Your List Has Got Me Pissed

S04E17

Now that Vaughn knows Michael told everything to Marv and has a list of everyone in his organization (thanks to the e-mail sent out last episode), he wastes no time bringing the hammer down. While Michael, Fi and Jesse are in the middle of trying to hide the list where even they themselves can't get at it, Vaughn's men show up and initiate a pursuit that leaves the Charger totaled, Jesse hobbled, and all three of them holed up in a half-built hotel that's going to be the site of their last stand. Fortunately it's well-stocked enough with bomb-making equipment to hold the bad guys off for a little while, but not for long.

Their only saving grace is that Sam and Madeline aren't with them. They're busy leaning on Rep. Cowley, the guy from the House Intelligence Committee they made friends with back during that episode with the puppet of Burt Reynolds. He's skeptical, to say the least, but Sam eventually convinces him to help -- even if Vaughn is so well-connected that soon the congressman is practically on the lam himself.

Michael, Fi and Jesse lay a trap for Vaughn's men, only to find out that he's nabbed Michael's mom. To save her, Michael hands the list to Jesse so he and Fi can get it out of there while he blows himself up as a distraction. But before he does, Fi joins him, I guess because it takes both of them. Fortunately, right before they have to, Sam shows up with the cavalry. Actually, it's more like an infantry unit, but the result is the same: Vaughn and his men are busted, and our heroes are saved.

But of course, that only means it's time for another end-of-season farewell. Michael is bundled into a limo by a tight-lipped government guy, and after a week of interrogation, he's dropped off in Washington, D.C., in front of a man he clearly knows. "Welcome back," the man says, which is an odd thing to say to a guy we're not going to see for another six months.

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No previouslies (it's only been a few minutes since the last episode, after all, 24), but plenty of Miami skyscraper porn as Michael VOs that in a desperate situation, you need to resist the temptation to act immediately; you always want to assess the threat and figure out how bad it really is. "It's bad, Mike. It's really, really bad," Sam tells him. This is over lunch, so how bad can it be, unless they're talking about the check? Jesse and Fi are also there as Sam elaborates that call to anyone Michael knows, from Barry to the Carlito kicks over an anthill at the FBI. So Vaughn's got guys in the FBI, which is awesome. Michael says they need to get the list to someone in the government -- "someone who can play this card." Too bad they don't know anyone like that. Wait, Sam has an idea. And considering what happened to the last government employee they tried to hand the list off to, I hope it's someone we hate.

Cut to the motel where they've stashed Madeline, and where Michael and Sam have just asked her to put some muscle on that congressman from the Burt Reynolds episode, who fortunately is on the House Intelligence Committee. Sam reminds her she did it before. "Same thing, different day." "It amazes me the things that become normal to you people," Madeline growls. Sam starts going into details, but is rudely cut off when she yells, "And you put me in a non-smoking room!" and hurls the little sign at Sam. Okay, now that's just sadistic of them. Michael's rescued by a cell phone call as she lights up anyway. He goes outside (past Jesse and Fi, who are wisely waiting outside) to take the call. It's from Vaughn, identifying himself as Michael's old pal, although the subtitles call him "Vaughn -- Not Michael's Pal." What I want to know is why Vaughn's suit has the buttons and the hanky pocket on the wrong side. With soldiers unloading a military transport plane in the background, Vaughn says he's in town and they should catch up. Michael tries to play it off until Vaughn abruptly wearies of this show's insistence on jovial dialogue between mortal enemies. Vaughn says he gave Michael plenty of chances to be his friend. "Now you're gonna see what it's like having me for an enemy. And so are your friends. And so is your family." End of call. Okay, maybe the faux-jovial thing wasn't so bad.

After the credits, Michael is going nuclear -- sort of. He VOs about how most hiding places are hard to find, but easy to access. "On rare occasions, for the most sensitive material, you have to go a step further and find a hiding place even you can't get to." Which his why he, Fi and Jesse are outside the fence of a nuclear power plant. Michael tells a nervous Jesse and Fi that this way, Vaughn could "extract" the location of the list from one of them and still not be able to get to it. Which seems a little optimistic if he has the FBI in his pocket, but you know how Michael likes to make things difficult for himself. All they have to do is get the flash drive with the list on it onto one of those trucks carrying stuff like depleted uranium shells and decommissioned sub parts into the compound, and all they have to do to do that is blow up part of the road leading in so the trucks will have to reroute to where the team can sneak something onto one of them. Sounds easy enough, and shouldn't raise any red flags at all.

By M. Giant

At a hotel (a real hotel) where some fundraising event for Rep. Cowley is taking place, Madeline and Sam bicker until she goes in to get Cowley out of there so Sam can talk to him alone. Inside, she braces a campaign worker about the supposed table she's at for the fundraiser, using it as a pretext to snag one of the nametags she needs to get inside. And she came up with that all on her own. I don't know why she pretends to hate this crap.

Near the power plant, Jesse's staking out the road while Michael and Fi get to work digging for a water line they'll rupture to flood the road out. Okay, that's at least a little more low-profile than blowing up another bridge. Fi frets some more about the move after that, and what it all means, and who wins, because she feels like she loses no matter what. Michael says it might not be her fight. "Just because it's my path doesn't mean it's yours." Wow, I'm not the biggest Fi fan (I may be the smallest), but that's cold. Before she can throw down her shovel and walk away like she really ought to, Jesse comes up and says "They're here," "they" being Vaughn's men. Well, that didn't take long. Jesse gets into Fi's Hyundai with her while Michael follows in the Charger. Soon there's a pursuit on between them and two government-type cars, with guys are leaning out of the chase vehicles and shooting out Michael's tires. While he drives on the rims, he manages to answer Fi's cell phone call and tell her to pull up to him. Fi makes Jesse get in her back seat while Michael reaches out and sticks a wad of plastique (part of what they were going to use to rupture that water line) under his door. He VOs, "If you can't outrun your pursuers, you have a choice to make: you have to decide if your vehicle is more useful as transportation or as a road block." With that, he leaps to Fi's car, then hits the detonator, blowing his poor car to shit. Talk about taking the "R" out of "Charger." Both the pursuing cars crash into it and are knocked out of commission. Fi asks if they lost them. "Yeah, I think," Michael says, and then amends, "No," as two more cars come out of a cross street. Shit, he just totaled the Charger for nothing. Fi hurtles off the road and onto a construction site, sending scaffolding collapsing down on the car. Michael tries to rush them out and under cover, but Jesse says, "Just need a second here." Dude, what's the holdup? Oh, the length of rebar piercing Fi's back windshield and impaling Jesse's leg. I can see where that would slow him down. He pulls it out (fortunately it doesn't go all the way through the floorboards) and lets them help him toward the under-construction hotel that's apparently going to be their stronghold for the duration. Michael VOs about the Trojan War, the battle at Thermopylae, and the Alamo, in which small forces took on much larger armies. Yeah, and how did those turn out? As Michael peeks out to see the bad guys rolling up outside, he quickly assesses their firepower (a measly 9mm each) and his VO continues that the reason we know those stories is that the little guys fought well before they died. Seems like he's got a pretty good handle on the situation, at least.

After the ads, Michael starts shooting to make the bad guys dive for cover and slow down their approach. Fi reports that Jesse's in need of a hospital, and their cell phone signals are already being jammed. Michael and Fi drag Jesse further in, then park him on a bench while they scout for supplies, Fi blaming Michael for Jesse's injuries and their situation, like he was the one who brought a scaffold down on top of them. Then she and Michael get to work building a makeshift splint for Jesse's leg out of cellophane, duct tape, and drywall, while Michael VOs about combat medicine being different from the regular kind (no shit). They make it up to a higher floor of the abandoned structure, where Michael peeks out a window and spots Vaughn himself down below. He figures they're settling in for a siege, but Michael figures that even though they can jam the cell phones, they can't keep our heroes from getting to the weather equipment on the roof. Fi sees that Vaughn's just been given a sat phone, and a second later, every phone in the place starts ringing. So construction was abandoned when the builders ran out of money, but someone's still paying the phone bill? That's not going to be the only odd thing you'll notice about this place, either. Vaughn wants the list, and Michael invites him to come in and get it. "Fine. See you soon," Vaughn threatens. Michael tells Fi, "He was coming in anyway." He asks her and Jesse to hold them off until he can get to the roof.

Fi and Jesse raid the kitchen for Sterno and propane, because fortunately the place was all stocked before they quit building it. While she's taping makeshift bombs together, Jesse decides this is time to start delving into the fraught status of Fi and Michael's relationship. No wonder these two always got along so well. Lighting the candles on the bombs, Fi says she used to think Michael would get on with his life after resolving the burn notice issue, but now she realizes it is his life. That's the downside of high ratings, sweetheart. Jesse pretty much says she should have known better .A moment later, they hear Vaughn and his team busting in below. They retreat, leaving the wicks burning.

Madeline approaches Cowley, and he not only remembers her, he isn't even remotely happy to see her. She reminds him that even though she almost got him killed last time, the incident also made him a hero and he won his last election with 70% of the vote. "76%," he corrects. Madeline's point.

Outside, while Michael VOs once again about the strained relationships between spies and politicians, Sam tells Cowley about the list. He's skeptical at first, until Sam drops some facts on him about the whole Barrett story that weren't in the papers. Sam at least has Cowley's attention now.

At the hotel, Jesse and Fi lie in wait while Vaughn's men approach. When they're close enough, Fi jumps out and shoots the bombs, setting the hallway alight and, one hopes, slowing the bad guys down at least a bit.

Michael has reached the roof, only to find some special-ops merc type already there. He tries to get the drop on him, but this dude is no slouch, and it takes quite a lengthy spell of bone-cracking, hand-to-hand battle before Michael can take him down and nab his weapon, radio, and flak jacket, not to mention make him zip-tie his own hands. That done, Michael opens a circuit box on the roof and starts messing with the wires inside. But before he can get much done, a sniper starts shooting at him from the neighboring roof. Michael dives for cover to the other guy, who tells him it's over. Michael just asks him, "What do you weigh, 200? 205?" Kind of a personal question. thing we see, Michael is running for the edge of the roof between the sniper's bullets, with a cable trailing behind him. He VOs that if you want to rappel down a building, you need something to slow you down, like a counterweight. "Although it's not much fun for the person who gets to be the counterweight," which in this case is the merc Michael already beat down. So now Michael's "safely" on the ground outside. What ? Commercials, that's what.

Somehow during that time, he gets past Vaughn's men and back into the building, where he safely reunites with Jesse and Fi .He tells them that "as far as the Emergency Broadcast System is concerned, this hotel is getting hit by a hurricane, fire, and nuclear attack all at once." With six cop cars approaching, Jessie's hoping for at least a fair fight. Unfortunately, they have forgotten how stupid Miami cops are, until Jesse sees that the bad guys are turning back the cops. Vaughn radios a "nice try" up to Michael (via the walkie-talkie Michael took off the merc), but breaks the bad news that one of the people on Michael's list is in Homeland Security. "He told those boys we were doing a training exercise." And of course "those boys" believed it, because, see above regarding Miami cops. Vaughn again gives Michael a chance to bring out the list, since it'll be dark soon and nobody's coming to the rescue. "We need a new plan," Michael understates to his friends. Fortunately he has one: raid the groundskeeping room for the supplies to make a bomb (in an unfinished hotel), lure Vaughn and his men into the stairwell, blow it up, escape via the elevator shaft, and "hope Sam did his job."

By M. Giant

Back at the Half-Hotel, Vaughn gets Fi back on the walkie-talkie to let her know he's coming up. And also, in case she had anything planned, "Say hi to mom." Yep, the cops nabbed Madeline and brought her here. I think Michael's going to kill Sam after all.

Michael decides to drop the pretense and talks to Vaughn. "Glad I took precautions," Vaughn says smugly. Michael wants to talk to his mom, and when he gets a little shirty about it, Vaughn signals a gunman to smack her with his rifle-butt. She goes down clutching her head, even though it looked more like she got hit in the back. Michael asks her if she's okay, and she says no. "They shot me! It doesn't matter what you do, Michael!" Vaughn snatches the radio away while she yells at him to run. Vaughn insists she's fine, and Michael says he's coming down. After Vaughn says he'll believe it when he sees it, he asks Madeline, "Does being too clever for your own good run in your family?" Well, no, because see: Nate. She makes a lame comeback, and Vaughn tells his men to hang on to her. "She could still be useful."

Having moved to a lower level, our heroes scope out the outside and see no one there -- figuring the bad guys must all be inside, with Madeline. Michael says Vaughn won't honor any deal they make with him; whatever they trade, they'll have no leverage. All they can do to save Madeline now is get the list into the right hands. Michael's new plan is to get across the way to a cabana, draw their fire, and blow himself up to give Jesse and Fi a chance to escape. Jesse volunteers to do it, already being injured (and weakening rapidly) but Michael insists he and the list are the target -- and he hands the list to Jesse to keep safe. "And for what it's worth, Agent Porter," he adds, "I am sorry for what I did to you." Jesse starts to come over all emotional, but all is forgiven; they're cool. Fi's not, though, and Michael reminds her what she said earlier: "Maybe it's time you went your own way." Wow, what ever happened to "It's not you, it's me"?

Michael bursts out the door and into a hail of sniper fire, getting as much cover as he can from both Fi and Jesse above, and whatever he dives behind along the way. Thus does he make it into the cabana. Vaughn orders Madeline stuffed into an SUV. "Grab a window seat, Ma, so you can watch me kill your boy," he taunts. Madeline spits in his face, which almost makes him stop smiling for a second.

On their way out, Fi decides to backtrack and rejoin Michael. Is that really a two-person job? Even though Jesse tries to talk her out of it, she gives him a quick kiss and runs to catch up with Michael.

By M. Giant

Sam is leading Cowley along the sea wall, trying to reach Michael on his cell (which obviously isn't going to work with Michael's cell phone signal being jammed) and avoid being noticed by the cops that are suddenly all over here instead of doing something about the "training exercise" across town. Sam tells Cowley to make some calls. "This is not a staring contest," he feels it necessary to add.

Michael has apparently been in the limo so long he's fallen asleep. The movement of the car eventually shakes him awake, and he looks blearily across at the young suited guy and the muscle he brought along. He VOs about dealing with interrogation. "It's not so much the questioning as the uncertainty that gets to you. Not knowing what the future holds or if you have a future at all." Michael asks where they're going (apparently there are no windows in this limo), but they're not authorized to say. Michael wearily asks for a hint. "Prison? Execution? Warmer, colder? You had me in a box answering your questions for a week and you can't answer one of mine?" A week, and Michael's still stuck in the same clothes he wore to the nuclear power plant and sweated in all through the siege in that hotel with tons of explosives and no A/C. Finally Michael comes up with a question his host can answer: "Can I have some water?" Unfortunately, the answer to that is no. The car stops, and the young guy holds out a strange-looking bundle of fabric to Michael, who looks at it in confusion. What is this unfamiliar item? It's more complicated than a curtain or a tablecloth. He hasn't seen one of these things in at least four years, but he accepts it -- and it's a good thing he did -- because it's a coat, and they're putting Michael out on a dark sidewalk at night, with snow on the curb and clouds of patently fake CGI breath puffing out of his mouth. H!ITG Dylan Baker walks out the front door of the building to meet him. "You," Michael says in surprise, which tells us almost nothing. Dylan Baker smirks, "Welcome back," and offers his hand. Michael takes it, and after puffing out some more fake breath, they enter the building together. And there's a dramatic crane shot, pulling up the front of the building, until it turns away and pans over to -- the U.S. Capitol building, just a few blocks away. So I think it's safe to say that at long last, Michael is no longer in Miami. And, it would seem, no longer out in either the metaphorical or the literal cold.

Watch this episode below, discuss it in our forums, then find out Michael's most useful spy tips!

By M. Giant

As Vaughn gets frog-marched out later (in fact, it's already dark outside), he tells Michael, "It's too bad, Westen, we could have been a good team." "I already have a team," Michael says, watching Madeline get her head treated by a paramedic from where that guy bashed her in the back. He thanks her and she insists she's fine, telling him to go see his friends.

Michael wanders over to the ambulance where Jesse's in a gurney while he and Fi listen to Sam explain how he heard about the "training exercises" and figured it must have been them. The troops were courtesy of Rep. Cowley, whom they now owe big time. Jesse has one more thing to say before he gets sedated, and as he shakes Michael's hand, he says, "Your girlfriend is crazy about you." That's a news flash? "You take care of her, all right?" Wait, what? Where does he think he's going? He has handed the flash drive back to Michael. Right on cue, a young guy in a suit shows up and tells Michael to "come with us." He says he's not with the police, and Michael gives Fi a long kiss goodbye before being led away. Jeez, Jesse gave him one job.

By M. Giant

Watch this episode below, discuss it in our forums, then find out Michael's most useful spy tips!

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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.