STEVEN LEE

Steven Lee worked at STRADA, the Strategic Research and Development Administration. In his capacity as assistant to Dr. Jill Ludlum, who had built the security system for the facility, he was intimately familiar with the operation of Sandi, the fifth-generation computer on the verge of true artificial intelligence that ran STRADA.

Thornton and MacGyver had arrived at STRADA as representatives of the Phoenix Foundation to certify the facility before it could go online. MacGyver's role was to attempt to break into the secure base, and Steven Lee, as well as Dr. Ludlum and Colonel Scott Woodward, the military officer in charge of the base, had complete faith in the invincibility of their system. Lee ran the simulation program for the test and estimated that Sandi would catch MacGyver in 15 minutes.

In fact, MacGyver was easily able to defeat the security system, however a program response error caused Sandi to misinterpret the simulation as a genuine threat, and she began to initiate deadly security protocols.

With MacGyver and Dr. Ludlum trapped inside the facility, and Steven Lee, Colonel Woodward, and Thornton working from the outside, they searched for a way to shut down Sandi. Lee's attempts to manually override the programming from a terminal were blocked. He offered the solution of shutting down the power substation at Twin Pines, a strategy that Woodward resisted but that Thornton enacted on his own. However, when Sandi was able to engage a backup generator, Lee assessed that there were only two options remaining for MacGyver's escape, the maintenance shaft or the exhaust outlet. Both exits were mined from the outside access ports with time left to dismantle only one of them. Woodward reluctantly allowed Thornton to make the call as to which exit MacGyver was most likely to choose since he knew MacGyver best. His choice of the exhaust outlet proved to be correct.

Portrayed by: Peter Kwong

Cross Reference: Jill Ludlum, Sandi, STRADA, Scott Woodward

Episode Reference: The Human Factor