Tuesday, June 10, 2014

Burn Notice, Season 1, Episode 5


In some ways this one wrong footed me at the start.

Michael in his apartment studying his burn notice isn't surprising, that he gets a call from Nate, asking him to help is.

I hadn't expected them to go back to the character of Nate quite so soon. I knew he'd pop in and out, but at this stage they had me wondering if they were trying to add him as a sidekick.

He had once again represented himself as something he wasn't and when things get nasty calls on his big brother for help.

This time he'd offered to help someone working as the security manager at a private airport being used by a family of Israeli gun runners. Before even seeing them Michael knows from the description of the patriarch that he's ex Mossad, not because he's encountered him before, but just from the gun he favours and the manner in which he acts.

This was the first time I remember seeing Fiona slip into her vacuous lady of means persona and taking a tour out to the airport and using her looks and the character she's playing to get a good look around, trying to work out what's going on. A quick look is all she needs to determine that the family are running guns and that the youngest son is the weak link.

He's the one Michael goes to work on and this time they don't even need to get all that rough before they have the family running scared and getting out of Miami. There was a nice C4 explosion, though.

A sort of secondary story centred around the car that Michael's father supposedly left him. Nate contends that as he had to put u with 'years of Dad's crap' after Michael left then the car should be his. Michael tells Nate that his father left it to him and there had to be a reason for that. Personally I think he's overthinking that. Maddie TOLD him that his father wanted him to have it, there's nothing in writing, it's just the sort of thing she'd do to try and force Michael to acknowledge that he has more than unhidden contempt for his father.

While working on the car Fiona and Michael do find a bug Sam put there. Fiona makes a very catty comment about bugging the young gun runner's car to Sam. It puts Sam's character and how serious he is about his FBI contacts and giving them information on Michael into question. Sam explains that he is under heavy heat and he was obvious about the bug because he knew Michael would find it. Michael then arranges for Sam to find the copy of his burn notice which he passes onto the feds, with Michael's knowledge and blessing. It gets kicked upstairs and gets those agents off the case, which means out of Sam and Michael's hair, but what if they get replaced by something worse?

Oh yes, Audrey Landers appeared briefly at the end of the episode as Sam's potential new 'lady'. I remembered Audrey Landers from the late 70's and early 80's when she was on a lot of shows as a 'pretty blonde'. Given that the first season of Burn Notice was made in 2007 she's held her looks well and definitely fits what Sam is looking for when he identifies a 'target;.

Almost a holding pattern of an episode in a way. They're definitely cycling through the threats in Miami; drugs, illegal prostitution, gun running.

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