When we first meet soon-to-be-ex-spy Michael Westen, he's standing on a street corner in Nigeria, not even trying to fit in. Michael's tall and athletic, like a lot of the locals, but as played by Jeffrey Donovan from Hitch and Touching Evil, he's also white. The other thing you need to know about Michael is that he's in love with the sound of his own voice-over, and is therefore always explaining what's going on and why. In this case, he's meeting with a "warlord wannabe" named Boris from one of the Russian splinter republics, doing a deal wherein the U.S. government pays the tinpot terrorist a big chunk of money to get him to stop attacking oil pipelines. Michael can do this because, as he takes pains to explain to both us and Boris, he is not in fact an employee of the CIA. He is an independent contractor, which is why he can broker shady transactions like this. The independent contractor thing is handy in my life as well, in the sense that being an independent contractor of NBC Universal (which produces this show) rather than an employee will allow me to critique it objectively. Which is totally worth not having benefits.
Anyway, when the meeting happens, Michael gets on his cell phone to effect the transfer of funds. Instead of accepting the account number, the voice on the other end informs Michael that there is a titular "burn notice" out on him, which means that Michael has been blacklisted. Cut off. Disavowed. Set adrift. Pinkslipped. Mind you, Boris and his thugs are still waiting for their money. If there's a worse time to learn that you've lost your job, I can't imagine when it might be.
Michael then undergoes the early stages of a crunchy beating before managing to escape by wits and by force (although not by his fists, as in the first of many educational tips, he voice-overs that the last thing you want to do in a fight is break the little bones in your hands). Stealing a motorcycle, he loses his pursuers in the busy marketplace and makes it to the airport, where he boards the first plane out of the country and soon passes out in his seat from his injuries. Needless to say, Michael is no longer a soon-to-be-ex-spy. This is going to take him a while to work through, and we get to watch.
Stage One: Denial
This, then, is Burn Notice, which you've probably seen advertised on just about every available flat surface by now. In the first season, Michael and his sidekicks spend every episode working on a Job Of The Week (in which they successfully help some poor victim get free of the bad guys who are making their lives miserable) and trying to figure out who burned Michael and why (which is generally more of a baby-steps situation).
The second season starts this Thursday, July 10, so we'll be getting another dose of what made the show a decent-sized hit last summer. For some, that's hot leads, an exotic setting (complete with gratuitous shots of beaches, bikinis, or buildings between almost every scene), and plenty of action. For me, it's one of my favorite actors ever and an opportunity to learn something. See, Michael has this habit of narrating the action by explaining what he's doing and why, and how it's a technique that has served him and other spies well in the past. The usefulness of such information in the daily life of a law-abiding citizen may be questionable, but on the other hand, if you ever need to know how to go undercover with illicit arms dealers, it's not something you're going to be able to look up.
But anyway, back to the story. When Michael eventually comes to in a random motel room, his situation hasn't improved. to him on the bed is Gabrielle Anwar from Scent of a Woman. She's overtanned, undermoisturized, and endeavoring to speak all of her lines with an ill-advised Irish accent. This is a woman from Michael's past, a sometime IRA operative (and most-of-the-time psycho) named Fiona Glenanne. Michael's not happy to see her, ostensibly because the two of them were once an item and it ended badly. I maintain that this in turn was because she's incredibly irritating. I will say one nice thing about her: her nickname, Fi, is ridiculously easy to type.
Adding to Michael's distress is the fact that he's in Miami. For backstory-related reasons that will shortly become clear, he's not thrilled to be back in this, his hometown. His VO claims it's only because beaches provide minimal cover and he hasn't figured out a way to conceal a gun in a swimsuit, but it's more complicated than that.
And of course, he's still burned. All his assets are frozen and he's got no job history and no valid ID. Pretty much just the clothes on his back. And since his shirt and jacket somehow vanished in transit from Nigeria, it's really just the clothes on his ass. But for some reason the poor naïve bastard is convinced that his burning is only temporary, a bureaucratic mix-up that he'll be able to clear up in no time.
But in the meantime, he needs cash. So he disguises himself as a messenger boy to sneak into the office of an old friend named Lucy, who looks just out of college and not at all the high-powered corporate security consultant she's meant to be. She can't hire him, but she can refer him to another mutual friend: Sam Axe. No, I didn't make that name up. The show did.
Sam is played by one of my personal heroes, the inimitable Bruce Campbell. You may remember him as Ash in the Evil Dead movies, or as Brisco County, Jr., or as Autolycus the King of Thieves from Xena/Hercules, or as that guy who keeps stealing scenes in the Spider-Man movies, or even the smooth dude in the new Old Spice commercials. If you don't remember him from those, go back and check him out. You won't be sorry. One of the reasons I lobbied for this gig was in the hope I might one day get to interview him, but it hasn't happened yet. Anyway, Sam is ex-Special Forces, ex-CIA, ex-every-kind-of-badass, now gone to seed and slowly beering himself to death in Miami. But right now he's all Michael's got, so he's the one Michael goes to. I should also mention that Michael's being followed by a couple of FBI agents whom he keeps ditching and annoying. We'll come back to them later.
So here's the gig Sam has for Michael: a guy named Javier works for an insanely rich real estate developer played by Ray Wise. It seems that a bunch of Ray Wise's art was stolen in what looks like an inside job, so it's not looking good for Javier. But come on, it's Ray Wise. So Michael quickly figures out that an overextended Ray Wise and another of his employees stole the art themselves to collect the insurance money and planned to frame Javier for the job. Rather than going to the police (Michael never goes to the police; going to the police is for pussies), Michael gets the upper hand on Ray Wise and even gets a confession from him on tape, leaving Javier in the clear. It is in the course of this assignment that we learn Michael's tragic flaw: he's a big ol' softie. He just can't stand to see the little guy getting beat up on by the rich and powerful. How he managed to square that trait of his with ten years as a covert operative for the United States is never fully explained, but it's only a ninety-minute pilot.
Still, there's room for plenty of other stuff. Michael gets some temporary digs, a warehouse/loft/80s heavy-metal music video set situated behind a nightclub, which will serve as his apartment and HQ (he even chases off the drug dealer who lives downstairs). He demonstrates another advantage of having been an independent contractor; denied an unlimited government expense account, he's developed the skills needed to MacGyver himself lots of sophisticated surveillance equipment and booby traps out of cheap crap from the hardware store and Radio Shack. He busts Sam giving the Feds information on him, but lets him off the hook as long as Sam promises to keep the G-men interested without giving them anything good. He wards off an attempt by Fiona to rekindle their romantic relationship (this last is particularly admirable).
We also meet Michael's mom, Madeline. She's played by Sharon Gless, best remembered as Detective Chris Cagney on some cop show whose title escapes me. She's also a real piece of work -- hypochondriacal, chain-smoking, needy, demanding, still living in the house where Michael grew up, and inexplicably wearing a platinum-blond wig that I would have nicknamed "Old French Whore" in a full recap. Fortunately most of these characteristics will be toned down after the pilot, but it's still abundantly clear why Michael left home at an early age, even before we also find out that he grew up with an abusive father (now long dead).
So with all of this accomplished, Michael returns to his new home at the end of the pilot to find his floor papered with surveillance photos of himself -- photos, he tells us, that indicate a project of much greater quality and scale than his two FBI shadows could ever manage. Obviously this is bigger than he thought.
Stage Two: Anger
But that doesn't mean Michael's about to give up. The problem is that as the second episode opens, the only lead he's got is a phone number that his mother was given by two mysterious men who came to visit her. And she'll only give it up if Michael agrees to do a favor for a friend. It seems that Madeline's elderly neighbor Laura has had her identity and money stolen by con men who also beat her up. I'd have to say a con that involves beating up old ladies sounds a little lacking in finesse, but Michael is still somehow reluctant to take the gig, even though Madeline has ditched the wig in favor of her real hair. Seems that would be deserving of some kind of reward.
So Michael goes undercover as a con man himself, adopting a Jersey accent to make friends with the perp and then turning him against his accomplices and using the perp's paranoia against him. Having won the con man's trust, Michael then takes the information given him and uses it to not only return all the money to the people he stole from, but also frame him for financing terrorists and child pornography. Michael will give you a chance to play nice, but if you don't, he is merciless.
Finally, Michael gets his reward: three hundred dollars and that phone number. When he calls it, a voice on the other end remarks that Michael's been busy, and they'll be in touch. So the underlying arc has been advanced approximately a tenth of a degree, by my calculations. In other news, we learn that Fiona and Sam have long hated each other for reasons that took place in the mists of Michael's backstory, which is another mark against her. She also torments Michael by accepting a dinner invitation from her mother and using the occasion as an excuse to talk about the two of them getting engaged. Yet another demerit is the fact that she has dropped her poor Irish accent in favor of a slightly less poor American one. Why they cast a British actor in that role in the first place is beyond me. I may have to start typing her name as F just to keep her in the black.
The third episode finds Michael sneaking into a hotel where a spy convention is about to take place, just to get the name of one of the attendees. He accomplishes this, barely escaping arrest, and then finds himself being asked another favor, this time by his landlord, Oleg, the guy who owns the neighboring nightclub. It seems one of his waitresses witnessed an assault committed by a midlevel Colombian drug lord, and now said drug lord wants her dead. Michael does some typical protector-style stuff for the waitress and her idiot teenage daughter who sneaks off to the prom, but he eventually just gets bored and frames the mid-level drug lord for planning to flip on his bosses. Bye-bye, mid-level drug lord. On the family front, Michael's mom gives him his dad's old Dodge Charger, a decrepit beast whose poor condition is a metaphor for everything that was wrong with Michael's relationship with his late father. And lets not forget the burn notice arc, in which Michael gets in touch with one of his old contacts at that spy convention and manages to convince him to get Michael a copy of his actual, literal, burn notice. Yes, the document itself. It turns out not to be the smoking gun one might think, but we're still only three episodes in, after all.
Besides, Michael has more immediate problems in episode four: namely, that creepy Eastern European assassin from Grosse Pointe Blank is in town to try and kill him. No shrinking violet, Michael figures that the hit man might actually end up helping him learn more about his burn notice. Michael is of course distracted from this lead right on cue, as he's called over to his mother's house to meet a new character. This is where we learn that Michael has a weaselly younger brother named Nate, a dead ringer for Johnny Drama who is also a loser with a gambling problem. Fortunately for Nate, he's heard about a family friend whose daughter has gotten unwittingly caught up in a prostitution ring, and Nate figures that he can help Michael deal with that and then split the cash from the job. It doesn't go smoothly, to say the least. At one point, Michael learns that Nate has headed over to Michael's apartment, which Michael has rigged with anti-assassin booby traps. Michael ends up exposing himself to the hit man's gunfire to stop Nate getting himself killed, and takes a ricochet to the shoulder. Nate not only chases the assassin away with his own gun, but later lets Michael walk him through kitchen surgery to excise the bullet. So maybe he's not a total loser.
Eventually Michael finds out that the hit man has a deadly peanut allergy, which he tries to use to his advantage. But all he gets is a small clue before saving the unconscious hit man from Michael-inflicted anaphylactic shock and leaving him to be picked up by the cops. And then he learns that the assassin died in custody, which he and Sam take to mean that while some people may want Michael dead, others clearly want him alive. Probably the latter are the same people who sent Michael that gift balloon with the note reading, "take care of that shoulder and we'll be in touch soon." The episode is almost never over until someone tells Michael they'll be in touch.
Episode five opens with bad news and good news. The bad news is that it's another Nate episode, and I really wasn't looking forward to another week learning more about one of the many reasons Michael left Miami in the first place. But the good news is that Nate is getting the crap beaten out of him at a private airport, which makes up for a lot. It seems that Nate decided to try and do a little solo Michael-ing, helping out a security guy at a private airport who's being leaned on by one of the companies that operates there. In over his head, Nate uses their dad's old Charger to guilt-trip Michael into helping him out. And while working on the engine, Michael discovers that Sam has also been using the car; it's bugged, presumably so Sam can keep tattling on Michael to the FBI. Anyway, Michael reluctantly agrees to help Nate out, only to find out that the bad guys are high-powered illegal arms dealers. Very upscale and paranoid. Fortunately Michael senses that the younger brother is looking for opportunities to expand his role, so he poses as a dealer himself to get access to the gun stash. Which he, Sam, and Fi forthwith steal, leaving the bad guys to think they're up against serious players, which in turn causes them to bail on Miami for good. It's almost as easy as it sounds.
At the same time, Michael's gotten tired of pretending not to be up to anything, so he lets Sam turn his illegally-obtained burn notice over to the FBI guys who have been tailing Michael since the pilot. And just like that, those FBI guys are gone, moments after notifying Sam that new spooks will be along to take their place. And moments before Sam introduces himself to the lady at the table, Veronica (80s hottie Audrey Landers), who will be a suspiciously innocuous presence in the background of Sam's life for the remainder of the season.
Stage Three: Bargaining
When we rejoin Michael for episode six, his little burn notice stunt seems to have kicked over quite the anthill in the intelligence community. When his mom calls to tell him that armed men are currently entering her house, Michael and Fi jump in the Charger and rush to the rescue. It's there that they meet Michael's new nemesis, played by Alex Carter (Detective Vartann from CSI. He's all faux-friendly as his goons trash Madeline's house in front of Michael, advising him in no uncertain terms that he needs to back off. He also refuses to identify himself or even the agency he works for, which of course tells Michael right off the bat how easy it's going to be to annoy this guy. He gets started on that as soon as he gets home, by simple expedients like reciting random phrases to foreign voice mail numbers on the phone he knows is bugged, and sneaking into the agent's hotel room to rig a booby-trap that will wipe the agent's computer. And as always there's also the Job Of The Week, in which Sam's friend Virgil, a boat repo guy, gets the team caught up between money-laundering Jamaicans, dirty cops, and a Donzi with ten million in cash under the subfloor (a plot that ends in an almost literal scorched-earth resolution when Michael ends a standoff between the two groups by torching the money and gets all the bad guys either shot or arrested at the same time). Fiona reliably takes advantage of Michael's need for her help by forcing him to talk to her about why he left her years before without saying goodbye. I of course have Michael's back on this one; his only mistake was not leaving years earlier. And in the end, Michael gets a new clue simply by picking his enemy's pocket and learning that he's dealing with Jason Bly of the Central Security Service. Oh, that Jason Bly.
In episode seven, things escalate quickly between Michael and Bly. Michael opens by outing Bly in a crowded restaurant, but Bly retaliates by setting Fiona up to get picked up in a stolen car full of illegal weapons (Bly also makes the excellent point that after all this time, maybe Michael should be getting on with his life already). Michael pulls Fi's nonexistent fat from that little fire, but Bly is still finding ways to put pressure on not only Michael, but Sam and Fi and Madeline and Nate as well. Michael realizes he needs leverage. To get that leverage, he gets a bunch of info on Bly and hands it over to his money-launderer friend Barry, where Michael will let it bake for a few days while he takes care of his Job Of The Week. In this case, it's chasing a ruthless crime boss (former MTV VJ Idalis, if you can believe that shit) out of a beleaguered neighborhood by acting even more ruthless. This ends up being one of his more shaggy-dog plans, but it comes together quite neatly when he manages to manipulate Idalis's top lieutenant into killing her himself. And when he's all done, he's got a nice little package waiting for him: fake proof that Bly is up to no good. Presented with this potential career-ender, Bly drops the jovial act and agrees to not only back off, but provide Michael with the full dossier on his burn notice. Bly's hangdog expression at this defeat is no more heartbreaking than mine is, after seeing Michael and Fi fall into bed together again for the first time. Ugh.
Stage Four: Depression
Actually, I'm the one who's depressed here, now that Michael and Fiona are a couple again. And it's only going to get worse. What starts out as a day at the beach turns into Michael's eighth Job Of The Week, when Fi asks her to help him do some quick bounty hunting. But after apprehending the bail-jumper, a guy accused of stealing a piece of expensive jewelry from a hotel, Fi decides that the guy is innocent and that she and Michael are going to help him clear his name. Not satisfied with hijacking his week, she also goes overboard in trying to make Michael jealous of the dude. This totally doesn't work at first, and I'm even more "Yay, Michael!" than usual, but her persistence in getting on his nerves eventually gets to even him. Which shouldn't surprise me; that is after all how she managed to get him to date her again. In any case, with a few hitches, Michael manages to not only ferret out the real thief, but manipulate him into trying to transfer the stolen brooch into his safety-deposit box, a move that gets him nabbed when Michael and Sam and Fiona stage a fake robbery at the bank that brings the cops running.
Oh, and what about that dossier that Michael blackmailed from Jason Bly? Don't you just bet it's chock-full of juicy stuff? Well, actually, there's not much for Michael to work with other than the name of the NSA guy who put it together, one Philip Cowan. Michael comes up with a seemingly subtle way to fuck with Cowan: get some Libyan contacts of Fi's to mention Cowan's name when they know someone is listening, or maybe have the head of the Libyan secret police send Cowan a fruit basket. By the end of the episode, Michael is being yelled at over the phone by the voice of Richard Schiff, who's playing Cowan. "I've got the FBI on my front lawn!" he yells. Michael isn't exactly repentant, and Cowan threatens/promises to -- wait for it -- be in touch. I guess he doesn't like fruit.
Episode nine teaches us that "being in touch" for Cowan means sending a government bureaucrat to Miami to meet with Michael. Michael's opinion of bureaucrats isn't much improved by the fact that this one is played by perpetual long-suffering nerd Arye Gross, so he makes the guy jump through a lot of hoops before agreeing to even meet with him. This is fairly easy, because Michael's also got his hands full trying to save the kidnapped girlfriend of an idiot surfer-dude. He does that by flipping one of the kidnapper's accomplices and then posing as a hostage negotiator to distract the ringleader while Sam and Fi rescue the girl by force. With that out of the way, Michael meets with Arye Gross at his loft, where the meek bureaucrat turns out to be a hired killer who nearly takes Michael out. Only Michael's home field advantage (in the form of a gun stashed under the kitchen sink) saves his life. So Cowan really doesn't like fruit.
In episode ten, Michael's too occupied with the Job Of The Week to do much on his burn notice project, other than try to get fake papers to he can go to D.C. to confront Cowan and then find out at the end of the episode that Cowan is going to be coming to Miami instead. That Job Of The Week involves a woman who tells Michael that her estranged and abusive husband has kidnapped their child, and there's nothing the police can do. The first red flag about this operation is that abusive dads is Michael's big hot-button, and he loses his objectivity the minute it's been pressed (much to a jealous Fiona's concern). The second red flag is that the helpless, vulnerable, weeping mother is played by Lucy Lawless, so you know right away that something's up. Someday there will be a show that will be ambitious enough to cast her this much against type, but Burn Notice is not that show. Sure enough, no sooner does Michael find the "husband" than Lucy Lawless tries to kill them both. Yep, she's actually a hired assassin who used Michael to help her find her target, a mob witness. Michael of course manages to not only protect the witness, but also turn the tables on Lucy Lawless and get the drop on her. There's also a scene in which we learn that the two of them have a shared history, of a sort; he had pursued her years before, somewhere in Europe, but never caught her, which is why he didn't recognize her when they met. However, that doesn't explain why she has kind of a creepy crush on him. Alas, after Michael busts her, she commits suicide rather than allow herself to be taken alive, which sadly deprives us of what could have been a really cool recurring nemesis. Here's hoping she bounced off an awning when she dropped off that rooftop.
And now we're up to the two-hour season finale, in which we learn that sometimes, being a spy can be really, really tedious. By way of demonstrating this, Michael and Cowan spend most of the episode trying to arrange and rearrange a meeting by leaving each other obscure clues. Michael is too busy with this to do much in the Job Of The Week, leaving Sam and Fi to do most of the heavy lifting in that department. In this case, Sam is hired by a woman at a defense contracting company who is getting blackmailed into helping to smuggle Turkish heroin. After learning that they're dealing with a "double-blackmail" (it's complicated), they enlist Michael to assume the role of a guy who wants a piece of the action. But the bad guys are too paranoid, and it goes south, leaving Sam and Fiona with no option but to try and set up a fake buy where they'll get enough goods on the bad guys to make them back off. But the fake buy goes really wrong, as the bad guys get killed by even worse guys, who then nab Sam and chase after Fiona. Like she's such a catch.
Things aren't going much better for Michael when he finally meets Cowan; after Cowan informs Michael that he's on the edge of something huge, a sniper bullet takes Cowan down, leaving Michael covered in a dead guy's blood while police sirens are already wailing in the distance. Michael calls the only available person he can trust -- okay, the only available person, period -- his brother Nate, who has become much more likable simply by shaving the "ferret" (TM Michael) off his face. When Nate comes to the rescue, Michael tells him to take their mom and get out of town already. He's about to go his own way, but suddenly realizes that Nate's pickup is surrounded by undercover spooks -- which means the people who shot Cowan are after Michael now. And then there's the panicked phone call he gets from Fi. Sure, the bad guys are dead, but Sam is captured and Fi is on the run. Michael and Nate rescue Fi from a warehouse in a daring operation that leaves Nate's pickup as the only casualty, but Michael still has a couple of problems. One is that very serious people are after him, and the other is that he has to figure out a way to get Sam back alive from heroin smugglers who don't seem to make customer service their top priority.
Multitasking brilliantly, Michael holes up with Fi and Nate and his mom in a foreclosure property his brother is "borrowing." This serves as his base of operations while he tries to negotiate Sam's release with the heroin smuggler who's taken Sam prisoner. He does this by posing as a competing heroin dealer and pretending he doesn't realize that the real heroin dealer plans to kill him, Sam, and Fi as soon as he can. While he's still dealing with that, and chauffeuring his mom and brother out of town, suddenly the government suits start closing in.
Stage Five: Acceptance
Realizing he's out of time, Michael puts on a big embarrassing drama-queen display in the middle of the street by holding a tapped cell phone in one hand and a gun on the other, then putting both to his head and threatening to kill himself unless they back off. He also adds that he'll turn himself in after twelve hours, after taking care of business. The mysterious, silky-voiced female on the other end of the phone (not Tricia Helfer, yet) agrees. That means Michael's got time to say goodbye to Fi, bust a very grateful Sam out of where he's being held, and shoot and/or blow up all the heroin smugglers in the process. Problem solved. Plus Madeline and Nate are out of town, so I'm even happier.
So what ? Well, the godlike voice that lives behind the OnStar button in the rearview mirror of Sam's Cadillac has a suggestion for Michael: drive where I tell you to. After dropping off Sam, who is fortunately still appreciative enough to not protest Michael's use of the CadillAxe, Michael follows the voice's directions out to the middle of a causeway, where a truck is parked on the shoulder with its tailgate open, in silent invitation for Michael to drive on in. Michael does so, as his final VO of the season ties in his reasons for following this mystery so far to the reasons he became a spy in the first place: "It's all about putting your ass on the line to learn something."
Fortunately, you and I don't have to put our asses on the line to accomplish that. We can just put them on our couches, starting Thursday. See you then!