MacGyver was a pedophile

Any little kid who saw the show MacGyver probably remembers it as having been awesome. He could make anything with a pocket knife and a thought, and pull off a mullet while he did it. The oversight we, as children, had was that Angus MacGyver may have tried to be our buddy, too. A really close buddy. An illegal buddy.

After flying some model airplanes with a friend of mine, my roommate and I went to a certain outlet we wouldn't go to if it weren't for Chronic insomnia. We weren't looking for anything in particular, just passing some time, but somehow "passing some time" ended up with us going home with a wooden spoon, a bag of chicken nuggets and MacGyver: The Complete First Season. We made some chicken nuggets and popped in disc one.

Episode one, directed by Alan Smithee (who's not a real director), opens with MacGyver and his little buddy palling around. The next thing we know, MacGyver has to stop some disaster or other, blah blah blah. None of the rest of the episode matters to the thesis of this. What matters is that, at the end, MacGyver and his "little brother" are playing basketball. On the surface, there is nothing wrong with this. Except that MacGyver has a basketball hoop in his living room, which is filled with toys and he is alone in this house with the little boy. Now, MacGyver's innocence can still be inferred from this. After all, he's just helping this inner city youth have a real role model. Nothing wrong with that. Sure, the bachelor with a room full of toys is a little suspect, but we can ignore that.

Until episode two, when MacGyver slaps a Burmese boy on the ass. Now, it's a sporting gesture, sure. My junior high football coach slapping me on the ass and yelling "Where is your buttpad?" may have been the *ahem* butt of many jokes. But the fact that MacGyver seems to concentrate all his attention on this little boy seems a little kooky. Him hugging him throughout it is a little strange. But him slapping the child on the ass is what we would call a little much. At this point, my roommate and I were dumbfounded, and we rewinded to that scene and played it in slow motion. And it was still just as creepy.

The third episode is where things go even more overboard. MacGyver teams up with an adorable gypsy girl, trying to get a watch back. The watch has a secret hidden in it, perhaps the secret to MacGyver's sketchy past. At the end, MacGyver rescues the gypsy girl's family and they make it to the Austrian border (from Hungary). MacGyver ensures their passage to freedom, then proceeds to pick up the little girl, kiss her on the mouth, spin her around and nuzzle his nose with hers, looking intently into her eyes.

The rewind/slo-mo process happened again. It got creepier. We watched the fourth episode, the last on the disc, intent on finding out if there was anything else to corroborate our new theory. Unfortunately or fortunately, there were no children in the episode ... just John Vernon. There was brief speculation that the connection between MacGyver and Vernon's character may have somehow related to Vernon molesting a young MacGyver, but it may have just been wishful thinking, like when creationists find a flaw in modern evolutionary theory to prove that there's a God.

At this point, we went to bed. We didn't pop in disc two, but rest assured, the saga of MacGyver's private life isn't over. We are going down a dangerous road, the road of discovering that an icon of USA Network may well have been a pederast.