Wednesday, March 4, 2015

Burn Notice, Season 5, Episode 17



After thinking he'd been dropped into a deep, dark hole and left there for the rest of his natural born days, Agent Vaughn returns. It's always good to see Vaughn, manly because Robert Wisdom does such a good job in playing him.

Armed with the information that she got from transferring Anson's money out of his Cayman's account and getting Barry to work his magic on tracking it, Fiona traces some of his dealings to a DC based law firm. It's childs play for Michael to steal someone's id, have Fiona impersonate the someone and stroll in there to check out Anson's dealings. They lead to Vaughn, and even though he's currently 'enjoying' his 'tropical island retirement' at Guantamo Bay the file was recently updated and active.

Michael uses his new clearance and every bit of influence Pearce has to get Vaughn transferred temporarily to a CIA supermax facility in Miami. The problem is that he doesn't have a lot of leverage to use with Vaughn. He can't get him out, so why should Vaughn volunteer any information about Anson, he doesn't like that he's contacted Michael, though.

Adding to Michael's woes is that despite Frank Westen being an abusive husband and father, Maddie isn't happy that Anson killed him and she does worry that he could cause the same sort of pain to others. She never outright says it, but I think Nate and Charlie loom large in her mind. She tells Michael to stop him before he ruins anyone else's life and when Michael intimates that he may have to crack a few eggs to make the Ansonless omelette, she says whatever it takes. She would have made a good CIA boss.

The main mission of this episode is largely Jesse centric. Jesse meets with an old friend who works in the customs area of the government. For a long time part of Ian Covey (Gregg Henry) has been doing things he doesn't much like and one of them is helping an Indian diplomat smuggle conflict or blood diamonds into and out of the country. He's coming up for retirement and he wants to do something good with his career and figures out taking this guy down will do it.

Jesse agrees to help and of course involves Michael and Sam. Fi was only involved peripherally when they needed to do some driving and scare off the diplomat's original buyer in order to replace him with the blinged up Jesse. Coby Bell is like Jeffrey Donovan in that he can transition from Jesse to a range of stock characters during jobs. Sam is always Sam, and that's probably because no matter who he plays Bruce Campbell is always playing Bruce Campbell.

I did wonder about Jesse's Porsche and doubted it would survive the season, it didn't. They've flirted with damaging it, but never gone the whole way. Michael blows it up to help sell Jesse's story and his reaction is not faked. He leased it too, which answered another question posed when he first rolled up in it.

Eventually when everything looks about to go tits up Ian comes clean. He's got terminal cancer, he won't live more than a few months. Taking down the diamond smuggling Yash was his legacy. He's prepared to die to do that. Michael and Jesse go along with the change of plan reluctantly, although Michael never agrees with simply rolling over and giving up, its why he fought to clear his name and it's why he keeps butting heads with Anson and others ho believe that they can break him. They do hope that they can get Ian out of it alive, but it wasn't to be and Yah shot him dead, but was then soon arrested for it and not even his diplomatic immunity can get him out of shooting an active government agent in cold blood, Ian was not armed at the time.

Michael gets Pearce to do him a favour. She agrees, because she's a decent person and she knows Vaughn is seriously bad. Michael wants to tell her why, but says that the last person he came clean with on all this was Max and he wound up dead soon after. Pearce accepts it, but I just have this awful feeling she's going to wind up as collateral damage in the final episode of the season. Once Michael tells Vaughn he's pulled strings to get him transferred from Gitmo to the mainland Vaughn says it's not enough to open his mouth, then Michael shows him that he's also had a few of Vaughn's favourite people, including Simon, transferred to the same facility. The canary starts to sing. Anton didn't want the money transferred to retire on, he wanted access to it, so he could start Management up again.

Interestingly for the penultimate episode to the season it wasn't a multi part one as they often are. Be interesting to see where they go with the final or if they're going to use it to connect onto Season 6.

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