LISA ALLEN

Lisa Allen was a young runaway whom MacGyver first met on a pier in San Pedro.

Lisa came from an abusive home. Her father would beat her mother, and then both parents would beat her. Several times Lisa had tried to run away from home. The first two times she went to the police, who placed her in a juvenile lockup. A social worker checked her story, and a judge issued a warning to her parents before returning her to their custody. Immediately, however, the abuse began again, and Lisa left home for good.

She had made a home for herself in an abandoned building near the San Pedro pier. With found items and ingenuity, she had made the dreary room livable, furnishing it with a bed and table and chair, electricity from a car battery recovered from a wrecking yard, a flame cook plate, a bottle and basin for water, a Styrofoam cooler, and even a few pictures on the wall, a hanging plant, a radio, and a burglar alarm made from clattering silverware against a suspended glass. She lived on fish that she caught at the pier, and she had schoolbooks from which she studied, fully intending to get a diploma and to make something of herself.

When MacGyver returned to San Pedro from a mission behind the Iron Curtain to acquire a microfilm list of terrorist names and plans, he noticed Lisa unsuccessfully fishing from the pier. He used a gum wrapper to make her a fishing lure before continuing to his rendezvous with Pete Thornton. However, Kurt Neilson, a colonel with East German Intelligence, apprehended MacGyver and brought him to a warehouse on Tucker Street. There he injected MacGyver with a serum designed to persuade him to reveal the location of the list. The initial effects of the drug included disorientation, memory loss, double vision, and hallucinations. In approximately three hours his mind would begin to clear but the drug would cause excruciating pain that would lead to death if the antidote, a tiny red pill, was not administered within six hours.

MacGyver was able to escape from his captors, but in his state of confusion and pain, he appeared to be drunk and disoriented as he wandered the street with no memory of what had happened. Lisa was walking home with Ron and Amy when she recognized MacGyver, and despite her friends' warning not to get involved, she was determined to offer her help in return for MacGyver's earlier kindness. Lisa helped him back to her apartment and offered him food and a place to rest. Nielson's men questioned Ron and Amy, and they searched the area, including Lisa's apartment, but by using a power surge and a bit of sleight of hand, MacGyver and Lisa were able to elude them.

As MacGyver began to recover his memory, he admitted to Lisa that he worked for the government, and he instructed her to phone Pete Thornton at the DXS for help. She reluctantly agreed to make the call from a pay phone and was eventually able to get the message through despite the lack of cooperation from the skeptical operator at the other end. Meanwhile, MacGyver returned to the warehouse where he used several clever contraptions to knock out each of Neilson's men. He then confronted Neilson in an attempt to acquire the antidote, and the two struggled before Neilson, in a gesture of victory, tossed the small metal tube containing the antidote into a sewer grate. Lisa had returned in time to witness the fight, and she understood at last that MacGyver had been poisoned. With one final punch, MacGyver knocked out Neilson, and Lisa stayed with him as he created a magnetized rod to recover the metal tube and take the antidote with moments to spare.

MacGyver had made an arrangement with the DXS to receive a bonus of his choosing following his missions, and once he had recovered from the effects of the drug and had retrieved the list from the light standard where he had concealed it, MacGyver returned to let Lisa know that he would be speaking to Pete Thornton about arranging a government scholarship for her in appreciation for all she had done.

Portrayed by: Tammy Lauren

Cross Reference: Amy, Kurt Neilson, Ron, San Pedro

Episode Reference: Nightmares