[2] MacGyver is an outspoken advocate of gun control, as well as a supporter of environmental preservation, racial equality, and assisting the poor.
He is often suspicious of militaristic attitudes within the government; he sees his Phoenix Foundation employer as an alternative to the more conventional (and violent) means of law enforcement.
Mac spends the majority of the first and second seasons searching for his father James, who abandoned him as a child shortly after losing his mother.
[5] Pete is an operative at the Department of External Services (DXS) which is where he is impressed by Mac's ingenuity while tracking down Murdoc, an international assassin.
)[7][8][9] In 2016 reboot, Patricia Thornton is an ex-field agent & director of operations for the Department of External Services and Phoenix Foundation.
In the 2016 reboot, Jack Dalton (played by former CSI star George Eads) is Mac's partner in the field and a former Delta Force soldier and CIA operative.
In the original series, Wilt Bozer appears in a handful of episodes of Season 5 and 6: "Serenity", "The Lost Amadeus", "Hearts of Steel", and "MacGyver's Women".
Bozer later joins the Phoenix Foundation after discovering MacGyver's secret, and uses his talents to create lifelike masks and facial prosthetics as well as a humanoid robot.
Davis was recommended to Director Thorton by Jack Dalton, one of her mother's boyfriends due to Nikki Carpenter being allegedly killed in action.
After she is discharged from the CIA for her unsanctioned actions to save a MIA SEAL, in the second-season premiere, Matty recruits her into the Phoenix Foundation.
Desi Nguyen is the Phoenix Foundation's newest agent, who uses her skills to protect MacGyver and his team on their global missions.
He is also very wealthy, and thus is used to both getting his way and enjoying the spoils of war (including expensive suits, fast cars, private jets and a house in Monte Carlo).
This became a recurring theme: each of Murdoc's subsequent appearances ends in another apparently certain "death", which he incredibly survives, to return in a later episode.
In the 2016 reboot, Murdoc (played by David Dastmalchian) is a hired hitman known as Suspect 218 to the CIA whose targets are enemies and MacGyver.
In the 2016 reboot, they are played by Sheryl Lee Ralph, Lance Gross, Javicia Leslie, & Jermaine Rivers and first appear in the first-season episode 16, "Hook", when they get the upper hand on Mac and Jack several times, until a Foundation team retrieves the fugitive from them.
[18] With little talent, but big dreams, her pursuit of a show business career gets her into trouble more than once; she was once used by Murdoc as an unwitting pawn in an attempt to eliminate MacGyver.
She was also the spitting image of her late aunt Betty Parker, who was murdered in 1958 by her boyfriend, and was suffering from lead poisoning.,[19] Like the somewhat impulsive identically named female-sleuth character of author Mildred Benson, Penny isn't exactly stupid, but she tends to act without thinking things through, and has only a shaky grasp of how the world works.