At the end of the MacGyver season 2 fall finale, we saw the character of Samantha Cage in a bad place. Murdoc shot her, and as the episode faded out her future wasn’t looking good.

Was Isabel Lucas gone from the show on Friday night? We knew we’d get an answer pretty early on in the episode, given that this wasn’t the sort of thing that the producers could just ignore based on what happened.

The show actually chose to pick up after the cliffhanger in a pretty shocking way. Rather than show her being carted to the hospital, we actually saw the entire Phoenix Foundation gang sitting at the hospital and waiting to learn of her fate. Obviously, the presumption was that she was getting surgery.

She pulled through! The good news was relayed back to the team, and just two minutes into the episode we had a chance to learn about the character’s future. That is good given that the team had a lot of other things that they needed to take on over the course of the episode.

While Cage was lucky enough to survive — and she really was lucky in some ways — we do think that the overall impact of the cliffhanger remains clear. This was designed for the sole purpose of figuring out a way in which to remind the team of just how dangerous Murdoc is. This is a guy who managed to do all sorts of evil stuff to the team last season, and this was another reminder that he’s still as capable of making everyone’s life a living hell.

What we are left to wonder right now is strictly this: Did he know the entire time that Cage was probably going to live through the shooting, and he just wanted to taunt her by telling her he left her to die? Murdoc probably could predict to some extent that MacGyver would find a way to save her. This is a team that is as tight-knit as they come, and obviously something was going to be suspicious about Cage being out of touch.