Well, for any fans who were convinced that Mac and Riley were the endgame hero couple, they were at least right, even if they didn't get to see the relationship unfold on screen. That was always the endgame for us, we just didn’t know the end was coming at the end of this season! We were laying the track for that with the episode where they go to the Indian wedding and you find out about Desi’s former fiancé. Yeah, because Desi would then get back together with her ex-fiancé, Evan, and Mac and Riley, they’re the hero couple. Macer elaborated on what would have been: The showrunner shared that an early Season 6 episode would have featured the reveal that Desi's fiancé didn't die after all, but has been a prisoner of war.
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On the plot side, the show would have explored a Manchurian Candidate type of situation with the nanobots and Mac, while on the character side there was already a plan for how to break up Mac and Desi, and set up Mac and Riley.
The upside is that Monica Macer did at least reveal what would have happened next for the characters. Eagle-eyed fans hopefully noticed the hints that pointed toward Mac belonging with Riley rather than Desi, but even if every single one did, surely they would have preferred the matter being settled definitively on screen, between the two characters.
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With filming already over and what would ultimately serve as the series finale already going through its initial edit, there was no chance to go back and film new scenes to attempt to tie off some loose ends and deliver the endgame that Monica Macer intended for Mac and Riley. And there’s a very clear nod to the fans with the Riley flashes - if you count the number of flashes and how that sequence starts and ends, Mac knows, in his heart, who he’s supposed to be with ultimately. So, we decided to do flashes of the team and the people that were closest to Mac. There’s a moment in the finale when Mac is coding on the table and we go into his subconscious mind state, and that was where I was like, 'We need to give something to the fans,' because now this is a series finale, and we shot a season finale. We got the news right as I was getting ready to go into a second edit session on what was supposed to be our season finale, and I had to switch gears and make all the calls, so we stopped.
Along with the rest of the team, they had to figure out a way to get rid of nanotrackers that had been placed in their bodies with the potential to cause a lot of damage.
with no memory of what happened that brought them into their situation. The long-running will they/won't they pairing went missing and woke up in a corn field 24 hours later. The series finale of MacGyver threw Mac and Riley together in a plot with high enough stakes that it did at least feel like a finale, if not necessarily the series finale. According to showrunner Monica Macer, she had to make some changes to the finale in light of the cancellation order. Of course, it's not altogether surprising that the episode feels more like a season finale than a series finale the cancellation order came down only after the fifth season had finished filming. MacGyver has come to an end on CBS with the fifth and final season finale, and with no sign of the show scoring a rescue like some cancelled shows that came before it, fans may want to resign themselves to the idea that this episode truly was the end of the road for the characters.