MacGyver: #137 The Mountain of Youth (S7E14)

Episode Title: The Mountain of Youth
Episode Number: S7E14

Ranking: 137 of 138

CBS.com

Summary: Jack Dalton drags MacGyver along on a quest to discover the Fountain of Youth in a politically unstable third world country.

Quotable Moment: 

MacGyver: You're up to something more than the betterment of mankind, I know it.  Deep inside, I know it!

Best Part: The entire first scene where Jack is trying to convince MacGyver to help him find this Fountain of Youth.

Worst Part: Any time that I was spoon-fed a ridiculous piece of information and expected to accept it without questioning its validity, which happened far too often in this episode.


Thoughts:

• 3:25: Mac's face when he sees Jack come whistling into sight is priceless.  If there's one thing I love about this episode, it's the interaction between Mac and Jack.  I'm a fan of Mac getting ruffled feathers - I think because he's normally so easy-going - and Jack never fails to push Mac's character and mellow-ish nature to the limit.  So I definitely enjoy any scene in which Jack is driving Mac insane.
• 3:33: The hug!  Be still, my heart - the bro hug.  Now, this, as readers of this blog will come to find out early on, is my fatal weakness: bromance - a strong friendship between two bros and getting to see how they care about one another, despite that darned male bravado, is like catnip to me.  You know, if I were a cat.  That metaphor got away from me a bit, I think.
• 3:45: Aaand now Mac's trying to strangle Jack, which I find hilarious.  Brokenness of this episode aside, I'm kind of wishing I'd ranked it higher just because I love this first scene so much.  I love the way RDA and Bruce McGill play off one another - they've got great chemistry on screen, and they're so funny.  However, this one scene isn't enough to redeem the travesty to come, but for the record, I adore this first scene.
• "Boy, have you ever become a cynic!"  I don't think it's just Mac, Jack... after all, you do have a tendency to bring out the *ahem* best in him.  That's why it's called best friends.  Right?  Right?
• Mac's problem is that he's a pushover when it comes to his friends - I'm looking at Jack Dalton and Earl Dent here.  Bless his little environmentalist heart, he tries to say no to Jack all the time, but it never seems to work out for him.  Granted, Jack Dalton does have considerable charisma and charm on his side, but I don't think that's why Mac caves.  I think he cares so much that he can't help but do what his friends want.  I can sympathize.  I can't say no to my younger sister.  I mean, she's never dragged me to a deadly third world country and made me help her search for the Fountain of Youth, but she has forced me to watch goopy romantic chick flicks, which is just as bad, right?
• The scene at 6:30 where Mac gives in but is unhappy about it takes me to Rocket's tantrum in the Guardians of the Galaxy movie.  "You're ... making ... me ... beat ... up ... grass!"
• When Jack says, "This is a mystical place," he almost sounds like he's being sarcastic.  This is what I'm talking about, saying the episode needs to decide what it wants to be.  I can't even tell if Jack is serious about it!
• About 15 minutes in, Jack is seriously starting to get on my nerves.  Was over-acting a requirement for this episode?  Really with waving his hands at the heavens and yelling melodramatically?  Is this really going to be a thing in this episode?  Because it's going to get old... fast.
• The music in this episode sounds like seafaring music, not finding the Fountain of Youth music.  It's not bad at all, though.
• 21:40: MacGyver is enlightened?  Is that what the whole staring into the chief's eyes thing was about?
• I do still enjoy the bantering between Mac and Jack in this episode, but you have to look closely to find these fun moments between the insane leaps of logic, cliche storytelling, and contradiction that runs unhindered throughout.
• We've gone from Fountain of Youth to H-bomb in a split second - from frivolity to dead seriousness.  My head's spinning from all the circles this episode is making me turn in.
• 43:30: This may be completely irrelevant to whatever is happening in the episode, but the guard who MacGyver just punched outside of the pump house has really nice, shiny curls.  I wish I could make my curls look as nice as his.

Nitpicks:

• Right from the start, I'm confused.  A prophecy - about Mac and Jack?  MacGyver, it seems, sometimes has a problem deciding what it is and where it stands.  For example, I commented in my last post about "The Kill Zone" that I felt the advanced tech/borderline science fiction theme was a little out of place on a show like this.  My... unease, for lack of a better term, regarding this episode stems from a similar place, I believe.  Not even a full minute in, and I'm already at a loss about what I'm supposed to be thinking and feeling about this episode.  Is this a farce?  Or am I supposed to be taking it seriously?  Is this an episode that throws caution to the wind and expects its audience to suspend its disbelief?  I think that's what's most unsettling about this episode: The episode itself doesn't seem to know what it wants.  At the same time, it portrays a situation so "out there" but also seems to earnestly want you to take it seriously.  It is essentially afraid to take itself too seriously, but it also tries to hard to make a somewhat farcical story into something "real": this results in a jumbled mess of an episode that contradicts itself at every turn and is impossible to read.  Choose a side, show: realism or supernatural, satire or seriousness!
• How does Jack know that the girl is 42 years old?  She had to have told him, right?  And, theoretically, people sometimes lie, correct?  So wouldn't it stand to reason that Jack doesn't know her age for sure?  She could just be vain, or delusional, or even deceitful.  Is this Jack's evidence for the Fountain existing?  It doesn't make sense.  Also, it is absolutely irritating how astonished Mac looks after Jack tells him her age, and how the dramatic music starts playing like it's some great revelation.  This is "dumbing down" at its finest - do you really expect your audience to take this statement at face value, like MacGyver apparently does?  Just because someone says something doesn't mean it's automatically true.  For example, I could say that I'm a astronaut who's flying a hot dog, and per MacGyver's logic, you have to believe that I'm piloting an Oscar Meyer Mobile. The first time I watched this episode, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop - for Mac to point out that she could have lied about her age... but he didn't.
• "She's living proof that the water works."  How is she living proof?  Unless you can find a way to scientifically prove that she's 42 years old, you don't have any evidence, Jack - you'll get laughed at.  They'll think you paid some college student to pretend to be a 42 year old, you'll be called a fraud, and you'll never work in this town again!  Geez, how stupid do they think we as an audience are, anyway?
• If this water is so effective, then why does her father look so old?  In fact, why are there any old people in their village?
• First of all, the soldiers have worse aim than Stormtroopers - I mean, they had three people to shoot, and they weren't even moving targets for long!  And then - "They're getting away."  Yeah, at a leisurely pace.  All they'd have to do to make sure that they didn't get away is aim their guns at the slowly retreating figures and fire, instead of standing around like idiots.  These soldiers' incompetency knows no bounds.  
• The bad guys really aren't that smart in this one, are they?  Why'd they both have to go check the disturbance at the same time?  Shouldn't one of them have gone and the other have kept watch on, you know, the place they're supposed to be guarding?
• I still don't know how any company would agree to collaborate on a project like this on mere hearsay.  If you're going to advertise and sell anti-aging water, you're going to want to make sure it's the real deal, so you're going to want to study it over a period of time and get actual results, instead of doing a few tests and using a girl who could very well be lying about her age as proof that it works.
• They seriously didn't find the video tape?  They didn't look in the only potential hiding place in the vicinity of where those who stole it were discovered?  How they've even managed to get this far in their plans is a wonder.
• The scene between the girl and her ... twin brother?? ... was weird and unsettling.  First of all, I don't appreciate once again being told some outlandish piece of information and being expected to accept it at face value, but here we are.  Secondly, he's a terrible person.  He goes up to her and tells her that she saved his life, but he won't be able to save hers, so... sorry?  I mean, Murdoc has more honor than that, and he's an insane hitman with serious serial killer tendencies!  And the whole thing about knowledge and power.... what even is he talking about?  Whatever plans they have for this facility?  Is anything going to be explained in this episode beyond "magic water ... prophecy ... H-bomb"?  Also, I just realized that if he really is her twin brother, then he shot his father earlier, without hesitation.
• If they had closed the door behind them, then they might have given themselves extra time to escape, because it looked like the soldiers were just passing through the hallway, and what alerted them to the fact that their prisoners had escaped was the gaping open door.  Geez Louise.
• I know I'm being extremely nitpicky here, but did they have to use the ladder to take those two guards out?  Wouldn't they have had the same effect if Jack had taken one and Mac had taken the other?
• "Things outside of this valley ... and inside of myself."  That's really cheesy, actually.  And what all did she discover on this journey of theirs?  That her brother is still a jerk, and that people are actually much worse than she thought they could be?  Her experiences have chipped away at her innocence, but that's okay, because she found something inside of herself?  I think the writers were trying to be profound here, but the only thing I'm getting from this scene is a profound corniness.  

My Conclusion?

I don't want to rehash everything I made note of in the "nitpicks" section, but I will say this again: My overall impression of this episode is that it didn't even know what it was supposed to be, so how on earth were we expected to make any sense of it?  Yes, there's a plot - sort of - and there's dialogue - of a sort - and character growth - not really - but what does it all amount to?  Jumbled bits of story that switch from being farcical to serious in a heartbeat.  Dialogue and scenes which openly contradict one another.  Logical fallacies.  A meshing of realism and fantasy.  In essence, disorientation, nausea, dizziness.  Call your doctor if the effects last longer than the episode itself - you might be having an adverse reaction to "The Mountain of Youth."

In all seriousness, though, while this episode did have some entertaining and even - dare I say it? - endearing moments sprinkled throughout, overall the story is just too fundamentally broken to be taken seriously as an episode.  The thing about a story, no matter what kind, is that it needs consistency.  Even stories that aren't necessarily supposed to be taken seriously - episodes like "Harry's Will" for example - still need to have uniting factors.  In "Harry's Will," the story was united by the bizarre characters, the quirky music, and the slapstick humor.  And it worked, because that was what the episode was going for, and it stuck to that.  That's not to say that you can't have fun and serious moments in the same episode, but you need to have some consistency in the overall tone and approach to the subject matter.  Heck, you even need to have cohesion in the subject matter itself.  If the episode wanted to go with the prophecy angle, they should have stuck to it on a superficial level, as a satire or farce, instead of trying to marry this mystical idea to real-world politics and issues.  It makes the whole episode seem like it's chasing its own tail, trying to figure out what it actually wants from itself and from its audience.  The over-acting, the cliche dialogue, and "dumbing down" of the audience sure didn't help, either.

Next time, we'll be moving on from the "Fatally Flawed" category and into "Not a Fan" territory with an episode that, although it makes an excellent point and is well done as an episode, is much too depressing and difficult to watch for me to rate it any higher than #136

Let me know your thoughts on this episode in the comments!