[Parece que o ABC simplesmente não se importava muito com o programa, mas tentando lucrar com um pico repentino de popularidade quando a série chegou ao fim.
Eu encontrei esta declaração de KateR em um fórum de fãs de Richard Dean Anderson (porque que existe):
After season six, MacGyver was only picked up for a half season, which is 13 episodes. They left Vancouver and returned to LA, and they shot the final 13 episodes there.
The Coltons episode is technically a sixth season episode. It was shot in Vancouver, and it was actually scheduled to air during season six. Without going back to check, I forget exactly where it came in the lineup, but it was near the end of sixth season, and I still have my original recordings of MacGyver that have the previews for the Coltons coming up the next week. But something unexpected happened that preemped the episode, and rather than airing it a week later, they dropped it altogether. It was never really a regular episode of MacGyver - it was intended to be the pilot for a new spinoff series - so it is possible that the studio's decision not to pick up the pilot affected their decision whether or not to air it.
Jump ahead to seventh season, and they began airing the new episodes, then, for whatever reason (perhaps due to the filming schedule?), they inserted the Coltons episode into the middle of season seven. The final episode was The Stringer, but the ratings were slipping, so they stopped airing episodes at the Christmas break, never aired Mountain of Youth, and held the season finale for a planned special event in April.
The Stringer aired in April as the season finale, but the ratings bounced back so high that ABC decided to continue airing episodes through the summer. They pulled out The Mountain of Youth, "the lost episode," and aired it the next month, followed by a few reruns through the summer until the new season started.
So that's the story of why season 7 was shorter than the others, how The Coltons ended up in season 7 instead of 6, and The Mountain of Youth was lost and found.
Embora não seja conclusivo, ele tem detalhes e informações suficientes para parecer que alguém se lembra muito bem desse tempo.
Ele também corresponde às informações encontradas no Guia do MacGyver World Episode :
This is "the lost episode". The Mountain of Youth was filmed before "The Stringer" and the production company decided to air it because the finale had done so well in the ratings. Originally this episode was rumored to be lost. (locked up in the vault never to air)
e uma revisão da 7ª temporada após o lançamento em DVD [ênfase minha]:
Most of the remaining episodes were clunkers to one extent or another, but the worst of the worst include "The Walking Dead", where MacGyver gets kidnapped by a voodoo cult and turned into a zombie; "The Coltons", a yawningly dull episode intended as a spinoff featuring the three bounty hunter brothers from several previous episodes with only two cameo appearances by MacGyver himself;