Burn Notice, Season 4, Episode 12

The fall out from Jesse finding out that he had been betrayed by his new best friends continues. Having Jesse Porter on your back is not a good thing. The guy is a trained counter intelligence operative, who has put in time in the field, so he's got that skill set, and having worked with Michael and his 'posse', he knows how they operate and a number of their tricks. Factor in Sam's eventual liking of Jesse and Fiona's conflicted romantic feelings and it's a great big mess.

Michael continues to set up a meet and greet and possible exchange of the Bible with Barrett, and keeps Vaughan in the loop on that. I'm not entirely sure what game Michael is playing there, but I don't think he plans to give Barrett the Bible or Vaughan Barrett.

While he waits for that to happen he takes on a job involving a highly paid lawyer, who does work fro drug dealers mostly. The lawyer's daughter has been kidnapped and he wants her back. Michael is one of the few people who can do this for him. The daughter is listed as the client, not the lawyer. If it weren't for her being young and helpless Michael wouldn't have taken the job.

The kidnapper is played by Michael Rooker, who is best known for his portrayal of Merle Dixon in The Walking Dead. Quite apart from the fact that Dale (the kidnapper) sounds and looks like Merle, he's almost exactly the same character, played in the same way, he even has a brother he's quite protective of (in fact he kidnapped the girl because her father failed to keep his brother out of jail), so I couldn't shake Merle out of my head. I'm sure that there's a fanfic out there somewhere that uses this episode of Burn Notice as it's premise and poses that Merle went from kidnapping and crime in Miami to finding himself in the middle of a zombie plagued Atlanta.

You know Michael, Sam and Fiona will get the girl, and they do, although Jesse shadows them every step of the way. He claims that it's not just about Michael burning him, so not sure what other game he could be playing.

As payment for recovering the lawyer's daughter Michael takes the submersible that his shady customers use for transporting their cargo. It seems to have something to do with his exit plan involving Barrett, the Bible and Vaughan.

Vaughan turns up at the meet and that throws Michael's plans into disarray, to make matters even worse so does Jesse. Believing that he's been double crossed Barrett tries to take Michael hostage and that's when a shot from Jesse rips through Michael's shoulder and takes out the guy holding him.

Barrett still manages to get a bleeding Michael into his car. In an act of desperation Michael wrenches the wheel to one side and rolls the car. He gets out. Barrett is bleeding from the head, unconscious, possibly dead and weak with blood loss Michael can't reach the Bible, as he blacks out a booted foot appears, a hand reaches down and takes the Bible. My first thought was Jesse, but I suspect that's not the case and someone else has just entered the mix.

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 15

One episode to go and they made us wait until the very end before we got an indication that the final episode is going to go off like a frog in a sock.

Once again Gilroy uses Michael. This time he infiltrates a house and compound being used by a militant group of 'separatists' or as Michael correctly refers to them white supremacists (do these really exist in the US? They're used in fiction a bit), and while Michael fights a couple of these idiots, Gilroy sneaks in and steals a high powered machine gun.

As usual Gilroy is coy about what he wants it for and what he intends to use it on, but it is all connected to the flight from Chile.

A lot of this episode was about Fiona and her past. A contact called Coleman (Australian actor Jonathan La Paglia, could have played Claude, at least his accent would have been dead on) puts Fiona in touch with an Argentinian called Gabriel. It's never really explained what Gabriel does, but he's paranoid and he has a lot of security and wealth. Fiona's interest is driven by the fact that he's kidnapped a scientist who has a family.

In an attempt to catch Fiona out Gabriel mentions some time she says she's spent in Madrid (she hasn't) and asks her about Las Ramblas. Las Ramblas is of course in Barcelona, which Fiona knows. I did think at the time it wasn't a hard question, it's fairly common knowledge. He then sends two of his people to her house to check her passport and see if it has a Madrid stamp.

Michael rushes over and doctors her passport to read right. Again I found this odd. Given what Fiona does (gun running, a bit of bombing on the side) I would have thought she would have had more than one passport and not all the information in them would necessarily be legitimate. It is however another chance for Michael to show off his MacGyver like skills.

Gabriel wastes no time in delving into her background and discovers that Fiona Glenanne once worked for the IRA. We the viewers found out that before Michael got burned she was happily set up somewhere else in the world and dropped everything to be with him. Gabriel doesn't seem to know about Michael.

Sam really only exists in this episode to keep an eye on Fiona and impersonate Chuck Finley, a grass obsessed representative of the local home owners association.

Fiona admits that her involvement with the IRA came about because of the accidental killing of her sister by British forces. Gabriel is using the scientist to try and bring about the downfall of an American company called Apex who dumped deadly waste into the water near his hometown and this killed his daughter. Fiona rescues the scientist and Michael has to rescue Gabriel when he tries to kill himself and Fiona won't leave the burning building unless they at least try and save him.

I had the feeling that this season was the introduction of a character called Simon and that was who Gilroy was trying to get off the plane, for a cool $10 million. There's a double-cross on and Simon leaves Gilroy fatally wounded (always knew he wasn't as a good as he pretended to be), had a bomb strapped to him and Simon is after Michael Westen.

The last episode should be a cracker.

Burn Notice, Season 1, Episode 9

I preferred the side story about Michael's burning in this one to the motw.

The motw was very standard. Nerdy young Asian slacker has a job house sitting these amazing houses in Miami for people that only use them once a year for holidays and someone observing him thinks that he owns the houses he lives in and the cars he drives, so they kidnap his girlfriend and hold her for ransom.

Somehow Sam's lady friend, Veronica (remembered her name!) knows the guy and puts him in touch with Sam and by extension Michael. When Sam talks about how his girlfriends reward him and how lavishly it does often beg the question 'What exactly do you do for these women?' It's asked a few times and it's always funny. It also plays on Bruce Campbell's fictional heart throb image.

The client (Luke) is worse than useless because he doesn't understand the first thing about how his team need him to act. He gets Michael made early on and he has to alter the plan, taking one of the kidnappers hostage then playing some psychological warfare, something that both he and Sam are quite good at. Fiona prefers the direct approach: torture, shooting, blowing stuff up. The three of them do tend to complement each other in that respect.

Michael pretends to be a hard ass kidnap negotiator and buys time for Fiona and Sam to rescue the hostage. The kidnappers also get arrested into the bargain.

The side story involves someone coming down to Miami to look into Michael's burn notice. The guy is represented as a bureaucrat and Michael makes him jump through hoops to see if he really is what he appears to be, refusing to meet with him until he's satisfied.

They got a little too cute with that I felt. Even if I hadn't already seen this and known that the 'pen pusher', played nicely by Arye Gross, was an assassin, I would have figured it out. He was just a little too perfect, too inoffensive.

However as Michael reflects just before the assassin tries to garrotte him, you can't be on your guard ALL the time, you have to trust that sometimes things are what they seem. Interesting that this unassuming, meek appearing character came closer than anyone else has to taking Michael Westen out. Fortunately Michael had the home ground advantage and being highly suspicious plants guns all over the place and managed to reach a hidden one.

It's going to get very nasty real quick now.