Burn Notice, Season 5, Episode 3

It looks like the CIA has given Michael some time off in this episode and just as well because it coincides with him realising that he has PTSD and the reappearance of his brother Nate in Miami.

I'll deal with Nate first and then get onto the other thing. Personally if I was Michael and I heard my little brother was coming back to town, I'd find a reason to be elsewhere. Admittedly he'd never hear the end of it from Maddie, but for some reason Nate and trouble go hand in hand, and Michael nearly always winds up almost getting killed.

I will give him this, he is trying to do the right thing, he's left Las Vegas because it's not the best place for someone with a young family and a gambling addiction to be. I don't know what shape his marriage is in, because we don't see his wife, but he has brought his son with him to bond with Grandma Maddie, and this is the first time we see young Charlie Westen. At this stage the role is probably played by a baby sized doll, because all we get to see is a baby shaped object wrapped in a blanket being nursed by Maddie.

As is usual with Nate he brings trouble with him. Someone he used to know died and left his wife with a mountain of gambling debts owed to a violent and thuggish loan shark. Of course Nate recommends his big brother and Michael can't help himself.

The shark is a piece of work and Michael realises that the best way to do things here is to present himself as another low life owed money and set up the bad guy at the same time.

I have to admit Trey on the run from Vegas was one of Michael's best aliases. Along with a sleazy personality and a grating voice he also gave him the little quirk of continually getting well known cliches wrong (like: getting juice out of a stone), and refusing to accept it when someone tells him the real saying.

The plan is to set the loan shark up as an undercover cop and let his boss take care of him. They do this successfully, but then get blind sided when he turns out to be an actual undercover FBI agent. The show did that really well (like I said I either didn't see these episodes before or they have been completely erased from my memory banks), because up until the reveal I didn't see it coming.

Michael and Co then have to work fast and think on their feet to put the real bad guys away and get the undercover agent out of the pile of manure they dumped him in.

Given the nature of what they were doing there was very little of Maddie and Jesse in this episode. We got Maddie at the start bonding with baby Charlie and Jesse made a cameo appearance as a crooked police administrator working with Michael's low life Trey.

I have to admit I had issues with Michael's PTSD. I'm not surprised he's got it, most people would have by now if they lived his life, but why now? It just seems like a rather convenient plot point to have Michael lose it or freeze at exactly the wrong moment.

He was also back in the loft with Fiona, so maybe the apartment was for her (although she seems to spend all her time at the loft) or she didn't go through with the lease on it.

I can see Nate becoming a larger part of the show from this season on, and where the hell is Barry?

Burn Notice, Season 2, Episode 3

No Tricia Helfer in the guest cast list, which was a little disappointing as I really like her as a character to hate on.

Just because Carla isn't there, doesn't mean that she's not part of the episode. To that end Michael heavies the head of security at the Pakistani embassy to give him information on her. The reasoning here is that the head of security at an embassy is usually secret service. Geographically the region known as Kurdistan, where Michael believes Carla has worked in the past, hence why she speaks Arabic with a Kurdish accent, does not share a border with Pakistan, but he sees them as the best secret service operation in the region. In any account they are able to provide with a heavily redacted dossier that does give him a little more idea what he's looking at with her.

The main focus of the episode is Fiona wanting to help a friend of Maddie's. Her son borrowed $200,000 to invest in a dodgy night club scheme, which was actually a scam, to provide for her in later life. The money is gone and now the loan shark he borrowed it from wants his money back and if he can't have that he'll take it out of the hides of the borrower and his mother.

I do have to question how smart this loan shark is. He sees Michael incapacitate two of his goons with a rolled up magazine and still wants to go to war with him. Just Michael's insane grin when he announces his intentions would be enough to put most people off.

Zeke, the front man for the scheme was actually played by Peter Fabian (familiar to me as Veronica Mars criminology professor in the 3rd season of the show), the characters were both dodgy so shared something in common.

Michael not only took this guy for what his client lost, but everything else he had in the safe as well.

Next he'll start to leverage Carla. A more formidable opponent may be the double team of Fiona and Maddie, who despite Michael's protestations to the contrary, want the two together.

Just an aside, Fiona used an over the top British working class accent in her role of charming Zeke and introducing him to Michael's gung-ho oil heir, for which he affected a heavy Texas accent. Gabrielle Anwar was raised in England and this was less grating than her Irish accent, but it still didn't sound quite right. My advice would be to ditch the accents unless it's absolutely necessary.