By M. Giant
Michael and Jesse are using Simon's Bible as bait to lure telecom CEO and part-time Bond villain John Barrett down to Miami, which is even trickier than making up a cover story to tell Jesse about how they got Barrett's name in the first place. After some hijinks with one of Barrett's hired thugs, their plan works, and Barrett's in town. With a lot more hired thugs.
As for the Job Of The Week, the client is a widow who got bilked out of her substantial savings by a charming con man who preys on grieving women. Sam goes undercover as a version of Chuck Finley who's in the same business, to win the con man's trust and get the client's money back. It turns out to be rather a bitch to get the con man's account info, so it calls for him to be drugged to the point of blackout -- twice. It also transpires that in order to avoid detection at a crucial point, Fi and Jesse "pretend" to make out. Anyway, the team pulls the same gag on the con man that the Bluths tried with Ira Gilligan on Arrested Development, namely making him think he killed someone, but this time it actually works. He gets what's coming to him and everyone gets their money back. Minus the team's commission, right?
But there's bad news. Jesse the brilliant counterintelligence operative has finally, at long last, figured out that Michael was the one who burned him. And he? Is not happy.
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Michael Sam, and Fi are hanging out by some hotel pool, and the guys are gloating about the slick fake intelligence file Sam dummied up pointing to telecom CEO John Barrett, while Fi's more worried about the effort they're going to just to keep Jesse out of the loop w/r/t how they found out it was Barrett in the first place. Michael rationalizes, "He just wants a name, and we're gonna give him that name." And lie about how they got it, apparently.
Over at Madeline's house, Michael and Sam show the file to Jesse, who's all "why didn't I think of that?" when he learns that Barrett is the guy he's been looking for. He wants to know when they're heading up to New York to pay Barrett a visit, but Michael says that's not in the production budget. Plus they need to bring Barrett onto their home turf. While he's saying he plans to offer the Bible to Barrett, Madeline calls an end to the meeting by announcing that her card buddies are on their way over. And she's clearly in a mood about something.
Jesse's and Michael move things over to Michael's loft, and they're getting ready to give Barrett a call. In addition to a clear case of nerves over this culmination of his three-year investigation, Jesse has doubts about whether they should really be using the straightforward approach. But Michael points out that it's not like they could get away with lying to someone like Barrett anyway. "We're just two burned spies selling a book code." Michael dials, and the call goes straight through to the T-1000 himself, Robert Patrick, who is presiding over a board meeting in a room that appears to overlook either New York's Central Park or a pretty good matte painting of it. He interrupts the meeting to answer it, and Michael gets right to the point, giving his real name and saying, "I have this odd-looking Bible? ...Is that at all interesting to you?" It's interesting enough to him that Barrett clears the room so he can continue the call. He's pretty curious about who Michael is and how he got a number that even his wife doesn't have, but Michael wants him to stay focused on the Bible that "you've been robbing banks and killing people to find." He says he and his partner Jesse Porter used to work for the government, but Jesse chimes in to say they thought Barrett might be hiring, what with him being a merchant of death and all. Barrett plays dumb, pretending they have the wrong number and the wrong man. "I run a telecom company," he says. Whose board meeting he just interrupted to take this call, even though it's a wrong number. The subtitles back him up: "John Barrett -- Drake Technologies CEO," until the lower line is pushed aside by the words "Merchant of Death." Michael pleasantly says the Bible's in Miami whenever Barrett's ready to talk, and hangs up. Jesse's not thrilled with how it went, but Michael says Barrett's already on his way, one way or another. That doesn't seem to make Jesse feel any better.
Madeline shows up at Michael and Fi's lunch table to take him to task for the whole business with Jesse ,which apparently has her pissed off all over again. After she stomps off, Michael tells Fi, "I want to thank you again for suggesting Jesse live with her." Even Fi admits that wasn't her best move, and then she's off to meet a client: a FOAF who got seduced and scammed by a womanizing con man. "Clearly a job for Sam Axe," Fi says before flouncing off. Yes, because Michael is so gnarled and hideous.
Fi and Sam are at the home of the client, a widow played by Jean Louisa Kelly from Yes, Dear. She's been busy boxing up a bunch of stuff in her nice house to sell off, but takes a break to serve them iced tea and tells them about how this guy named Charles charmed her into giving him access to her bank accounts, saying he'd invest it for her. Fi talks about breaking the guy's kneecaps, but Sam suggests fighting fire with fire. "Charles isn't the only charmer in Miami," he says smugly, as "Emily -- the Client" looks at him dubiously. Fortunately the scene ends before Sam chokes on his iced tea and dribbles it down the front of his shirt.
Michael and Jesse, both carrying large duffel bags, let themselves into a huge abandoned boathouse. "I don't mind being the bait as long as the trap is good enough," Michael tells a doubtful Jesse. Cut to the two of them setting up a booby-trap with a 50-gallon drum and a defibrillator. Then they set up a Webcam so they can monitor the trap remotely using some Skype product placement. Jesse's still nervous about whether this is going to work, wondering, "Why do I get the feeling Sam's having more fun than we are?"
Probably because Sam's across town wading through some bikini porn, where he and Fi already have "Charles Archer -- Sleazy Womanizer" under stakeout while he chats up a new mark at the bar. Charles doesn't have much of a rap sheet in the U.S., but he has an Interpol file, thanks to a few of his marks back home in England disappearing when they complained. Sam says it's time for Chuck Finley to step in, ignoring Fi's protests that the target's name is Charles, and that'll just create confusion. "Chuck Finley is forever," Sam insists. OR at least it is until more people in Miami know that name than Michael Westen's.
That night, Sam and Fi invite themselves to sit down across from Charles and his new mark Lindsey. Charles isn't happy to have his style cramped like this, until Fi makes some remarks about all the money she's supposedly been throwing around since hitting town. They banter until the ladies hit the powder room, and Charles asks what "Chuck" does. Sam says he does the same thing Charles does, and Fi is his most recent target. But Sam adds that the IRS is after him, so he needs to run "Alexis's" money through Charles's accounts. Charles isn't interested. And in fact, he's kind of rude about it, ordering Sam off his turf. Plus anyone who calls themselves a "lone wolf" without irony deserves to suffer the fate that usually befalls people like him at the end of any given Burn Notice episode.
Meanwhile, in the bathroom, Fi is learning that Lindsey's sister recently died, and she thinks Charles works with cancer research. As soon as she and Fi return, Charles drags Lindsey out as fast as he can. Fi's ready to go after Charles with her gun, but as Michael VOs that hanging out with criminals can be less dangerous than hanging out with their victims because "letting your emotions get the best of you can threaten the entire operation," Sam has to physically restrain Fi and promise to get Emily's money back another way. "If we don't, I will shoot him, then I'll shoot you," Fi threatens Sam. Wow, they don't usually have the plan B and plan C in place so quickly.
morning, Fi brings Michael to meet Emily, who's sticking a "for sale" sign on the sailboat she and her husband built from scratch. Tragic, isn't it? Michael and Fi tell Emily their real plan B: drug Charles, convince him he went on a spending spree while he was blacked out, and then snoop while he checks his accounts. "That plan sounds insane," Emily says, quite correctly. "Insane is one of our specialties," Fi agrees. The only part of that statement I would take issue with is the implied plural.
Sam drops by Charles's club to hand him a gold watch as a token of apology for invading his turf. He shit-talks Fi a bit, and Charles agrees, "There's nothing more pathetic than a bitch who can't move on." Because we'd hate to think a villain has any redeeming qualities. Sam chuckles in agreement, and Charles suddenly gets very share-y, confiding, "I have a mate across the pond who disposes of the clingy ones once he's wrung them out." Wow, give a guy a gold watch and he'll confess to anything. Has Kyra Sedgwick tried that on The Closer? Sam offers to buy Charles a drink, and thus begins Sam's amateur remake of The Hangover starring Charles. After any number of drinks, at least one of which gets powdered by Sam, we cut to the two of them in Charles's house with Fi, with Charles flat on his face and Fi just having finished some evil with Charles's phone, namely planting a bug in it and "drunk-texting" Lindsey with Charles's plans to rip her off. They return his phone and leave him there on the floor in a puddle of his own drool.
Jesse and Michael are sitting on stakeout in the Charger, and Jesse's starting to have doubts about the file pointing to Barrett and whether Sam's source is reliable. Michael, who really doesn't want to talk about this, puts him off until a bald thug shows up on the webcam feed, drawn by the signal from the cell phone they used to call Barrett. They watch gleefully as he finds the oil drum, reaches for the metal box inside, and then gets juiced by the defibrillator and totters to the floor with a myocardial infarction or something. Michael and Jesse burst into view, take him hostage (making sure to taunt him with the phone book he almost stole), and secure him with zip ties. Good plan, that, hanging out in the same place until Barrett sends more people. In fact, why did Barrett only send one person to begin with? There are no clues on the thug's phone, so that means hanging out here until his bosses check in with him. Too bad Michael can't be the one to hang around, because he's supposed to meet Sam and Fi, right? Wrong. "I'll pick up more bug spray," Jesse offers on his way out.
Sam's at Charles's house, putting his living room into artful disarray while on the phone to Fi (waiting outside in her Hyundai Commercial) about how it's time to wake Charles up. Jesse surprises Fi by joining her in the car, and Sam wakes Charles up, freaking him out with all manner of wild tales about the night before, including how he crashed into a Bentley and then bought it. Sam can even produce the car, which, I'm not sure how he managed that. Charles gets in the Bentley and drives off in a panic, with Fi and Jesse on his tail.
Charles goes not to a bank, but to a law office. Through the bug in his phone, Fi and Jesse can hear him (although they have to drive closer to do it) as he yells at "Martin -- Charles' Lawyer/Dirty Money Manager." Martin also has some muscle in the room, who looks out the window and sends someone out to check out Fi's Commercial. Michael VOs that when your surveillance gets blown, you have two choices -- run, or stay put and look like you have a reason to be there. Whereupon Fi hurls herself into Jesse's lap and starts making out with him. And it's...uh...pretty convincing. In fact, it's hotter than it ever is with her and Michael. A security guy taps on the window to chase them off, and Jesse Freudian-slips, "What, I can't make out with his girlfriend?" Once the coast is clear, they breathlessly declare it..."tactical." Uh-huh. Jesse, would you mind standing up for a minute? I just want to see something.
Sam and Fi update Emily on what they've learned about Charles's accounts through Barry, the recently invisible money launderer (although Sam's product-placed low-calorie beer bottle is so visible it actually fills up the whole shot at one point). They can't get at the money, but they can make Charles paranoid enough to turn to Michael for help, and give him access to the money. "Do you guys have, like, a manual where you get this stuff?" Emily asks doubtfully. No, Emily, you cannot have my job.
Sam bursts in on a private pool party of Charles's claiming he's being followed by a blue Hyundai. That rings a bell with Charles, but he says the blue Hyundai that followed him just turned out to be a couple "snogging." In broad daylight, but whatever. Sam loses focus for a minute as he takes that in, but Charles isn't convinced, so Sam has to disengage for now.
He calls Fi to ask how things are going with an obvious bug, and Jesse has just arrived at her place with Madeline's old stereo. And presumably the Barry White 8-tracks that go with it. Sam wants to talk about Jesse for a bit, but Fi hangs up on him so they can get to work cannibalizing the hi-fi to build a bug that not only looks like a bug but also emits a high-pitched squeal when it's to something electronic. They manage the task, but are so awkward and uncomfortable with each other that it's a near thing. Much like their hands.
Back at the boathouse with Michael, Jesse acts guilty when Michael asks how things went with Fi. So now at least they're lying to each other, which evens things out a bit. Fortunately a call comes in on their captive's phone, and it's a guy looking for "Colonel Russell." Michael is suitably impressed that their errand boy is a colonel, and says they're sending him back with some photocopied pages from the Bible. Which Jesse threatens to burn if they send another thief over. I guess sometimes spies have to get sacrilegious. Michael cuts the colonel loose and they send him on his way with the photocopies. Jesse wants to invite Sam out for a drink to celebrate, "but he's probably lost his taste for alcohol."
Cut to Sam enjoying a beer poolside, when he gets a call from Charles, who has already shredded his new Bentley finding the bug. Sam plays along to amplify Charles's paranoia, and says he knows a guy. Charles agrees to meet them. Before we know it, he's sitting at a table with Sam and Michael, who's playing a sleazy cop who's willing to help -- he just needs their account info. Charles balks, and Michael takes his sweet time walking away to give Charles a chance to change his mind. Charles calls up his moneyman Martin, who gives him some news that causes Charles to pull Sam aside. Where he informs Sam that it's all under control; one of his marks who hired a private investigator is about to be taken care of, and Charles is off to Rio. And while that's happening, Michael gets a call from Fi, reporting that Emily is in her closet, besieged by a hit squad. So that's a new errand.
Fi rushes to Emily's house, and Michael VOs that it's best not to charge into a house full of armed men, but rather to set up an ambush and make them come to you. She baits the trap by hotwiring the garage door, knowing they'll come to investigate when they hear it open. And thanks to some sweet timing, when she blows the garage entry door, it bounces off one of the thugs and flattens him. Fi comes in and discharges her shotgun into the other thug's belly, but it's just a beanbag round, which is why he's still alive to hear her tell him she shot him with a beanbag round. Not like her to be such a softie.
Now that Fi's handled that so well, and taken another big step towards rehabilitation in my perspective, Michael shows up to explain the sitch to Emily, who's pretty pissed that Charles is about to leave the country with her money. But they've got a plan, and it involves Sam casting Charles into The Hangover II: Hangover and Over Again and something to do with Emily's boat.
Over at Charles's house. Sam gives Charles a fresh spiked drink while Charles gives his buddy "Chuck" some new leads, including one woman who "won a lawsuit against some chemical company that killed her kid." Sam calls him a peach, and Charles takes a drink. This one works a lot faster.
And then Charles wakes up in Emily's yard to an empty can of kerosene, a blood-soaked purse, and an even bloodier baseball bat. He sees Emily's boat burst into flames down by the water. And while he's standing there in shock, Sam rolls up demanding, "Would it have killed you to just snap her neck?" Charles is shocked to learn he killed Emily. "You gave her a fricking Viking funeral!" Sam yells at him. He wants them to go meet Michael, and Charles is desperate to get this fixed. "It ain't gonna be easy, it' ain't gonna be cheap," Sam warns. Charles says he doesn't care, but when Michael confronts him at the boathouse demanding a million dollars, he says it's too much. After some desperate negotiation, Charles agrees to the million. Michael says he'll backdate a ticket to Tahiti to make it look like Emily skipped town and torched the boat as part of an insurance fraud scheme. So Charles gets on the phone to Martin, blackmailing him into bringing all the money -- including Martin's share. Everyone's happy (except Martin, presumably), and Sam invites Charles to Rio, suggesting a limo to the airport and everything.
Charles collects the money from Martin, taunts him, and runs back to give it to Michael, who promises, "By the time I'm done, it'll be like this never happened." Oh, Michael, you scamp.
In a limo to the airport with Sam, Charles is completely remorse-free. Sam says he figured out why Charles keeps blacking out. "I've been drinking too much," Charles duhs. "Well, it's that, yeah, and I've been drugging you," Sam agrees. The good news is he's not a murderer, not that Charles seemed all that bothered by that. But the bad news is that Sam told Martin where to find him. "We're going to Rio," Charles reminds him, remarkably slow on the uptake for an alleged con man. Sam has more bad news: he pulls out a pair of plane tickets and rips them up, saying they're not going to Rio. Did he really buy tickets just for that little display? The limo stops, and the driver lowers the divider. It's of course Fi behind the wheel. She finally gets to put her gun to Charles's face, and tells him it's time to get out. Charles puts a desperate hand on Sam's shoulder, and Sam peels it off, saying, "There's nothing more pathetic than a bitch who can't move on. A raging British jackass once told me that." And thus Charles is abandoned to his fate in the middle of a long causeway.
Fi and Sam give Emily the big bag of cash, and tell her that they're getting the rest back to his other victims. Because I'm sure none of it got spent or anything. Charles is on the run, and as for the boat, she says, "Josh would have appreciated the final voyage." Yes, I'm sure he's smiling down from heaven right now, knowing that he boat he put so much work into that he christened it Back Pain had to get incinerated because his dingbat widow took up with some slick crook who literally screwed her out of everything they had. I'm thinking Richard Dreyfuss in Always, in fact.
Michael shows up at Madeline's looking for Jesse, only to find Madeline packing for a trip. She's going out of town to visit a friend that she doesn't even like, because she can't take the lying any more. "Don't bother calling me to come back until it's all over," she says. One wonders if Michael will bother calling her to come back... ever. His cell phone rings, and he doesn't endear himself to her by taking it.
But what was he going to do, not take a call from an international telecom CEO who moonlights as a Bond villain? Because it is indeed Barrett, and he's in Miami. "I thought I should meet you face to face," he says. "I'll be in touch." After we get a chance to admire his sinister motorcade of Cadillac Escalades, that is.
At lunch, Sam hands Michael the FAA manifest for Drake's private jet, which apparently was carrying fifteen of Barrett's thugs. That plus whatever locals he plans to hire. Their move is to find out where Barrett hangs out when he comes to Miami, and Sam orders five beers so they can get to work. "Gotta hydrate," he shrugs.
Fi lets herself into the loft, calling for Michael. Someone slams the door behind her and sticks a gun in her face. "Hey, Fi," Jesse says, for it is he holding the gun. Looks like he finally figured it out, and he's barely holding in his fury. He explains that he talked to his old handler Marv. On the laptop, he pulls some surveillance footage. Now, the footage of the day of his burning from the actual building where he worked got wiped, but there's another facility with a camera across the street that has cameras of its own. "So it turns out that at the exact same moment that I was accused of stealing government files, someone else was rushing away from the annex." Cue the footage of Michael running across the street. Fi starts to make excuses, but Jesse screams that she doesn't get to lie to him any more. "Michael burned me. And you all helped cover it up." Fi says they've been trying to get Barrett so Jesse can get back in, but he's not convinced. He says he should have expected it from Michael, "But you... I thought I meant something to you." Well, enough that she'd rather make out with him than lead bad guys on a car chase, which is... okay, kind of a lot. She says he does, but he cocks the gun and says, "Goodbye, Fiona." She starts to beg, but shuts up, closes her tear-filled eyes, and waits. For long enough for Jesse to leave the loft, in fact. Which, by the time she opens her eyes, he has. Doesn't he even want his laptop?
She immediately calls Michael to tell him what happened. After making sure she's okay, Michael urgently asks where Jesse is now. Fi doesn't know, of course. "And I think he's going to make us pay." Sounds like a summer finale to me.
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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.