By M. Giant
Michael finally gets to meet his new handler Carla face-to-face, and she gives him what seems like a simple assignment: have a counterfeiter make a copy of a top-of-the-line security badge in two days. But complications take the form of Sam wanting his help with a pretty lady's stalker and Madeline wanting to drag Michael to counseling with her. And Sam's case turns out to be more complicated than it seems, with the stalker a drug smuggler and the stalkee an undercover DEA agent. Michael approaches both the counterfeiter and the stalker/smuggler using separate cover IDs. The stalker/smuggler turns out to be kind of a handful, making it difficult for Michael to turn the stalker's boss against him and force the stalker to flip for the DEA. But of course Michael pulls it off anyway, saving the stalkee, her case, and her job.
Michael and his mom don't have a great time at the counselor's, but they end up getting a bit closer together in their own way. As for the security badge, Michael gets his hands on a copy moments before going back to find the counterfeiter dead. So that's one possible lead on Carla's organization down the drain. But Michael quickly gets another when he tricks her into speaking Arabic to him and learns that she does so with a Kurdish accent. Oh, her. I totally know who she is now, don't you?
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The first time I clapped eyes on Jeffrey Donovan, he already looked familiar to me somehow. This was years ago, but suddenly this week it hit me: he looks like a taller version of Guy Pearce without the manorexia. A Hulk Pearce, if you will, only not green. I'll try to maintain my interest despite the fact that with this realization, the real mystery of Burn Notice has been solved, as far as I'm concerned.
We catch up with Michael, spending a little private time in his loft with that crossword puzzle Carla left him at he end of the last episode. As the Michael VO lectures us about "steganography," or the art of sending coded messages that don't look like messages unless you have the key, Michael flips back and forth to the puzzle. It turns out it's a coded message whose key consists of little windows cut out of the page in front of the puzzle that reveal individual letters, allowing Michael -- or a clever rhesus monkey -- to decode it. "MEET AT MARINA MALL NOON." is the message Michael comes up with. I hope he got his little windows lined up right and Carla wasn't actually telling him to MAKE A VANILLA MALT DOOD.
The day, Michael parks the Charger in the middle of a right-turn lane to the mall in question. He, Sam, and Fiona hop out as Michael instructs Fi to tail Carla if she leaves. Fi suggests, "There's room in the trunk." Michael nixes that and leaves her in position with the car while he and Sam enter an open-air mall, the latter carrying a big flashy digital camera. Sam frets about a meeting of his own he's got to get to, but Michael already knows Sam's only got a Pilates class with his girlfriend Veronica. Sam acts all whipped and even blames Michael for getting him in trouble in the first place. This despite the fact that Michael waded into the fortified hideout of a heroin smuggler to save Sam after a job went bad that Sam picked in the first place, but Michael doesn't have time to do anything but tell Sam to make sure to get a photo of Carla while they're there.
As Michael trolls the mall, he VOs that you always want to be the one setting the meeting, because that puts you in control. Funny, Michael's not usually the "do as I say, not as I do" type. But I guess there's not much he can do about it now. I notice that Sam has been imprudent enough to skyline himself and the camera in the background, but we'll get to that. Suddenly Carla calls out to Michael from behind him. She's sitting at a table all friendly-like with a go-cup in front of her and a freeze-frame subtitle under her face: "CARLA -- THE NEW HANDLER." She offers him a drink, and he starts fishing for clues right away by saying, "I'll have what you're having." She reveals that she's drinking some kind of Yemenese (sic) coffee that she brewed herself, because you never know what's in restaurant drinks. So now we know she's paranoid and pretentious. She thanks him for meeting her at the mall. "Work has been so busy I haven't had time to shop," she says. Michael asks for her boss's number so he can call and straighten that out, which of course doesn't fool Carla. She just hands him a little paper shopping bag. Inside is a credit-card sized piece of laminate plastic with computer chips and holograms visible inside. Fanciest security badge I've ever seen. Pretty hard to get an illicit copy, I'd suspect, which of course is what she wants done. Without telling him where she got it or what it's for, she directs Michael to contact the one counterfeiter in Miami who can do the job, a Tunisian named Nefzi. And Michael's going to be approaching Nefzi on his own, with instructions to have the original and the copy back in two days. Michael asks if that's all he needs to do to clear up the burn notice. Yes, Michael. You were burned overseas in the field during a live operation, then shipped back to Miami, given untold levels of surveillance, and spared any number of assassination attempts, all so Carla could have a copy of a security badge. Seriously, I think not, and Carla straightens him out on that pretty quick. "But there are rewards to playing nice," she adds, handing him another shopping bag that contains five figures in cash and adding that he can keep the change after paying Nefzi. As she stands up, she casually asks, "Looking for Sam?" Michael endeavors to shrug innocently, but indeed, Sam is no longer in that obviously skylined spot where we last saw him. And as a beefy guy approaches the table with the Sam's digital camera and the car keys Michael gave to Fi, Carla says she brought friends, too. She assures Michael that Sam and Fi are fine as she pockets the chip from the camera and drops the camera itself on the sidewalk. "time, kids stay home," is her exit line. I hope Nefzi doesn't mind buying Sam a new camera.
Back at Michael's loft, Fi is raving about how good Carla's guys were. "Polite, too, for counter-surveillance types." "Not with this," Michael protests, rooting around in the guts of the ruined camera. Yeah, it was Veronica's, which means Sam's a little grumpy. But on to the subject of getting in touch with Nefzi. Fi suggests getting in touch with him through Michael's money-launderer buddy Barry, who was in several episodes last season. The problem is that in the season finale, Michael kind of threatened Barry in order to get his help with putting Michael in touch with a local heroin boss so he could track down the other heroin smugglers who were holding Sam, so now Barry is kind of avoiding Michael and Sam both. "Gonna need a fresh face," Michael says. "Someone he won't expect." I can think of someone who fills half that bill...Fi acts reluctant to help Michael with this, because apparently she's got something against money launderers. "The last one I dealt with? They're still finding pieces of him all over Belfast." Fi likes her money dirty, eh? Michael asks her to do it for him, and when she claims to now be immune to his charms, he offers all the yogurt she can eat. Which is, what, one or two of those little cups a day, depending on her water intake? Michael is cheap. Still, Fi takes the deal, as long as she doesn't have to promise not to kill Barry. Just then, Michael gets a cell phone call from Sam: "There's a thing I need to talk to you about, right away."
Michael arrives at the sidewalk café where Sam asked him to meet, but when he sees Sam talking to a petite brunette, he starts to turn and walk away. Too late -- Sam chases him down. Michael protests that if this is about a job, it's not a good time. Sure, Michael gets handed a sack of cash and he forgets about how he paid the rent for the first season. Sam assures Michael that this is just a little stalker issue, one that that ex-SEAL Sam can't handle himself for some obscure reason that has to do with how horny Veronica gets when he's on a job. So Michael agrees to hear the woman out rather than hear any more from Sam. Good call.
Cut to Michael, having joined Sam at the table, along with "SOPHIA -- THE CLIENT" (thank you, subtitles). It seems the stalker in question is a dude named Raul who's a regular at the bar where Sophia is a hostess. But since he hasn't done anything more overtly hostile than come to her work every day and watch her, the police can't do anything. "I'll see what I can do," Michael says. He needs to get that printed on his business cards. He asks when Raul shows up at the restaurant. Sophia says that won't work; she doesn't want to get fired, either. Sam suggests another venue, and she says that Raul always wants to pick her up from church every day. Every day, she goes? Jeez. Sounds like Raul likes a challenge.
day, Michael and Sam are staking out the church and waiting for Sophia and Raul to show up. Michael idly asks how Sam met Sophia in the first place, and a little red flag goes up when Sam says they met in the celebrity-chef cooking class Veronica signed him up for. Suddenly Michael gets a cell phone call from his mom asking when he's going to come over and fix her coffee maker already. Michael agrees to show up later just to get her off the phone, because the target has just arrived across the street. Michael peers through his opera glasses -- and over the subtitle reading "RAUL -- THE STALKER" -- at a Latino version of Jonathan Rhys-Meyers who's wearing a track jacket over his t-shirt. But Michael's eye is drawn more by what's under the jacket, namely a shoulder holster containing a very large hand-cannon. "That stalker happens to have a MAC-10!" Michael bitches at Sam, who didn't really have the whole picture. "I thought it was, like, a regular gun," Sam protests. As they watch Raul cut Sophia from the herd outside the church and bossily deposit her into his red sports car, Michael bitches about how much extra work this means. "You're buying lunch," he snaps. Sam is happy to have gotten off that easy. Yogurt's cheap, after all.
Barry the money launderer was a recurring character last season, and now we see him again, comfortably ensconced in a spa, complete with robe and guac mask and cucumber slices on his eyes. He holds out his water glass for a refill, but when the water comes it hits him smack in the face. Right then is when the subtitles pick their moment, freezing Barry's shocked green mug to inform us we are looking at "BARRY -- THE MONEY LAUNDERER." The subtitles never trust us to remember Barry. We remember Barry, subtitles. Give us a little credit. When he sits up and recognizes Fi, he comes right out and admits that Michael scared him a little bit last time they talked. Fi assures him that Michael just needs some info on a Tunisian counterfeiter. Barry tries to stall with an unfunny bit about where Tunisia even is, but Fi isn't having it and brings him in line by grabbing him by the eyebrow. Barry gives in and says she's asking about Nefzi, but they would be wise to steer clear of him; he's the most hard-core counterfeiter around. Normally I don't think of freelance counterfeiters as being particularly scary. What's he going to do to you, print novelty cash with your face on it and then black out one of your teeth? "Plus," Barry adds, "he's the most arrogant son of a bitch in South Florida." He tells Fi to look for Nefzi in a TV repair shop in South Miami, and adds that Nefzi was in the Tunisian security force in the early eighties. Which means he knows where all the Tusken Raiders are buried. Fi appreciates the info, but not enough to respond to Barry's overtures to her with anything other than a threatening gesture with a pointy object.
Over at Madeline's house, Michael's about ready to call time-of-death on his mom's old coffee maker and promises to get her a new one. Madeline broaches a new subject, which is that she's been going to a counselor who says that the two of them have "unresolved issues" and that Michael should join the sessions. Michael's like, not so much, as he packs up the old coffee maker for the trash. Madeline sells the whole idea of how she's been having night sweats, so Michael agrees to go with her, without bothering to ask when he needs to be there. More bad news: the appointment is tomorrow. Michael then gets a call from Sam, who followed Raul to work. "Man, you gotta see this," Sam says.
Cut to the docks, where Michael and Sam peek around a parked semi trailer as Raul seems to be running a pretty big crew in what looks to be an, ah, importing enterprise. Sam's momentarily distracted by a cell call from his horny mistress, which he quickly gets rid of. Michael sends Sam on ahead to get a closer look at Raul's operation. "Think you can handle that, Pumpkin?" Michael mocks. Sam thinks he can.
Some wacky editing later, Sam pulls right up to that area of the docks in the CadillAxe, chattering away on his cell phone as though he doesn't notice the presence of Raul and his goons looming menacingly around. Sam pretends to be wrapping up an argument with a shipping guy, and then, after hanging up, turns to Raul to claim he's got to move a lot of Pilates equipment fast and wants to do business with him. Sam takes a few steps closer to Raul's trucks, acting like an ignorant yokel who just wants to rent some trailer space and pretending he doesn't notice the pallets stacked high with coffee and lidocaine. Raul keeps trying to turn Sam away, but Sam doesn't give up until he takes out a wad of cash, which Raul takes from him and throws away. Retrieving it on his way back to the CadillAxe, Sam calls that a down payment and leaves. It's probably good that Fi wasn't here to see how well Sam can play the irritating moron, let alone Veronica.
Later, Sophia is walking along when suddenly Michael grabs her and pins her to a wall, demanding, "Who are you?" She plays dumb, and Michael tells her what they saw at Raul's work and what it means: "Lidocaine is used to cut cocaine, and coffee masks the smell from the dogs." Sophia acts shocked that Raul is into drug running, which Michael isn't buying for a second. He asks how she just happened to meet Sam at a cooking class someone in her job shouldn't even be able to afford, and she's decided she's had enough. She pokes a fist into his ribs, and a second later she's got a gun. Which Michael grabs and sticks under her throat. "I'm DEA," she confesses. "I'm a cop." Wow, would this make her the worst cop ever?
Later, she, Michael, and Sam walk along the beach as she explains that she's been working undercover to build a case against Raul for two years. It seems Raul is a number-two guy in the Valdez cartel (which might possibly mean a more innocent explanation for all the coffee, at least). But it's still true that Raul is stalking her, which makes it kind of tough for her to track down a big shipment that's expected in the couple of days. And, as Michael realizes, she can't tell her bosses because they'd pull her off the case. So rather than letting that happen, she decided to go to an off-the-books enforcer. Genius, really. She apologizes to Michael for lying to him, but needed his help and cites the stories she's heard: "There are rumors about a guy who took on the cartel a while back. I found the people you helped and they told me what you did." "Don't believe everything you hear," Michael says modestly. Sophia reiterates that she needs help, and could go to jail for involving Michael. "I'm out here alone," she says. Michael says he knows what that's like. Because it's all about Michael.
So then Michael and Sophia are in the Charger, parked up the street from Sophia's workplace -- or, more accurately, the place she works as her cover. She points out Raul's boss, a grayhair named Campos, to Michael and Sam, saying that he meets with Raul there for lunch every day. Wow, those guys like their routine. Oops, freeze frame: "CAMPOS -- THE BOSS." Yeah, thanks for keeping up, subtitles. Noticing the guys with giant guns of their own standing around nearby, Michael asks about the firepower, although he doesn't say anything about their shocking lack of discretion. Sophia explains that Campos is in a turf war with Mexican dealers, who just happened to put out a hit on him last week. Just like that, Michael has a plan, which he outlines for Sophia: "I need to get in with Raul, quietly. Make myself useful, get some information. Then I let Campos know that Raul is spilling information to a new friend behind his back. Campos deals with Raul for us and it looks like you had nothing to do with it." "You make it sound so easy," Sophia says. "That sounded easy?" Michael asks. Well, Michael already did something like this at least twice last season, so he would be the expert. They watch as Campos gets into his car and is driven off. A second later, they see Raul dial his cell phone, and Sophia's rings a second later. As they converse in Spanish (as these two characters do throughout the episode for some reason), he's wondering where she is. She claims she's on the bus, on the way to work, but he doesn't buy it, demanding to know who she's with. Aw, the stalker who thinks he's a boyfriend. Instead of telling him to fuck off, Sophia plays innocent, even afraid of Raul. So Raul hangs up with a vague threat, and Sophia hops out of Michael's car and off to work. Let's hope she's a better hostess than cop.
That night in the loft, Fi comes in to find Michael at his table with a stack of old checks, courtesy of Barry. Michael's decided to become a forger. But why, when he's supposed to be hiring one, not becoming one? "Approach the Tunisian with a few phony checks..." he says to Fi. "...And you're not just a client, you're a colleague," Fi finishes. She takes the X-Acto knife from Michael's hand and starts pouring bottles of nail polish remover into bread pans. This triggers a stylish little forgery montage as Michael explains what they're doing: all you need to do some check forging is old checks, nail polish remover, and some Scotch tape. Dip the check in the acetone to dissolve all the unprinted ink save the signature (which I assume you cover with the tape), and you end up with a blank check. "Counterfeiters call it check-washing," Michael says. How creative. I always knew counterfeiting was an art. To be fair, I learned a lot more about this kind of thing from Catch Me If You Can, but then that was also a lot longer.
morning (how much time does Michael have left on his project for Carla? Like, an hour?), Michael strides into the TV shop Barry mentioned, looking like a complete tool with his hair plastered down over his skull, dorky silver-framed sunglasses, and a white silk track jacket over no shirt. As he VOs that "there is no honor among thieves, but there is a certain respect. Establishing that you're in the same racket is a great way to make an introduction." And then disguising yourself as a tremendous dork is an even better way to undercut that respect. When Erick Avari (Papa Suresh from Heroes) meets Michael at the counter, Michael just holds up the security card Carla gave him. Instantly intrigued by the implied challenge, Erick Avari flips the "CLOSED" sign around in the door behind a subtitle: "NEFZI: THE COUNTERFEITER." I have to say, those subtitles look exactly like the real thing. They're always good for a correct spelling, if nothing else. Michael tells Nefzi in a dopey voice that he was asked to make a copy of the badge, but it's out of his league, which is why he came to Nefzi. "I'm good with papers, not with computers," he says, chomping on a wad of gum. "This is a computer thing, right?" Nefzi dryly affirms that it is, and isn't impressed when Michael tries to make a professional connection by showing off his briefcase full of washed checks. He's even less impressed when Michael offers to pay with them. But when Nefzi demands $10,000 cash with half up front, Michael only acts all sticker-shocked for about a second before saying, "Okay," and dropping a few bricks on Nefzi's counter. He asks when he can have the passes back. Nefzi offers a basic knockoff the day, but anything decent will take a few days. "Take your time," Michael says. He had to think about it for a second there, which meant he came dangerously close to breaking character.
Back out on the sidewalk, Michael gets a call from his mom, heartbroken that he missed their appointment with the counselor. No sooner has she sadly hung up than he gets another call, this time from Carla. "You look upset," she says. "Is everything okay?" The camera starts circling around Michael as he looks around for Carla, playing it cool and forgetting all about the fresh guilt-knife in his gut. "If you need to talk, I'm here for you," she smarms. Michael responds by asking for her home number, which of course doesn't work. He says the badges will be ready in a few days, and she's disappointed. "Yeah, well, that's the best I can do," he says unrepentantly. She says she doubts that, and hangs up. That could have gone better.
That evening, Michael is in a natty dark suit as he enters Sophia's workplace, where Raul is hanging at the bar and putting his hands all over her. Michael wastes no time in approaching Raul and offering to help him with his "shipping" activities, as a "consultant." Raul defensively says he imports coffee -- and we all know how defensive coffee importers can be -- prompting Michael to scoff, "Right, and I used to work for the Mexicans. Let's cut the crap." Raul dismisses Sophia and makes a barely veiled threat about how Michael sounds like he's trying to get himself killed. Michael claims that he really did used to work for the Mexicans, but now he's a disgruntled ex-employee. He hints to Raul that he's got friends in the police force, customs, and the docks that can help expedite Raul's "shipping." Raul's suspicious, not only because this sounds too good to be true, but because he thinks it's strange that Michael didn't go to Raul's boss instead. Michael claims he just wants to make Raul look good and make some money for himself, and is about to leave his business card behind until Raul invites him to join him for a drink. He summons Sophia over to set them up, and introduces her as his girlfriend. "She loves me more than her own life," Raul confides to Michael. "That's a lot," Michael says. Good comeback.
The day, Michael walks into his mom's house to apologize in person for missing the appointment. But Madeline isn't mad any more; she lurves the new coffee maker that showed up on her counter that morning, and calls that apology enough. Of course, when Michael looks over at the new unit on the counter -- a sleek chrome number that looks not coincidentally like the head of a Cylon Centurion -- it's the first time he's seen it. Madeline asks why he didn't wake her last night when he dropped it off, and he claims he was in a hurry. "You were here long enough to read the paper," Madeline points out. You guessed it -- there's another crossword on the counter. Once again, Carla's handwriting is so dude-like that it fooled even Michael's own mother.
Back at that same mall where they met before, Michael and Carla shop for sunglasses as she extols the features of the new coffee maker, which she claims she picked out for Madeline herself. "Yeah, I'd stay away from her," Michael says, faux-casually. Carla reminds Michael about what he told her about the old coffee maker, and models a pair of shades for him to ask what he thinks. "Depends on where you're staying," Michael says through a white-framed pair that almost make him look too stupid to be fishing for clues about where to find Carla. She's not fooled though, as she takes him by the arm to walk along and remind him that he works for them now -- whoever that is -- and he needs to do things their way. She's talking about his pushing back on the timeline for the badge. "Quality work takes time," Michael says. She compares him to a new puppy, chewing the furniture and testing the boundaries. Which would also explain why she keeps leaving newspaper behind for him. "time I give you a deadline," she warns, "I expect you to meet it. Don't test me again or the time I leave a gift at your mom's house, it's not gonna be a coffee maker." Well, I certainly hope not. She already has one.
It's evening again as Michael VOs, "If you want to make a friend, solve a problem for them. No problem to solve? Create one." Yeah, I've seen how well that works for Susan on Desperate Housewives. But in this case we see Fiona sneaking around on the docks near Raul's trucks so she can hide some electronic device inside the grip of a dolly attached to one of the trailers. Michael calls her to check in, and also to let us know this is all part of the plan to make Raul look bad in front of his boss. He quickly hangs up as Sophia delivers Michael a menu with a note on a napkin inside. "He's searching your car." Michael smiles. This, too, is part of the plan, as we see Raul finding a PDA and a bunch of tickets from the racetrack in the car. "Relationships are about trust," Michael VOs. "People trust you when they have something on you, like...information about a secret gambling habit."
Inside the restaurant, Michael pretends to act flustered when Raul shows up with the crap he found in Michael's car, but he's still playing the part of the guy who needs the business. Still, Raul is being cagy, refusing to give Michael anything. Michael's about to walk away, but Raul sticks that MAC-10 in his ribs before he's fully up from the table. Michael VOs, "People don't trust information they get for free. If you want to sell someone on a lie, you have to make them drag it out of you. It's effective, but often painful." After Michael subtly waves off Sophia, who has quietly picked up a paring knife, Raul asks Michael for a sample of his wares. Michael "reluctantly" tells Raul about a DEA tracking device on one of his trucks, which Michael claims to have heard about from a source in the DA's office. Cut to Raul on the docks, finding said device and yelling at his men for not finding what Fiona just planted there. Satisfied, Fi turns away fro her hidden vantage point and hops right into the shiny new new Saab commercial that Jimmy gave the show last week. Seriously, it's totally blatant.
"I always like to think that the "C" in "counseling" stands for "communication," says Madeline's counselor, as Michael's mother sits listening raptly. Michael looks at the counselor like the idiot she is. The counselor asks Madeline to talk about an example of a time she didn't get the communication she wanted from Michael. She obliges by telling them about the time he forgot to call her on her birthday eight years ago. Michael responds, "At the time, I was stationed overseas, transporting a colleague to a locked facility. There were some individuals who were trying very hard to prevent me from doing my job. I was injured and ended up in a field hospital for six weeks. They didn't have a phone, so I could not...communicate." Wow, Michael is good at this. Now he gets to take a turn, so he tells a story about the groceries he stole when he was nine, "because Dad blew his paycheck." The store owner's son, the bag boy, caught Michael and beat him up, but Michael still escaped with the groceries somehow. "You took the groceries, Mom, but you never asked me about the black eye. Any communication about that?" Madeline shrugs her ignorance. "Then why did we never go back to that store?" Michael asks. She doesn't have an answer for that, and tries to change the subject. "Let's talk about the time we went to Disneyworld," she suggests.
Out in the parking lot, Madeline can't remember what she ever liked about that counselor. "Really?" asks Michael cheerily. "I didn't think it was so bad." At least Madeline has learned that if she wants to take Michael on, there'd better not be an impartial observer in the room. Suddenly Michael gets a call from Raul, wanting to meet.
When Michael shows up at the restaurant, it's empty, except for Raul and Sophia. He's standing over her, and she's sitting in a chair, looking kind of beaten up. Smiling nervously, Michael asks what's going on. Raul says he had a friend look at Sophia's phone records, and now he knows that she and Michael have been talking. He whips out his MAC-10 and points it at Sophia's face while Michael stays cool, smiling and saying, "I don't know what she's told you." Which is a good way of getting Raul to tell Michael what Sophia's said, which is nothing. Raul yanks her to her feet and screams, "How long have you and this puta been sleeping together?" Now, I know very little Spanish, but I'm pretty sure he didn't just call her a princess. Michael laughs and calls Raul stupid, which gets Raul's gun pointed at Michael's face instead. As the scene freezes, Michael VOs, "Inexperienced operatives abandon a cover ID under pressure. Experienced ones just play their roles harder." Which Michael now demonstrates by yelling at Raul that he was trying to use Sophia to do his due diligence on Raul, but Sophia never told him anything, even when he offered her money. Raul's gun is back on Sophia now as Michael says, "But if you want to shoot her, go ahead. In fact, I'll do it myself." He draws his weapon on Sophia and everything. He fails to VO that in this situation, an inexperienced operative might fumble the gun and say something like, "Oops, I just pointed my gun at a DEA agent," so I guess we'll just have to wait for this hypothetical operative to get his own series in a year or two. Raul pulls on Michael again and asks Sophia in Spanish why she didn't tell him this. She says she was scared. And also, she is the worst cop ever. He promises to take her somewhere nice that night, all Sleeping with the Enemy, and she continues to play her own part. Michael turns away to hide his look of relief from Raul. After Raul dismisses Sophia, he says he's ready for Michael to meet the boss. That's not in Michael's plan, but Raul doesn't care. "That is how I operate." Too bad the psychotic stalker turned out to be also such a scrupulously honest employee.
Back at the loft, Sam's wondering how they're going to bust Raul for doing something he's not doing. Michael's way ahead of him: "If we can't make him a traitor one way, we'll gonna have to do it another way. Fi, get me a sniper rifle and some C-4." Fi likes where this is going, but Sam doesn't appreciate when Michael takes away the beer he just opened. "We have work to do," Michael says, as he trashes a perfectly good beer. Wow, Michael really does have an evil side after all.
Back at the dock, Idiot-Sam and the CadillAxe make their triumphant return, this time with a big old inflated Pilates ball that Sam wants to show off as an example of the kind of wares he wants shipped. Good thing he's just playing a character, otherwise I can't imagine a real shipping guy would be like, "sure, I've got plenty of room in my trucks for your air." Michael explains in VO: "Most people think that distracting a group of guys is best done by a beautiful woman. The problem with beautiful women is that people want them to stick around, which can cause a lot of problems." And while Sam is doing the distracting, the beautiful woman on the team (although opinions on that vary, clearly), is dashing across the parking lot to stick a plastique bomb under the frame of a parked car. "Obnoxious guys, they just want to get rid of," Michael concludes as Sam is bundled back into his car, sans exercise ball. Hey, let's not be too hard on Sam, here; there are plenty of people on the boards who want to get rid of Fi, too.
Meanwhile, upstairs, Michael is just now being frisked and let into Campos's office overlooking the whole dock operation. Raul is also present, of course. Campos invites Michael to start his pitch, and Michael leads Campos to the big picture window in the office to start lecturing him about his vulnerabilities. That picture window just happens to have a sweet view from a boat docked across the way, where Fi is now positioned with that sniper rifle. She gives Sam the signal to "Go." In this case, "Go" means popping a CD into the CadillAxe's player while Sophia, sitting in the shotgun seat, calls Raul's cell phone to complain to him about a drunk masher at her work. Sam plays the part in the background, to the point where he's cackling and rubbing Sophia's phone. Raul of course dashes off to defend his sweetheart's honor while Campos shakes his head. No sooner has the door closed behind Raul than Michael wonders out loud, "Raul would never go to the cops?" Campos doesn't think so. But Michael points out that Sophia isn't at work today. Campos starts looking pretty doubtful.
And here's another helpful hint from Michael's VO: "Most assassinations involve the firing of a single well-placed bullet." Just then, he warns, "Get down!" and pulls Campos to the floor while the picture window shatters in front of them, courtesy of the first bullet from Fi's sniper rifle. Michael VOs that to sell an assassination attempt, you need a little more firepower, while Fiona blows the shit out of Campos's office from a few hundred yards away. Then she switches to the remote detonator. "And an explosion or two doesn't hurt," Michael's VO adds. Cue one exploding car, shot from every possible angle because this is on a basic-cable budget and they need to wring as much footage as possible out of shit like that. Still on the floor to Campos, Michael yells, "Raul set you up." Campos is sold, and sends his goons to find Raul.
As Sam and Sophia stake out the restaurant, Michael explains in VO about drug cartel justice: "It doesn't involve courts or lawyers or proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. If they think you might be a traitor, they'll kill you just to be on the safe side." "Run, Raul! Run, baby!" Sam crows as Raul dashes out the back door of Sophia's restaurant, yards in front of Campos's gunmen.
Somehow Raul made it to an interrogation room somewhere, and he's singing a whole aria. But he calls for a recitative until he's sure he'll be protected. The agent assures Raul they've got it covered, and they're going to have Raul talk to one of their agents. "Someone who knows your operation pretty well." And in walks Sophia, all badged and suited up, smirking at him around that bruise he gave her. Well, Raul, at least now you don't have to worry about explaining to her why you aren't taking her anyplace nice tonight.
Outside the building, Sophia meets up with Michael in his car to provide the denouement: Raul is pleading out and is on his way to maximum security. Sophia asks of there's anything she can do for him in return. How about, uh, paying the man? Bombs and sniper rifles ain't free, lady. But Michael just asks her to keep the rumors about him just that. They smile at each other, and Michael drives off, all cool-like, as though he's not going to have to get out and push once he's around the corner because he's doing this shit for free now and can't afford to keep gas in the Charger.
Michael's back in Nefzi's shop, toolishly grinning about Nefzi's quality work. Nefzi's actually smug enough about his three prototypes and his "masterpiece" to be able to bear talking to Michael for a minute. Michael asks if there's a way to find out what building the cards will provide entry to. Lest he seem too much like a serious player, he peers through the clear cards at Nefzi as though through sunglasses, even as he offers Nefzi an extra five grand. Nefzi tells Michael to come back week and locks himself in his back room, while Michael grins and walks out.
But all is not well, as Michael notices a white van parked on the corner with people sitting inside. Whatever does it mean? "A good adversary lets you think you're winning," Michael VOs. "They know the best attack is the one you don't see coming." After also looking at his reflection in Nefzi's shop window and seeing a surveillance guy peeking over a newspaper behind him, Michael realizes it's time to dash back into the store. Which fortunately does not explode at that exact second. The soundtrack is screaming something about going for the jugular as Michael shoots the electronic lock to get into Nefzi's back room. Nefzi is, alas, lying on flat on the floor. So Michael's VO offers, "If you walk in on a corpse and can't catch your breath, you might be suffering from a panic attack. Or, someone might be pumping nitrogen gas into the room to displace all the oxygen." The plastic hose Michael finds sticking out of the wall indicates it's the latter. The method causes suffocation without leaving any trace to be picked up by a tox screen, apparently. Michael smashes Nefzi's blacked-out back window to get some fresh air as the VO continues: "There are a lot of disadvantages to being at the scene of a crime. You could get arrested, you could get yourself killed, and no matter how many times you've done it, it's never fun hanging out with a dead body." None of this stops Michael from rooting around the room, getting his ungloved fingers all over everything. Apparently he's been burned so thoroughly that he's confident that his prints don't exist in any law enforcement database. Finally he finds what he's looking for: one of Nefzi's prototypes, which he decides to take with him as he VOs that the advantage is that nobody is there to object to some intelligence gathering. And Michael's out of there.
Michael comes to Madeline's house, ready for their appointment with the counselor, but she has decided to find a new counselor who asks better questions. Jeez, she could called and have saved him a drive over. Michael admits to her that he doesn't like talking about what he did in his time away, but he's willing to spend more time together. He even offers to take a pottery class together. She appreciates it, but chuckles that she doesn't want another "ugly ceramic ashtray." Michael doesn't say anything, but I'm pretty sure from the look Jeffrey Donovan just gave that ashtray that he decided that Michael made that ashtray in middle school. Madeline brings up the subject Michael broached in therapy, saying that she knew about the groceries, and thought Michael wanted her to pretend she didn't know the truth. "I always hated that bag boy," she concludes. "It was nice to know I was right about him." Yeah, what a little asshole, trying to stop someone from robbing his father's small business with its razor-thin profit margins. Fucker.
Michael has yet another mall meeting with Carla, and they get right to it when he grumpily drops the bag on the bench to her. "He was awfully good, don't you think? she asks him. "You gonna kill everyone I talk to?" Michael retorts. He tells her to knock it off. She pretends to agree. Looking in the bag, she says, "Oh, look, you forgot your money." He claims he's not taking it because he's never going to work for her, but she's fine with holding onto it for him. She seems pretty confident that he's going to start taking money from her sooner or later, and I have to agree. At the very least, he's going to have to cover the expenses he's incurring on her behalf, like ugly track jackets and sunglasses. As she gets up to leave, he says to her in Arabic, "No coffee today?" She responds in the same language -- although with a pronounced Kurdish accent , I can't help noticing -- that she has a meeting, but they'll be in touch. Always with the being in touch, on this show.
As soon as she's gone, Michael calls Sam to report, "Carla speaks Arabic with a Kurdish accent." Okay, fine, yes, I admit it -- I couldn't actually identify Carla's accent just now, or even the language she and Michael were just speaking to each other with certainty. Happy now? Sam wonders if this means she was stationed there ("there" meaning Kurdoslovakia, right? No? Shit!), and Michael wants Sam to ask around. "It's not much to go on," Sam says. Michael agrees, "but it's more than we had." And they have to fill a whole season with minor little episode-ending clues like this, after all.
M. Giant is a Minneapolis-based writer with a wife, a son, and a number of cats that seems to have settled at around two. Learn waaaay too much about him at Velcrometer, or just e-mail him at M.Giant[at]gmail.com