I watched this when I was younger. I wanted to like it, and I did like the idea behind MacGyver. Despite the show's unwarranted reputation for realism, I mostly laughed at the impossible things he did. One that has stuck in my mind was the magnesium bicycle cutting torch. Glancing over a pile of junk, MacGyver finds an old magnesium bike. This brings up a myriad of issues. For one, magnesium frame bikes are super rare. The bike they showed looked just like your average 10 speed bike. Magnesium is prone to failure from cracking. Magnesium also has oxidation (rust) problems. Magnesium is also expensive: it is an expensive material, and it is costly to fabricate. This would make it unsuitable for the 'average' user's bike, especially considering the availability of alternatives which don't suffer from these problems (such as aluminum). If it existed in real life, this specialty item would likely be for racing.
OK, so now MacGyver has the extremely improbable magnesium bike. He takes it apart, and fills part of one of the bike's tubing with metal filings from the rest of the bike. He gets it lit (I don't remember how), and uses it as a cutting torch to cut through plate steel. Except, of course, that this could never work. Yes, the magnesium would burn, but it never would take the directed shape needed to cut through steel (unlike a cutting torch). Also, the filings would burn very fast (or even explode) while the tubing would burn very slowly (if at all). On screen, it looks just like a cutting torch, with a well-behaved flame.
Episode after episode were filled with similar improbabilities and impossibilities. In the end, I laughed at it because it ended up being stupid.
OK, so now MacGyver has the extremely improbable magnesium bike. He takes it apart, and fills part of one of the bike's tubing with metal filings from the rest of the bike. He gets it lit (I don't remember how), and uses it as a cutting torch to cut through plate steel. Except, of course, that this could never work. Yes, the magnesium would burn, but it never would take the directed shape needed to cut through steel (unlike a cutting torch). Also, the filings would burn very fast (or even explode) while the tubing would burn very slowly (if at all). On screen, it looks just like a cutting torch, with a well-behaved flame.
Episode after episode were filled with similar improbabilities and impossibilities. In the end, I laughed at it because it ended up being stupid.