During his show’s seven-year run on ABC from 1985 to 1992,
MacGyver — the everyman with a Swiss Army knife who was also a mechanical genius and
international spy — faced off against a diverse series of adversaries: scenery chewing hitman
Murdoc — he’s getting his own video at some point — ruthless gangs of mercenaries, and thieves;
loggers, poachers, serial killers; cheating race car drivers, homicidal ex-girlfriends,
homicidal current girlfriends, bad hockey dads, and, as I covered in a previous video, guns.
But there was another enemy MacGyver came up against back in the day,
a resurgent evil that most people thought had been defeated decades before:
the Nazis. In 1989, MacGyver did a Nazi episode. And not only was it a jarring break from the
show’s usual breezy and cheesy tone, it also proved surprisingly — and upsettingly — prescient.
The episode is “The Ten Percent Solution,” and it originally aired in November of 1989,
early in MacGyver’s fifth season. It begins with a woman on a jog through a park being
chased and attacked by a gang of masked men.
I’d just like to note for the record that these goons are able to catch and grab this
full grown woman in a fraction of the time it takes Flea and his gang of mercenaries
to capture pint-sized Princess Leia in the first episode of The Obi Wan Kenobi Show.
Am I saying MacGyver is better than The Obi Wan Kenobi Show? Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.
Then, we cut to an art auction, where Pete Thornton and MacGyver — looking quite spiffy
in a tuxedo, his mullet in full flower — have come to purchase some paintings
for a program being run by the Phoenix Foundation for the purpose of buying art that’s been hidden
away in corporate collections and returning it to public display so that everyone can enjoy it.
And right away, I’m reminded that the Phoenix Foundation, a benevolent and socially conscious
private company that seems sincerely dedicated to fighting injustice and making the world a better
place, is by far the most unrealistic aspect of this show. MacGyver building a working ultralight
aircraft using bamboo, garbage bags and some duct tape? I’ll suspend my disbelief for that,
no problem! A corporation that does good for its own sake? You’ve got to be kidding me.
Anyway, Pete is bidding on this painting by Peter Paul Rubens. He blanches a little at the
price — it ends up going for over four hundred thousand dollars — but he wins it! Just then,
an old man named Sam rushes into the room and declares that they can’t sell this painting
because it belongs to him! It was stolen from his family! As guards are restraining him,
he mentions something about the ERR, and MacGyver notices a serial number tattooed on his arm.
Well. That’s never good.
Pete and MacGyver pay a visit to Dr. Sand, the Phoenix Foundation’s art expert, who is optimistic
that the painting, which was damaged in a struggle with Sam at the gallery, can be repaired. She also
catches Pete up on what the ERR was — a Nazi agency empowered by Hitler to steal artwork
and other cultural artifacts from Jewish families throughout Europe. It’s possible Sam is telling
the truth about the painting — and he says he can prove it. So, Pete heads back to the art gallery
to get the official provenance, while MacGyver goes to the police station to talk to Sam.
Meanwhile, this guy Hoggart arrives at a silver mine to have a meeting with Mrs. Brandenberg
about Sam, who they refer to as “the old Jew.” Brandenberg doesn’t like the idea that Sam might
be able to prove that the painting was stolen from his family by Nazis because that would threaten
whatever plans they have, so she tells Hoggart to have Sam killed. Then, she stares ominously at a
campaign poster for William Brand, a political candidate we glimpsed on TV in a previous scene.
Also, Mrs. Brandenberg speaks in a thick and quite theatrical German accent,
but I’m sure that’s just a random character detail that won’t turn out to be important. Moving on!
We cut to the police station, where we get the customary shot of a couple of
sex workers being brought in — because how else are we gonna know it’s really a police station?
MacGyver is talking to his pal Sergeant Gray and convinces him to let him talk to Sam.
No sooner does Sam walk through the door than an inmate tries to stab him! Luckily,
MacGyver jumps to the rescue. Then, Gray pulls his piece and blows the attacker away!
William Brand is talking to Mrs. Brandenberg, who is his grandmother,
and he’s worried because election day is only two days away! Brandenberg tells him to relax,
she’s got everything under control. Then, Hoggart comes back in and she reiterates
her order to kill Sam, and adds that Hoggart should also kill anyone who sees his proof
that he owns the painting. Hoggart’s like, “I’ll definitely do a successful killing this time.”
Of course, Sam is telling the truth about the painting, and he and MacGyver head to
his place in MacGyver’s awful truck that I hate. What was wrong with the Jeep?
Why couldn’t he just keep the Jeep?!
Anyway, Sam is showing MacGyver the proof of his ownership of the painting when Brandenberg’s
goons break in and abduct them. Hey, they look familiar — you know, if I didn’t know any better,
I’d say they were the same guys who attacked that jogger in the first scene.
The goons take MacGyver and Sam to Brandenberg’s silver mine. They’re ushered into Brandberg’s
office, where they find Dr. Sand, who was nabbed by Hoggart when she turned up to question him
about inconsistencies in the official provenance of the painting. Hoggart gets a tip on the phone
that Pete is about to discover their operation, so they decide to evacuate the silver mine.
But before they go, Brandenberg takes a few minutes to explain her evil master plan.
It turns out, she is the widow of an SS officer, and she acquired quite a bit of valuable art
through the Nazis’ campaign of theft, including the Rubens painting that rightfully belongs to
Sam. She sells items from her collection now and then to raise money to support her activities.
The big idea — which, like all supervillain plans worth a damn, includes a big map to
illustrate it — is to place Nazis in influential offices in five U.S. States — California, Nevada,
Oregon, Washington, and Idaho — and then, when the time is right, secede from the
rest of the U.S. so that those five states can form their own independent Aryan nation.
One of those people in influential offices — or so Brandenberg hopes — is her grandson,
William Brand, whose campaign for Congress she has been funding. Brand’s election campaign
has been built around tough on crime rhetoric, given legitimacy by a series
of recent attacks on joggers, like the one we saw at the start of the episode,
which we now know are being carried out by Brandenberg’s own people.
Brandenberg orders MacGyver, Sam and Dr. Sand to be taken to the mine. On the way in,
they run into Sergeant Gray, who is revealed to be one of Brandenberg’s people.
He reveals to MacGyver that he killed the would-be assassin at the police station in
order to keep him quiet after he failed to kill Sam, then he herds them into the mine
and locks them in the bunker where they had been storing their stolen paintings.
Then, they use the gas canister from a welding rig to turn the bunker into a gas chamber. Gray
wants to know why they can’t just shoot them, and Hoggart smiles wickedly and explains,
“Madame is feeling nostalgic.”
So, at some point there was a story meeting where someone said, “How about we do a show
where MacGyver has to escape from a Nazi gas chamber?” And then, they did that scene! It’s
a clever bit — MacGyver pulls the gas hose through the vent and pinches it off to keep the gas from
killing them, then pokes a hole in the hollow door with his trusty knife and uses the hose to
fill the door with gas, which he then ignites to blow the door open — almost clever enough
to overcome the horrendously bad taste inherent in doing a scene like that in the first place!
They run out of the mine, and we get one of the highlights of the entire series for me,
when Hoggart sends one of his Nazi flunkies back to the mine,
and MacGyver surprises him and damn near knocks his rotten Nazi head off. MacGyver punches Nazis.
Ergo, punching Nazis is good. That’s not one of the Beatitudes, but it should be.
MacGyver hotwires a truck so they can escape, while Sam takes it upon himself
to go after Hoggart and Brandenberg. He takes out Hoggart with a shovel and grabs his gun.
Sergeant Gray catches MacGyver at the truck, leading to another highlight of the entire series,
when MacGyver punches out another Nazi — and a Nazi cop, to boot — bonus points.
Remember when punching a Nazi was like the least controversial thing someone could do?
Of course MacGyver punches Nazis — he’s the good guy! It would be weird if he didn’t!
Pete shows up with a bunch of cops — some of whom, presumably, are not Nazis — and
catches William Brand hiding under some stairs. “Looks like your popularity’s taken a nosedive,”
Pete confidently declares. Yeah, because there’s no way someone revealed to be a
white supremacist could ever win a Congressional election!
. . .
MacGyver and Dr. Sand arrive just as it looks like Sam is about to shoot Mrs. Brandenberg. But
instead, he chooses to let her live. He tells her that the two of them are very different,
and marches her out the door to face justice. That just leaves Dr. Sand and MacGyver in the office.
There’s still the big map, filled with dozens of little flags to indicate the Nazis that have
been placed in high offices or positions of influence. MacGyver stares at the map,
perhaps realizing the true scope of the threat, and wondering what happens now —
and that’s it! Cue the theme music! Good-night, folks! Be sure to tune
in next time when MacGyver’s rock star friend thinks her identical twin is trying to kill her!
So, there are a few things that strike me about this episode. First, as I was just making fun of,
this is some pretty heavy subject matter. I realize that by this point, Nazis had become
well established as pulp villains — Indiana Jones fought them in the movies, Captain America
fought them in the comics, a lot of the horror of what the Nazis truly were had been watered down
in order to make them more palatable for popular culture. But, even so, this episode isn’t just
“MacGyver foils a plot by some Nazis” — it’s “MacGyver foils a plot by some Nazis in an
episode that makes direct and repeated reference to the Holocaust and other actual atrocities.”
Adding to the unusual gravity of the episode is the performance of Nehemiah Persoff
as Sam. Persoff inhabits the role with such
authenticity that for many years after seeing the episode for the first time,
I assumed he was an actual Holocaust survivor. He wasn’t — he was just an actor giving a natural,
emotionally vulnerable, and generally remarkable performance — a performance so good
that every time I see it, I can’t help but think it’s too good for a guest shot on MacGyver.
And did I mention they have to escape from a gas chamber? This is an episode of MacGyver! Less
than a month earlier he was crashing a hitman Halloween party to rescue Murdoc’s sister!
A week after this episode is the “rock star may or may not have an evil twin” show,
and after that is the Christmas episode guest starring Jeanette Nolan as a homeless lady who
may or may not be the Virgin Mary, and then, the week after that is the first episode
where MacGyver dreams himself into a western — and yes, I said “the first” episode!
So, the tonal shift from that sort of stuff to “Holocaust episode” is pretty drastic.
Then again, MacGyver does have its share of “very special episodes” — I talked
about one in a previous video, the story of how one of MacGyver’s childhood friends was
killed in an accidental shooting, fueling MacGyver’s lifelong opposition to guns.
And, the week before “The Ten Percent Solution” aired, the episode was “Black Rhino,” where
MacGyver fights poachers of endangered species in Africa. It’s not that the show never tackled
serious topics — it frequently did. The thing is, it’s still MacGyver, and . . . I dunno, I feel
like “Nazis trying to take over the United States” is punching a little above MacGyver’s weight.
MacGyver the show, I mean, not MacGyver himself — clearly, MacGyver himself is the exact right
person to call in that situation. Who else can you count on to stop the Nazi menace?
Michael Knight? The A-Team? Hooperman? Forget about it — between his responsibilities as a
San Francisco Police detective and the landlord of his apartment building,
he doesn’t have the time to topple an invisible empire!
I’ll tell you who else you can call: Superman! And I do mean Superman — not Dean Cain, because —
you know . . .
In its third season, in November 1995, almost exactly six years after the premiere of “The
Ten Percent Solution,” Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman aired the episode
“Super Mann,” a show with a similar plot, where a group of secret Nazis have infiltrated positions
of power and influence in American culture and are working to gradually take over. The episode ends
on more or less the same note, as well, with the Nazis posing the immediate threat being defeated,
but the characters left shaken at how far-reaching their influence may be.
Truthfully, I’m shocked it took Superman as long as it did to defeat those
Nazis — couldn’t Lois Lane have told him have MacGyver beat the Nazis six years ago?
She must have heard all about it — she was one of his best friends!
. . . Teri Hatcher joke. Hey! Another thing is, “The Ten Percent Solution” turned out to
be somewhat prophetic, and not just because it provided a plot for Lois and Clark to recycle.
The master plan of Frau Brandenberg is presented in such a way that
it seems over-the-top — seriously, you’re sacrificing credibility pretty much any time
you pull back a curtain to reveal a huge custom made map, that’s just the way it is — but if you
look beyond the cartoonish presentation, what she wants to do . . . is pretty much
what actual white supremacists did: adopt a friendlier, more socially acceptable image,
attract support by playing on people’s fears and promising to restore America to some mythical,
pristine state, and slowly accumulate power and influence over many years.
Where do you think this guy came from? And why do you think he was able to find a home so quickly
and so comfortably in one of our two major political parties?
And look at the kind of people included in Brandenberg’s group of secret infiltrators:
politicians and their wealthy benefactors, yes, but also: judges, teachers, journalists,
and police.
Does this mean the writers of MacGyver were psychic? Or gifted with some uncanny intuitive
insight into the future course of society? No — although, I will note that this Nazi thing is
not the only example of the creators of MacGyver being a few decades ahead of their time — they
also predicted that the secret to career success and financial security in the future
would be to diversify your resume and work experience as much as possible,
a principle which MacGyver — the military veteran, spy, scientist, environmental activist,
survivalist, security expert, forest ranger, logger, teacher, hellfighter,
race car driver, and Olympic-level hockey player — embodies more than just about anybody.
I said “just about!”
It’s not that the creators of MacGyver possessed any special knowledge of the
future — if they did, they would have known what a bad idea it was
to replace MacGyver’s Jeep with that fucking truck! God, I hate it!
It’s that they saw, like a lot of people saw back then and have seen continuously
throughout the last few decades, that if white nationalists were going to try to
take power — which they obviously were, it’s inherent in the ideology — they weren’t going
to start an armed revolution and try to topple our existing institutions — they were going to
worm their way into those institutions in order to eventually control them.
And that’s just what they’ve been doing, and it’s what they’re still doing.
Maybe, if more of us had been watching MacGyver and paying attention — or just paying attention,
period — these past thirty years — and specifically the last, like,
six? — would have gone down a little differently. Imagine what the world
would be like if we all heeded his warnings, and followed his example.
Sure, we’d have worse hair, but we’d have a better world! A world with fewer Nazis — or
at least fewer Nazis in charge of shit. I’d grow a mullet for that. Some things are worth sacrificing
your— no! No, absolutely not, I want the Jeep, I will not be caught dead driving that thing!
I don’t care how much better the world would get — there are some lines I will not cross!