MacGyver this Friday continued his and Riley’s infiltration of Codex, ultimately ending Season 4 with quite a bang.
Arriving at Codex’s hidden bunker/mini city and after being welcomed by Aunt Gwen, Mac was led away to meet Leland (played by Tobin Bell), the proverbial man behind the curtain. Mac impressed the visionary with his knowledge of history — namely, how the Black Plague brought much death yet gave birth to the Renaissance. Mac also ably answered the old man’s quiz, about who to save from an overburdened lifeboat — and with the same reply as a previous would-be recruit… named Russ Taylor.
Mac and Riley, along with other Codex teams, were dispatched from the bunker, traveling separate routes and each armed with tablets that would direct them to a rendezvous point. Mac and Riley’s truck, however, soon enough was waylaid by a spike strip, planted by Russ and Desi. Mac contended that he and Riley merely were undercover, and regrettably to launch their covert op did need to gas their pals. Mac gains his Phoenix friends’ attention with his observation that Codex has a nuke in their possession, and even more so with his recent discovery that Russ was once wooed by Codex. Russ explains that one of the reasons he revived Phoenix Foundation was to stop Codex, after which Mac fixes his flat and he and Riley go on their way.
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Arriving at the rendezvous, where they met up with Scarlett and her team, Max observed that there was no nuke in sight. Meanwhile at the bunker, Lelend shared with Gwen footage of Mac confabbing with the Phoenix Team on the roadside, before revealing that he has no choice but to eliminate them (and Scarlett’s team) by having a Cobra attack helicopter light up the rendezvous point with a missile. Luckily, Mac smelled a trap just in the nick of time, pulling him and Riley to safety behind a sheet of metal once the blasts began.
Mac and Riley, with Desi and Russ, tracked the truck that was carrying the nuke. As Desi pulled up right behind it, Mac leapt onto the back and slipped inside, but was soon confronted by Gwen. Mac had just about convinced her to accept that there is a better way to save the world than ending so much human life, when the Codex Goon Who Used to Be on Agents of SHIELD (wait, who is now driving?) joined them in the back of the truck. A fight ensued, in which Mac found himself dangling from the back door. And though Gwen tried to pull him in, he let go of her and fell out… to grab onto the railing of the high bridge over which they were passing.
Desi pulled over and pulled Mac up, after which he revealed that he had jammed his phone inside the truck door, serving as a GPS tracker. They followed it to a dam near Yellowstone Park, which Codex had long ago purchased for the purpose of drilling a deep hole beneath it. Their plan is to detonate the nuke inside the dam, and the rushing water would flood into the hole… which leads to a magma chamber inside the supervolcano beneath Yellowstone. The pressure would build and lead to an explosion of long-held gases and ash that would saturate the atmosphere and eliminate summer for the West Coast for years!
Grabbing this and that thing and the other, Mac built a device that would act as a “shotgun” and safely-ish explode the nuke. But during the course of another scuffle with Codex Goon Who Used to Be on Agents of SHIELD — ended by a gunshot from a redeemed Aunt Gwen — the time-delay fuse got busted. Mac was prepared to trigger the blast manually, but Gwen offered to do it instead, reminding her nephew that, as his mother Ellen said in an earlier flashback to Angus’ birth, he deserves the world and the world deserves him. Mac, as well as Desi, Riley and a hobbled Russ, then scampered a safe distance away before the explosion.
In the aftermath back at Phoenix Foundation, Russ gave Mac and Riley back their (shredded) badges, before putting Mac in charge of things while he recoups from a broken leg. Mac’s first order of business? A trip to Washington, D.C., where, wielding his mother’s and Aunt Gwen’s binders of data, he detailed for a subcommittee the important steps needed to save Mother Earth.
