KATE LAFFERTY

Kate Lafferty was a brilliant young student. At the age of only about 15 years, she was attending college classes at the local university, and her teacher, Professor Willis considered her to be a bona fide genius. With a quick and clever mind, she enjoyed projects such as building and following maps of communications satellites, she excelled at mathematics and creative problem solving, and she had acquired highly sophisticated computer skills. However, Kate struggled with low self-esteem. With a chip on her shoulder, she was often defensive, rude, and moody, including with her mother, Carol. She had no real friends, her peers teased her about being an egghead, and boys who took notice lost interest when they found out she was smarter than they were. She gave little thought to her appearance, and she insisted that she was ugly, and weird, and that she didn't care if anybody liked her or not.

When Professor Willis, who had also been one of MacGyver's former college professors, had discovered a glitch in the new guidance system for the US Army's Snake-Eye missile, he began working with the Defense Department to fix the problem, and as was often his practice, he had also had some of his students work on the problem with him. Kate, in her eagerness to solve the problem, had broken into the Defense Department's computer and had been able to find a solution. Consequently, both the Department of Defense and Hatcher, an arms dealer who had orchestrated the theft of several of the Snake-Eye missiles with the intention of selling them to interested buyers, sought Professor Willis's help to correct the flaw in the guidance system. Because of his past with the professor, MacGyver approached Willis to ask for the solution, a solution Willis was willing to share as long as there were no negative consequences for Kate's innocent enthusiasm. However, Hatcher's men attempted to abduct Willis and force his cooperation, and when Willis struggled for the gun and was accidentally killed during the botched abduction, Hatcher's men turned their attention to Kate.

MacGyver vowed to protect Kate, but he encouraged her to help the Defense Department solve the problem with the guidance system. Resentful of being treated like a criminal, however, Kate was unwilling to cooperate with MacGyver or with the Office of Defense Intelligence when agents Oslow and Rogers had taken her downtown for questioning, hoping to learn how she had broken into their system. Using her knowledge of computers, Kate was able to override the building's security and escape, but when she returned to the university and found MacGyver trying to access her computer file, she was deeply hurt when he was able to use his conversation with her to determine her computer password: UGLY DUCKLING.

Meanwhile, Hatcher's men, including Larkin and Walker, overpowered MacGyver and abducted Kate, threatening to use sodium pentothal to acquire the information they needed, and she felt she had no choice but to cooperate. Hatcher arranged for the sale of the missile with his buyer, but before making the purchase, the buyer demanded a demonstration to prove that the new guidance system was operational. The buyer designated the coordinates for the test, the location of the Clinton Narrows Bridge, unaware that the South Bay Marathon would be taking place at the same time and there would be thousands of runners on the bridge.

Kate's clever mind worked much like MacGyver's. She had left him a clue using a SAR-SAT frequency to help him find her location, she used a battery and jumper cables to build an arc welder to cut through the iron bars of the cabin where she was being held, and with MacGyver's help she was able to escape from Hatcher. Together, MacGyver and Kate used radios and triangulation to locate the missile, and they used ingenuity and focused solar energy to blow up a jeep and knock out Larkin and Walker in order to prevent the launch of the test missile. However Hatcher, at a second location, launched a second missile instead. Kate removed the guidance system chip from the first missile, returning it to its original surface-to-air heat seeking configuration, and when launched, the missile sought and destroyed its guided counterpart in mid-air, leaving the bridge and the marathon unaffected.

Rather than prosecute her for breaking into the government computer system, the Defense Department expressed an interest in seeking Kate's services after her graduation. Her experience brought about something of a transformation in her personality as well. She had come to trust MacGyver, considering him her first real friend, and she became cautiously open to new relationships. She began to see herself in a new light, she exhibited a new sense of happiness, she began to give more thought to her appearance, and she even took an interest in Les, a smart but shy boy with whom she had begun a new friendship.

Portrayed by: Darcy Marta

Cross Reference: Clinton Narrows Bridge, Hatcher, Carol Lafferty, Larkin, Oslow, Rogers, Snake-Eye Missile, South Bay Marathon, Walker, Professor Willis

Episode Reference: Ugly Duckling