Burn Notice, Season 4, Episode 8

This was the sort of episode where you think you're getting one thing, but wind up with something entirely different.

There are hijinks of two sorts. One is Jesse and Michael getting Maddie to help them steal a safety deposit box. Jesse has really been a bad influence on her.

The other is Sam and Fiona playing Mr and Mrs Finley (Charles and Charlotte) to do security at a party held by a very wealthy individual and his glamorous wife. The husband was played with just enough weasel by Steven Culp, who excels in playing this type of character. He was last seen weaselling in Revolution as a dodgy US general.

Back to the safety deposit box. Maybe I wasn't watching hard enough, but I don't think Jesse really knows why they're even stealing it. Mainly because the information in it relates to Simon and Jesse doesn't know about Simon, because if he did he may eventually link Michael with Vaughan and that would wind up tipping him off about who burned him. The bit at the end when Michael finds information about Simon definitely hints that Jesse doesn't have a clue what's going on.

When Sam and Fiona's security job goes wrong and the wife is kidnapped by a Mexican gang who do this for a living, and Fiona goes with the lady to make sure she's safe, Jesse and Michael drop their other plans and go after Fiona. Maddie is particularly insistent on that score. She's adopted all of Michael's friends and she's particularly tight with Fiona, who she definitely sees as the daughter she always wanted, but never had.

With a little help from her friends Fiona takes care of herself and her fellow kidnappee. Even before she turns the table and the cavalry arrives in the form of Sam, I think the kidnappers were rethinking their choice of target. The audience also found out that you can make a nice miniature incendiary device with an electric light bulb and a small amount of vodka.

The story spices up once Fiona is rescued. She goes straight to Michael and from the look on Jesse's face, he's both surprised and disappointed. I can see why. Every time Michael has been asked about Fiona he's been at pains to say that she is not his girlfriend, but she so is. Maddie also counsels Jesse about that and tells him that the two were made for each other. She does care for Jesse, but she's not letting anything get in between her son and the daughter she's always wanted.

The mention of Simon at the end is mouthwatering.

Burn Notice, Season 3, Episode 16

This is it, the season finale. It was almost as if all of Season 3 had been building towards this moment.

The seeds of this episode were sewn at the end of Season 2 when Michael first encountered Management and this episode itself is a springboard into Season 4. I don't know what series creator Matt Nix had in mind when he first came up with Burn Notice, but thinking about how many questions this episode answers and what it introduces, it seems reasonable to think it was at least a 4 season story arc.

Michael finds himself on the run from the police, which has shades of the season opener, and has to use everything he has to get away, eventually hot wiring a jet ski and making his escape over the water.

Fiona and Sam provide support and send word to Maddie to get out of town.

She's packing, making sure to include a shotgun, when there's a knock at the door and it's two men from the government. I can't remember where they said they were from. I don't think it was FBI, because the two guys that Sam and Michael meet with from time to time seem to be the only FBI agents operating in Miami. They were probably CIA, but didn't actually say so.

When trying to threaten and pressure Maddie didn't work, as it was never going to, they start to present images and reports from Michael's file which indicate that he did some pretty bad things. Sam's concerned that Maddie will crack, but Fiona trusts her to hang tough, which she does, ringing Michael and telling him to come home right away, which is code for stay away, it was what she did when his father went on a bender.

Simon lures Michael out into the open and then to a TV store. He's killed the owner and rigged the screens to show images of Michael's 'atrocities' on a loop. It turns out that all those things in Michael's file, the things that got him burned, they were Simon's doing and he was doing it for Management. They want Michael big time. Once he'd served his purpose they tossed him in a South American hell hole.

Simon was played by Garrett Dillahunt. Dillahunt plays an unhinged psychopath very well. I first saw him as John Henry in Sarah Connor: The Terminator Chronicles, but after that I started seeing him everywhere, like in this episode of Burn Notice.

What Simon wants is to take out Management, why Michael should help him with this is because he's rigged a bomb up in a hotel, which is timed to go off at a certain time. Fiona and Sam pressure every bomb maker and gun dealer that Fiona can think of to find the bomb. They disarm it and render it useless, but by that stage Management is on his way to Miami.

Michael tries to warn him, but Simon is one step ahead. Michael actually uses Management to help him take Simon out of the picture, but he's not dead and until he is, he's going to be a problem.

Michael is arrested, but released on orders from very high up and in one of the show's classic cliffhanger endings is taken somewhere unspecified and when the bag is removed from his head finds himself in a sumptuously furnished room.

I think Simon will be Season 4's Big Bad, that is when Michael gets out of wherever Management have him.

Note: I'm heading off on holiday next week and will be away for a month or so. I hope to start Season 4 when I get back.