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ORIGINAL AIRDATE:December 18th, 1989 —
A magical homeless woman teaches MacGyver and friends the true meaning of Christmas… sort of…
MISSION: MacGyver interrupts the harassing of an older homeless woman by a pair of hoodlums and transports her to the Challenger club. At the same time, a statue of the Madonna has gone missing from a local church.
This week’s highlights include:
Cloak & Dagger (Film)
Cloak & Dagger is a 1984 spy adventure film directed by Richard Franklin starring Henry Thomas, Dabney Coleman, and Michael Murphy. It was originally released in a double feature with The Last Starfighter on July 13, 1984 and then released separately on August 10, 1984.
Check out the article on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloak_%26_Dagger_(1984_film).
Watch S5E11: “The Madonna” on CBS’s website or check the alternative streamability of this episode here.
I can explain the bizarre boy & his wagon element of the ending. This, along with the overall theme of a religious statue being stolen at Christmas, is directly taken from an episode of Dragnet. I hadn’t remembered this episode of MacGyver, so after watching it a few months ago, I looked up the Dragnet episode that it pays homage to, and as it turns out, that episode was produced twice. Both the 1960’s run that I watched on Nick at Nite, and the original 1950’s run of Dragnet had a version.
The A.V. Club has an article about the Dragnet episodes, and about how differently they can be perceived because of when they were made: http://www.avclub.com/article/idragneti-the-christmas-story-aka-the-big-little-j-66909
The article also mentions another episode of Dragnet(which I’ve since watched) that sounds like prime MacGyver material, “The Big .22 Rifle For Christmas”, where a kid unwraps his Christmas present early, and accidentally kills his friend with it.