Burn Notice, Season 7, Episode 8

This is where, not only I, but other members of the cast start to question just how deeply James has got his hooks into Michael's mind. He looks and acts like he always has, and he seems to do the right things, but James pushes certain buttons that Michael can't deny are attractive to him.

This time he offers Michael the opportunity to go after a Dominican drug lord. Michael and Sam go in, get the guy and deliver him to James, who will serve up his own brand of justice. The only reason the guy is still operating is because he's an MI6 asset.

This is Michael's dream. Taking people like this out of the picture was what he was all about when he first started white knighting. Only he was always under resourced and couldn't move up the food chain as high as he wanted. James provides him with weapons, funds, travel, everything.

Sam's concerned about how much Michael seems to be buying into this. The drug lord was an interesting character. Played by Peter Mensah (Onemaus in Spartacus) he had the British accent that made his Eton educated drug lord believable, and he's a scary guy. Shame it's only a once off.

The only indication that Michael has genuine doubts about James comes after they deliver the drug lord to him. Rather than take he and Sam on the boat with him, where I have little doubt they're going to feed the drug lord to the sharks on the way, he gives them fake id and tickets back to Miami.

In Miami, Fiona is reluctantly working with Strong, because she has no option, but both Carlos and Madeline are concerned about what it's doing to her. Carlos actually doesn't even know she's doing it and when Maddy finds out she counsels Fiona to be careful and tells her that she'd probably be better off with Carlos than Michael in the long run. I really wish they'd been able to recast Sharon Gless as a CIA commander, she'd be really good at it.

Fiona and Jesse along with Strong and his team are going after a long term mental patient, who was also a Delta Force team member, and means something to James. Jesse manages to get him to give up a name; James Kendrick.

In an interview with Michael he tells him that Kendrick was his friend and his commander, until something snapped in Mogadishu and he killed his entire team, with one exception and he had him committed. Michael agrees that James is possibly the most dangerous and possibly insane person he's encountered. I personally think Simon, Anson and Card may disagree, even Larry. Fullerton could run rings around James.

Burn Notice, Season 5, Episode 14

Michael gets an upgraded clearance level, which actually makes him more valuable as an asset to Anson, and I wonder if being the puppet master that he is, if the evil psychiatrist had a hand in him getting the upgrade.

In the meantime he has to bring the killer of an old friend to justice with Jesse, while Sam and Fiona tackle the dangerous job of tagging Anson and seeing if they can find out where he sleeps and use that as leverage.

The story about the murdered friend struck me as very typical of similar shows. Devoid of inspiration the writers suddenly invent a very good friend of the main character as the catalyst for an episode. Andre (the now dead friend) is described by his younger brother; Ricky, as having considered Michael and Maddie as family. No mention of Nate or how the presence of the alcoholic, abusive Frank must have made Casa Westen seem a very welcoming family kind of place. Despite this supposed link Michael hasn't seen or heard from Andre in over a decade, and he never made any attempt to contact him when he got back to Miami, nor did he ever mention him. Maddie, likewise, despite living close never seemed to bother to keep up with the family. Maybe making Andre a friend from Special Forces may have made more sense.

Despite this implausibility Michael was to take revenge every bit as much as Ricky does, although he doesn't plant a bomb in the murderer's (a local drug lord by the name of Dion) warehouse, which Ricky does in retaliation for both his brother's death and that of a girl called Dolly (played by the actress Indigo, best known as Potential Slayer Rona in the final season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer). There is an amusing line when Michael sends Fiona to alter the bomb and when Fiona looks at it she tells Ricky to not give up his day job and asks how he learned to do this and his response is 'the internet'. 

Michael playing a loose cannon arms dealer to the hilt, with Jesse being his out there partner, manages to convince Dion's crew that their boss tried to blow them up. This leaves Dion with the unpalatable choice of either confessing to Andre's murder and cutting a deal which will get him solitary or taking his chances on the streets. They missed a golden chance of saying 'sucks to be you' there in my opinion.

While most of this is going on Sam and Fiona are tailing Anson. Michael's voice over keeps reminding the audience of how hard it is to tail someone who is an experienced operative, but I don't think that's really necessary with Anson. He's a gun psychiatrist and likes playing with people's heads, but he's not really an operative, that's why he had minions like Carla and Vaughn. Charles Finley made a welcome return as an environmentally conscious lawyer in order to convince local liked minded students to door knock the apartment complex that Fiona and Sam believe Anson lives in so that they can pinpoint him. As it turns out he doesn't live there, but uses a satellite setup from the place's balcony to pick up information. This in itself could prove useful leverage. They may be able to 'blind' him without him knowing or feed him incorrect data.

Anson pops up late in the episode so Michael can stall him while Fiona and Sam scope the apartment out. Michael broaches the subject of when the two of them may be quits and is told in no uncertain terms that the answer is probably never, or until Anson doesn't think he can use him anymore. The guy knows Michael so well and even has knowledge of his family history, gleaned by posing as Maddie's therapist some years ago. It's going to take a lot to get out from under this thumb, and you can't trust anything Anson says in any case.

Interestingly Renny Harlin directed this, I thought that may have meant some added pyrotechnics, it didn't really although the stunt where Michael got Dion to blow up a truck with an rpg was quite fun.

Burn Notice, Season 4, Episode 5

A more traditional sort of episode in terms of structure. Mike works one job, mostly related to tracking down Kendra (the kick ass female assassin) and getting the information that is on the tape they found at the end of the last episode, because it's old tech and no one can crack it. He does some of this with Fiona and some with Sam, I don't recall seeing Jesse involved, and at the same time is white knighting with the rest of the gang.

The main job is protecting a free medical clinic from a nasty drug dealer (played with relish by Rhys Coiro, who will always be maverick avant grade film director Billy Walsh from Entourage to me). Jesse and Maddie actually got that job. This plays well with Jesse's background and his sense of fair play. In fact they later use a clip of Jesse from this episode when he makes the opening credits. Maddie seems to have developed a social conscience over the time the show has been running, and I like that, but this season so far she's become very preachy and that's at odds with how she usually presents herself. Fortunately I don't think this particular version of Maddie lasted all that long. She does have a soft gooey centre inside a hard shell, but at the moment she's more goo than shell.

Unfortunately the guy running the clinic is an idiot who doesn't like Michael and won't take a backwards step even when that's the right thing to do and will ultimately make Michael's job easier and keep the clinic open and drug dealer free long term.

Sam takes a beating when doing some reconnaissance and shows that he may be old and out of shape, but he's still got what it takes when he has to. Man has some skillz.

There was a cameo from Michael's former neighbour and drug dealer Sugar to get them an in with Vince (Rhys Coiro) and explain how things worked. I'm not really sure why he was in the episode to be honest. He didn't give them anything they couldn't have found out and while they brought him in to get them a meet with Vince he didn't do that either. Maybe it was easier to use a character that the viewers were familiar with than create a new one.

There was little doubt that Michael and his team would see Vince and his crew off. They did give the doctor at the clinic a chance to be a hero, though and Fiona got to blow lots of things up. There was a nice comment from Jesse about how many explosives she had and how they were using all of her explosives and she said, 'If you think this is all I have then you really don't know me very well.'

Kendra was interesting, she clearly knows her spy stuff and she knows about Simon, but they can't find anything on her or where she learned what she knows. They do eventually get her and her information, but it comes at a cost, she manages to slice open Michael's arm and not many can do that. She's also partial to a knife rather than a gun, which is unusual in modern covert affairs.

We haven't seen him yet, but it looks like Simon may be returning as a thorn in Michael's side this season.