Burn Notice, Season 6, Episode 15

I like this episode largely because Schmidt basically becomes a member of the team, even if it is briefly, and I get to enjoy more of Patton Oswalt. 

Because of their notoriety, getting Michael and Co out of the US isn't as easy as faking some passports. There's a lot more to it than that, and it requires money. $200,000 per person. Michael and his team don't have that sort of money.

However Schmidt has a warehouse full of all sorts of expensive toys. One of these is a high tech piece of equipment that can help a hard case criminal pull off a big gem heist, and he's willing to pay Schmidt $1,000,000 for said piece of equipment. Of course the warehouse is crawling with police. This is something Michael and his associates do on a regular basis, so they liberate Schmidt's piece of hardware, but it gets shot in the doing and is basically rendered to so much scrap metal.

Michael asks his mother to make contact with Barry (I was wondering where he was when the CIA was pressuring his family and known associates) and get him to fake large transfers to various tax havens throughout the world. Michael doesn't intend to go to any of them and it's not real money, but it will have the CIA and various other secret services throughout the world chasing their tails looking for something that isn't there.

Maddie's way of contacting Barry was wonderful. Tricking him into visiting a local clinic and then meeting him there. Without even knowing it her CIA surveillance team actually drove her there. All done under Riley's nose, while she's threatening Maddie with jail because she threw off her team to meet Michael. They can't prove anything and Madeleine knows it. She's also been backed into a corner and Michael is the only family she has left (they kept leaving Charlie out of this equation, and it was odd, because he became the centre of both Maddie and Michael's world in the seventh season, yet here his existence is ignored). There's very little more dangerous than a pissed off Madeleine Westen. Riley better watch her back.

Schmidt has to deliver the broken tech to a nasty criminal called Thorn. All he needs to do is drop it off, take the money and leave. However he gets cute and talks too much because he's nervous. Then he invents an expert, so Sam has to go in to cover for him. Sam and Schmidt become part of the team stealing the gems, and only Michael, Jesse and Fiona get them out.

Michael suggests that Maddie come on the run with them, and she may even do it.

Burn Notice, Season 3, Episode 8

In Season 2 of Burn Notice it was highly noticeable that episode 8 was the half season kickstarter. It's not like that in Season 3. It is the halfway point of the season, Season 3 is 16 episodes, just like Season 2 was, but this is far more like a standard episode, and the alteration in the stories focus came about a few episodes ago when Paxson was effectively replaced by Strickler.

So Michael has gone over to the dark side (working for Strickler) and Fiona is not happy about it. She's even less happy when he calmly involves his mother in what he's doing for Strickler. Okay, they had to plant someone at a bingo game and Maddie's less noticeable in that setting than anyone else Michael can call on and it's low risk, but as Fiona points out it flies in the face of Michael's previous policy to try and protect his family from getting into what he does. It may be low risk, but there is still a risk and he's thrown Maddie under the bus to get back into the CIA, which has become an obsession. Considering what they did to him, how quick they were to drop him and the startling lack of interest that they have shown in him I don't know why he's so desperate to get back in. There's also no guarantee that Strickler is telling the truth. This guy lies like the rest of us breathe.

Complicating matters a bit is Barry. Honestly why Paul Tei does not get an opening credit is beyond me. He, like Maddie, is an unofficial member of Team Michael Westen.

His 'little black book' has gone missing. Yes, Barry keeps his clients details in a hand written ledger, which he doesn't even store very securely. He claims that in this digital age it's a selling factor. Computers are too easy to hack and access.

His girlfriend (I'm betting now his ex-girlfriend) was the one who took it and sold it for $100,000. It's worth a whole lot more. The girlfriend, played by Debi Mazar (who I remember as Vincent Chase's foul mouthed press agent in Entourage), is not the brightest crayon in the box, she takes a swing at Fiona with a garden implement and gets punched in the face for her trouble. Then Fiona proves that her car was wired to explode by tripping the device and blowing it up.

They got an address from her and Michael and Sam went to check it out. They met a mobster type and a woman he was abusing at the house, so took them prisoner. They stashed them in a holiday getaway Sam had intended to use for a weekend of loving with Miss Reynolds (Maddie's neighbours daughter, who still lets Sam use the bright red Buick).

They picked the woman out as the weak link and tried to get Fiona to cozy up to her. Through her they got another address where they found her passport, the other guy's passport and someone else, who the 'mobster' claimed would release the information in the ledger to the internet if anything happened to him.

The passport should have tipped them off. The guy was a Serbian interrogator. Why would he want a money launderer's ledger? How would he move it? Michael and Co didn't twig and it took the other guy to let them know that the whole operation was being controlled by a woman. The same one Fiona was getting friendly with.

Sam and Michael raced back and Fiona had already let her out of the cuffs. Michael had to get her out of the way and lock up the other woman without letting her know they were onto her. He had a number of options open, but he elected to hit Fiona in the face. This is a result of working with Strickler and using his methods. Fiona let Michael know in very certain terms that he was on extremely thin ice with her after that.

They let the woman escape and tracked her. Fiona confronted her. It ended in a stalemate, as while Fiona doesn't want to incur collateral damage, her adversary had no qualms about that. She walked away and melted into the crowd, but they got Barry's ledger back.

It had another happy coincidence. Barry holed up at Maddie's just in case and got her a good deal on fixing her roof. Sam's bomb at the end of Season 2 had damaged the roof so that every time it rained (it rains a lot in Florida) it leaked.

Fiona tells Michael that she doesn't like the path he's headed down or what it's doing to him and walks so she doesn't have to witness it. That could be the tip off that this is half season, but it's not as climactic as last season's one. And Michael falls further into Strickler's web.