Channel J: MacGyver’s Anti-Gun Time Capsule

In the wake of the Buffalo shooting, the gun debate rages on, as it always does.  It’s baffling to me that there are still two sides in this debate, but the one side is so adamant that no one takes their guns away from them that they’ll always trot out all the old excuses whenever it’s suggested that maybe our access to guns needs to be more limited.

“But it wasn’t a gun that killed those people.  Another person killed those people.”  “If you don’t let someone have a gun, they’ll just use a knife.”  “It was their mental illness that caused them to kill those people.”  And so on.  So now ten more people are dead because certain people in the United States are too selfish and self-centered to realize that there’s a problem, united under the rallying cry of, “They’re gonna take your guns away!”

Quite frankly, it’s hard for me to trust someone if they’re carrying a gun, especially if I don’t know them.  Are they going to just suddenly start shooting, and how do I know they’re telling the truth if they answer in the negative?  There were over 19,000 homicides involving guns in the United States in 2020.  Even if they can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that they’re not going to shoot me on purpose, a further 535 deaths were preventable accidents.  That’s 535 deaths where “nobody’s gonna get killed”.

Nobody’s gonna get killed.

Gun control has been a topic of conversation for decades, due to the risk of accidental injury and death.  It was only in recent years that we’ve become increasingly aware of the potential for homicide, even though violent crime has always been a thing.  There was, for example, 10,828 homicides involving guns back in 1999, the farthest back I was able to check.  But I guess those nearly eleven thousand lives are a small price to pay as long as you can wave your gun around whenever you want.

Over the years, various television shows have tackled the topic of gun violence, like the Gargoyles episode where the writers almost killed off Elisa Maza until they realized that they were going to kill the only strong female character in the main cast (and a person of colour, too) outside of the villain Demona, and replace her with a white guy.

MacGyver was famous for his aversion to guns, but it wasn’t until season four when we found out why, in an episode called Blood Brothers.

Originally running from 1985 to 1992, MacGyver starred Richard Dean Anderson as the titular character, a hero who preferred to use his ingenuity to save the day instead of a gun.  Granted, many of the situations he thought his way out of weren’t situations where a gun would come in handy in the first place, but he definitely had his share of moments where ingenuity defeated a bad guy with a gun

Blood Brothers opens in 1963, with a group of four boys pledging to return in 25 years to dig up a time capsule, no matter what happens.  In the present day, MacGyver arrives in his home town of Mission City, Minnesota, remembering both good and less than good times.  I imagine that would be true about anyone returning home, and if I were to drive back to Revelstoke, there’d be some things I’d cherish and some things I’d just as soon forget.

“The decisions we make shape our lives.  When I was a kid, I made a bad decision about a gun, and my life was never the same.”

In another flashback to 1963, MacGyver and friends are pooling their money to buy a gun and a box of bullets, and Jess expresses his misgivings, but MacGyver assures everyone that it’s going to be cool.

In present day, a young man named Shawn is chased down by a gang and threatened, but is bailed out by his friend Danny.  One of the gang pulls a gun and both Shawn and Danny flee, but a car belonging to Spider, the gang leader, gets damaged as a result and in his anger, Spider promises to kill them.

Danny confronts Shawn about using crack, but Shawn swears he’s clean and that he just owes a couple hundred dollars to Spider.

MacGyver arrives at Chuck’s Hunting And Fishing, a shop owned by his childhood friend.  Chuck dismisses MacGyver’s invitation to follow through on the promise they made twenty five years earlier and then proceeds to finalize the sale of a gun to one of his customers.  According to the writers, handguns require a police permit and it takes about seven days to acquire one, but rifles are cash and carry, and so the customer buys one while MacGyver stands there looking rather uncomfortable, especially given what happened when they were all young.

“If he doesn’t buy it from me, he’ll buy it from someone else,” Chuck says, one of the classic excuses made when selling guns.  He offers to take Mac fishing and they can all stay at Neil’s cabin (Neil being another of their friends from twenty five years ago), with the implication that they all forget about the time capsule, as if Chuck is trying to avoid the subject altogether.

I don’t know what the laws were for buying a gun in Minnesota in 1988, but a news report published thirty years later confirmed that everything shown in the episode, if true then, is still true today.  It takes a permit to acquire a handgun and an assault-style rifle, but shotguns are cash and carry, no permit required.  Although handguns require you to be 21 years old, an 18 year old can acquire a rifle.  You may be dismayed to find out, though, that anyone can go to a gun show in Minnesota and buy a gun without a background check, and this includes selling handguns to 18 year olds.

The “alleged” shooter in the incident in Buffalo often complained about how the gun laws in New York were, in his words, “cucked”, but he was clearly still able to get the gun he used, and if the laws in Minnesota are anything to go by, they aren’t cucked enough.  Unless loopholes are closed, such as the one allowing guns to be sold at gun shows without restrictions, tragedies can and will continue to happen.

Chuck’s son Danny arrives at the shop, and Mac meets Neil’s son Shawn for the first time.  Fun fact, at this point in the series, MacGyver believes he has no children, but in the last episode of the series (and second to last to air), he finds out he has a son and retires from the Phoenix Foundation to take care of him.

Chuck reveals that he never told Danny about what happened when he was a kid, and MacGyver replies,

“It wasn’t just what you and Neil did.  I was responsible.”

Chuck gives Mac a compromise.  If Neil can be talked into going, then he’ll go, too.

Meanwhile, Spider’s broken windshield has been fixed and he decides that the first thing he’s going to do is follow through on his promise to kill Danny.

“If we’re gonna own this town, it’s gonna take power.  Do you know how to get power?”

The answer, of course, is fear, delivered with a gun.  The answer is always a gun, apparently.  The Buffalo shooter was convinced that white people were being forced out of positions of power and being replaced by people of colour, the so-called “white replacement theory” that Republicans seem very obsessed with.  His solution was, of course, to acquire a gun and kill as many of them as he could.  “Allegedly.”

I love how someone can commit a crime, even broadcast themselves doing it, but until a court agrees that they committed the crime, everyone has to pretend that it’s possible they arrested the wrong person, or that it’s possible no crime took place in the first place.

MacGyver’s next stop is the police station, where Neil’s working as a police officer.  Neil also doesn’t want to go, and Mac confesses that he doesn’t either, but he has to, because he always fulfills his promises.  The gun from twenty five years ago is still being held as evidence, and it serves as a sobering reminder to Neil about what happened.

Meanwhile, Spider attempts to kill Danny via drive-by shooting, and shoots up Chuck’s Hunting and Fishing as a result.  Shawn and Danny end up having an argument about what to do and Danny tries to get him to tell his father about what’s going on, but Shawn’s reluctant, much to Danny’s dismay.

“What do you want from me?  Do I have to take a bullet for you, too?”

Shawn comes up with a plan to get the entire gang arrested, but Danny has to lie low until Tuesday.  Then, when Spider gets a new shipment of drugs in from Los Angeles, Shawn will phone the cops, Spider will be busted and Danny’s in the clear.  Danny, meanwhile, works in his father’s shop, and the solution to him seems obvious.

MacGyver catches him hiding a gun in his pants and confronts him.  Danny tells him about the situation, as if that justifies the use of a gun.

“Hey, nobody’s gonna get killed!”

MacGyver, however, isn’t convinced, and for good reason.  He knows what can happen with guns.  But instead of going and talking with his dad, Danny runs off with the gun, and despite that the police manage to round up some of Spider’s gang, Spider manages to slip away along with one of his accomplices.  All they have to do is kill Danny and the gang’s in the clear because no one’s left to testify against them.  As for Shawn?  Well, they know they own him, so he won’t be a problem at all.

Sure enough, Spider forces Shawn to tell him where Danny is, and it’s up to MacGyver to rescue Danny and defeat Spider.

The entire rescue mission brings back uncomfortable memories for MacGyver.

“I still don’t like this.  What if we get caught?” asked Jess while they loaded bullets into their gun.  But it wasn’t as if they were doing anything wrong.  Guns were awesome and cool toys, and nobody’s gonna get killed.  They were just going to shoot it off a few times, like in the movies.

Despite a head start, Danny’s running scared and he doesn’t realize he’s making it incredibly easy for Spider to track him, what with footprints, dropped bullets, even the noise of a door falling off its hinges.  He might as well be shooting off flares and calling out, “Hey, come get me!  I’m right here!”  Fortunately, MacGyver’s following the same trail, and between him and Spider, I’d say Mac’s the smarter one.

The bottles shattered one by one, impressing Chuck and Neil.  They hadn’t known that MacGyver was such a good shot.  Jess declined the chance to shoot next, offering instead to just keep score.  Neil took his turn next, and got ready to fire.

Danny traps Spider and his accomplice in a hallway in an abandoned hospital and flees, and the sound of retaliatory gunfire alerts MacGyver to his position.

The last bottle shattered, and a satisfied Neil looked around for something else to shoot.  MacGyver was shocked and horrified to see his friend take aim at a bird in a nearby tree, and he knocked the gun away before Neil could pull the trigger…

Danny flees from Spider, but just as MacGyver catches up to him, he slips on the bullets he spilled earlier, falls down a flight of stairs, and the gun goes off, hitting him right in the chest.

…but Neil’s grip on the gun slipped and the gun tumbled through the air.  As it landed, the gun fired a single bullet, and Jess went down like a rag doll.

Nobody’s gonna get killed.

MacGyver was quick to rush to Jess’s aid and pleaded for Neil and Chuck to help, but the two friends got scared and fled, leaving a distraught Mac behind to try to help Jess in any way he could. 

The rescue mission turns into a survival mission for MacGyver and Danny.  Mac takes Danny to a treatment room, where he searches for the means to treat Danny and keep him alive.  He assures Danny that he’s going to be okay.  He certainly is much more well supplied this time around, and he might also be trying to convince himself that things will be different this time.  He has no time to dwell on this, for Spider and accomplice are on their way, having used their shotgun to blast their way through the door.

MacGyver, having been abandoned by Neil and Chuck, knew he had to work quickly.  With nothing on hand except a pair of bicycles, he modified one to carry Jess and hooked it up to the other, then quickly rode through the woods to get to the nearby road, where he attempted to wave down a passing car.  At first, it seemed like no one cared enough to stop, but eventually he managed to flag someone down who sent for help.  However, when medical help arrived, it was too late, and Jess was gone.

Nobody’s gonna get killed…

Thinking quickly, MacGyver mixes up a chemical solution to resemble blood, which he then uses to fake a trail for Spider’s accomplice to follow.  Punk kids are stupid, so he’s easy to subdue, leaving just Spider to deal with.  It’s Spider who finds him, though, and MacGyver’s held at gunpoint.  Danny is quick to hide, and Spider is dealt with fairly easily, but Danny’s survival is in doubt.  He pleads with Danny to stay with him while memories of Jess’s final moments continue to play out in his mind.  Both Danny’s friend Shawn and his father Chuck are forced to look on as MacGyver tries to keep Danny alive long enough for medical help to arrive.  His efforts are not in vain, for when the ambulance arrives, Danny still has a pulse and he’s carried away to a real hospital to receive treatment.

Mac, Neil and Chuck dig up the time capsule as promised, and although Jess never did make it back twenty five years later, I’d say he has a pretty good excuse.  He’s one of the approximately 400-600 people who die annually in the United States from accidental shootings, from instances where people are reckless with guns because hey, nobody’s gonna get killed.  The objects held in the time capsule bring back memories for each of the surviving friends, and at the very bottom of the capsule is a photo of the four of them, and a note on the back in Jess’s handwriting, reading “the best pals a guy ever had”.  Jess, Mac, and the two boys who ditched them when they were needed the most.