S1E20 - The Escape

General Summary

Mac gets himself imprisoned in an unnamed North African country so he can help John DeLancie escape. However, after the escape he learns that the man is not a missionary doctor but rather an arms dealer, and his sister is not, in fact, his sister, but some Soviet arms buyer with the convenient tendency to grow a conscience. This complicates matters.

Football is played at several points in this episode.

Things learned about Mac

He knows the basics of football.

He has will remind people to mind their posture and has no aversion to calling people sons of diseased ruminants, though I remember him using "goat" rather than "camel". Still, it's a 5+ year old memory and he may have used "goat" in another episode.

Mulletacious

That woman's black suit. Oh dear.
The black belt she wore with the white dress also deserves a mention. Don't really see that anymore these days.

(Sub)text Central

The woman gets tingly music when she appears, so Mac, of course, goes all smitten and end up kissing her. *sigh* Do not want! If I recall correctly, he had a bit of a tendency to kiss any random woman that turned up during the first season.

John DeLancie made serious puppy eyes at Mac, looking rather eager, to which Mac responded in kind. And winked at him. Mac also referred to him as "sweetheart" near the end of the episode. You'd start thinking they had some kind of history.

Khan, though a big, if somewhat camp man in prison, seems to be the Commandant's bitch.

Oddly, I noticed no subtext between Mac and François.

Mac Science

In this episode Mac:

Made a miniature paper maché-like hot air balloon using newspaper strips, oil, bits of wire, and bits of oily, fiery cotton ball which he then used to signal not-sister.

Fixed the out of phase speakers on the hi-fi set using a knife. Though he should've maybe unplugged it before screwing around. Electrocuting yourself isn't actually that much fun.

Imitated chopper sounds by affixing something floppy to the ceiling fan and recording the sound using a cassette recorder he nicked.

Makes splody using PCP and sparkly things, and times one of the sparklies by tying it to ice so it doesn't go boom until the ice has melted. Clever!

Makes a powder trail using the gunpowder of some pre-WWI-looking grenades.

Fixes up some monkey bars for the orphanage. This I think he did from a proper kit rather than bits of pipe the nuns had laying around, but it was still very nice of him and showed certain skills.

Group Hug

John DeLancie looks uncharacteristically cuddly and kind of like he belongs in period drama. And manages to keep looking like that even after we find out he's not a missionary doctor. That's new. And rather unexpected after a good bit of Star Trek.

Poor Mac gets beaten up a bit by Khan's muscle man.

Reality Check

A nun-run orphanage in Northern Africa? I expect Catholics can be found pretty much all over and have a history of desperately wanting to "save" African souls and stop them using anything approaching birth control, but I always thought the Northern parts Africa haven't been much into Catholicism these last few decades, what with region's people being predominantly Muslim.
I don't expect they'd much care for nuns, to be honest.

Would a Frenchman say soccer? And would that Mr Exposition be immediately friendly to Mac? Really?

Looking at the people, I doubt this was actually shot in Unnamed Country, North Africa. You never know, though.

As for the prison, I suspect visiting rooms in prison don't look like well-decorated bedrooms, and I don't see the need for a camp fire in that courtyard. It's probably the sort of thing an actual prison warden would consider a safety hazard.

Wouldn't someone in the prison mention to Mac what John DeLancie was in for? It doesn't seem like that's the sort of thing that's difficult to find out.

Shouldn't the exploding arms truck have made a bigger bang and killed the dealer and unnamed buyers? And why did John DeLancie collapse dramatically? It didn't look like he got hit by anything.

Isms and issues

Though we got a woman who wasn't one of the Good Ones after all, she still got Conscience and wasn't simply bad because of general disillusionment or good enough pay. Still, she did her duty without being too flinchy. Though she was rather concerned about Mac thinking she was a good person, that was odd. Really, why care?

With Mac's general desire to avoid hurting and killing people, I'd expected him to have given the arms people some more warning before making things go splody.