Monday, December 1, 2014

Burn Notice, Season 4, Episode 11


This one starts off as two separate stories which do have significant impact on each other and promise to resonate throughout the rest of the season.

Fiona and Sam take a job tracking down and gouging money out of a cold hearted British lothario for a widow he conned out of her life savings. In some ways that's rather reminiscent of the show's early days when it trod the seamy side of Miami, but this con artist runs with the rich crowd and so never really gets down and dirty.

While Fiona and Sam are doing that, and Sam tries to stop Fiona from simply shooting their mark because he's sleazy and callous, Jesse and Michael play the dangerous game of baiting the wealthy businessman and merchant of death John Barrett (played with just the right level of menace by Robert Patrick) by waving Simon's coded Bible in his face. They know he won't come and get it himself...at least to begin with, so they have to put those who do come on ice to force him out, and face him on home turf.

Both Jesse and Michael get drawn peripherally into Sam and Fiona's job, and when Jesse and Fiona are tailing their mark and get spotted, at least their car does - Fiona's bright blue Hyundai really does stand out - she has to find a way not to get shot. She puts two and two together and comes up with the answer of 'make out with Jesse'. It puts the suspicion away from them, but only serves to confuse both Fiona and Jesse and cement the growing love triangle.

The target later lets slip to Sam that the people who were tailing him weren't picked up on because when security checked it was only a couple snogging (this is later explained to Sam as making out. The occasional use of British slang is a running gag, in that Michael and Sam don't understand it. Michael also gets to use his dreadful British accent again, but this time it's okay because it is deliberately bad). Hearing that Jesse and Fiona were making out, even if it wasn't for real, bothers Sam. Now someone else knows that Jesse could prove to be a rather large obstacle between the future happiness of Michael and Fiona.

They do resolve the issue with the Brit by repeatedly drugging him and making him paranoid, they also make him think he killed his old girlfriend by blowing up her boat after one his drug fuelled blackouts. Overall the story was a little dissatisfying. It was largely caused by the actress who played Emily (Fiona and Sam's client), she came across as very unconvincing, and I was wishing they hired a better actress.

The kicker in this episode comes at the end, when Fiona walks into Michael's warehouse and has a gun pointed in her face by Jesse. His old friend Marv found some other footage of the day Jesse was burned from a different vantage point, that not many other people knew about and it shows Michael exiting the building just before the hammer came down on Jesse. He doesn't shoot Fiona, but he runs and now he's angry and he's going to target Michael. It all just hit the fan in a big way.

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