end of the show), and—hey—he gets to kiss the girl in the end, too. What more could you want?
Sources: I referred to the Wikipedia article MacGyver (1985 TV series). The complete first iteration of the show (there was a 2016 reboot as well) is available on DVD.
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