Television's most inventive and resourceful crime fighter is on the job as MacGyver launches its first season. A special operative for the Phoenix Foundation, a private think tank dedicated to fighting evil everywhere, MacGyver (Richard Dean Anderson) is sent out on missions ranging from "rescue" to "seek and destroy" -- but never without his trusty roll of duct tape and his all-purpose Swiss Army Knife. Disdaining violence and brute force, our hero wriggles out of his various perils by improvising weapons and such out of simple household devices at hand, from a light bulb to a credit card. This talent comes in handy in his first assignment, in which he goes to rescue a pilot whose plane has crashed atop a cliff. In subsequent episodes, MacGyver will use a magnet to recover stolen secret documents in Burma; escape from certain death in the desert by employing a hot-air balloon; employ a can of gasoline to ward off killer ants in Brazil; utilize a jerry-built blowgun to neutralize a virtual army of hitmen and rescue a lady general; manipulate a cake-decorating tube and an oven cleaner to defuse a bomb; instantly construct an organic "lie detector" to determine who his real enemies are in a remote Indian village; and, in the season finale, prevent the assassination of an archbishop by adopting a clever disguise (as the archbishop, of course!). The first-season ratings for MacGyver were not spectacular, but the weekly, 60-minute series managed to hold its own against such competition as Murder, She Wrote and Amazing Stories.