Burn Notice, "Devil You Know": Post-morteming season three with Matt Nix

As we come to the end of "Burn Notice" season three, I thought in lieu of a review of what I felt was a strong episode with a couple of smartly-chosen guest stars, I'd talk to the show's creator, Matt Nix, about the ins and outs of a season that began airing all the way back in early June of '09. Matt's thoughts (and, of course, spoilers for season three, plus one question at the very end that discusses some of the direction for season four in the vaguest of terms, and which will get its own spoiler warning) coming up just as soon as I meet you at the emergency-emergency spot...

So we ended last season with Michael jumping out of Management's helicopter, free from his control but also from his protection. What was your plan going into this year, and how, if at all, did it change?

We wanted to explore what was Michael's life like if he wasn't under the thumb of the folks that burned him. That fell into two categories. One is the people that were interested in getting to him, who might have been reluctant to do so before, which is something we did some of, notably in episode 301, "Friends and Family." And then, when presented with a situation where he was still burned but not where he had people working actively against him, what efforts would Michael make to get his job back and his life back, and what challenges would he face there?

One thing that evolved for us over the course of the season is that we didn't want to get into a series of repetitive, And here's another person from Michael's past coming to get him! And here's another one! And another! That can seem appealing when you're thinking about it, and we've done that over the course of the seasons, but ultimately, there are only so many ways to skin that particular cat. And one of the things we're conscious of is having people show up just wanting to kill Michael - well, it's not that hard to kill a guy, even a trained guy, if you set your mind to it. So it has to be about asking "To whom is Michael useful, and what uses do they want to put him to?" Part of the Strickler character came from that; it might not have been the hell that people were expecting, but it is something that people in that position do have to deal with.

In season two, there were essentially two big adversaries: Carla and Victor. Here, we had Detective Paxson, and then Diego, and Strickler, and Gilroy, and, in the finale, Simon. Why did you decide to pit Michael against so many ongoing people? Was it a matter of just trying to find the right fit, or was there a specific plan that required all of them?

We felt like we were on the hook for cops. It's a question that had come up. People will sometimes say, "Why haven't the cops come after Michael?" - as if it's something we'd never thought of. We wanted to address that the cops hadn't come before because he was disappearing from police computers, so what would happen if there was suddenly a cop who noticed him? So that was one thing. And then, of course you are right to mention Michael's CIA contact (Diego), but he wasn't really an adversary. He was someone Michael was cultivating. He wasn't a season-long adversary. Paxson was a straight-up adversary. That was interesting, but it's not really a show that lives in the realm of the police force. Strickler was really kind of our first cooperative "Burn Notice" seasonal adversary. He's kind of Michael's friend. He was working with him specifically. There's reason to believe that he might not be a good guy, but he's not at odds with Michael. And Gilroy, the big thing we were exploring was Michael's sense that some things are worth pursuing whether or not somebody's making you do it. It's not like anybody came to Michael and said, 'Go after this guy.' It was more like Gilroy was around, and Michael felt he had to go after him, and he did. And Simon was just our opportunity to bring a season-long arc that didn't have a lot to do with Michael's ongoing mystery and bring it back around in a new way. Answering a question that I think is a really interesting question, but that people maybe hadn't asked, which is, "If Michael didn't do all thsoe things in his file, who did?"

Well, why would Simon be so upset that Michael had been given credit for his deeds? Once he was broken out of prison, wouldn't he be pleased that he was no longer being accused of this stuff?

The truth is that if you look at the history - not that we expect people to watch "Burn Notice" with a compendium of recent history - but that grew out of reading up on folks like Abu Nidal. The true international terror types are in the business of building themselves a little dossier, cultivating a particular reputation. And they do steal things from each other. It is actually useful for one international bad guy to borrow the jacket of another intl bad guy. There are a few kind of superstars of that genre. Carlos the Jackal did not do all the things Carlos the Jackal was credited with. He found he could make more money by having a great reputation and threatening to hijack planes than hijacking planes.

So in the end, was Gilroy working for anybody, or had he just been hired directly by Simon?

You'll have to watch season four.

I ask because fans were asking for a while why Michael didn't just put a bullet in Gilroy's head, and then last week Michael explained that he was worried Gilroy might be working for someone else. But we get to the end of this episode, and it seems as if there wasn't anyone else in the picture.

It turns out in season four, he's not Simon's only friend in Miami. As season four progresses, we find out, yes, Simon had other friends. It makes sense. Simon didn't get off the plane and then find a cache of explosives.

In the back half of this season, Michael seemed to really be embracing his new life as a vigilante who helps people from week to week, even as he was going after Gilroy. Do you see a point at which the show can exist without the mythology about the burn notice and the arcs with various spy types? Could it work as just a detective show where stuff blows up, or does the series need the arcs?

I don't really anticipate a point at which, to speak in mechanical show terms, we just do A-stories. The show is sort of built around the idea that Michael participates in helping people in Miami while at the same time operating in a larger context, albeit in a sort of clipped wings fashion. In season 20 of "Burn Notice," when everyone is riding around on their motorized scooters and shooting their laser guns at each other, do I think that Michael will be engaged in year 20 of dealing with the folks that burned him? No. But I think in year 20, will he be engaged with a larger overall intelligence world in some way? Yes.

And another thing. I guess this is not really the way you're supposed to answer these questions as a show creator, but it's the truth: We are really in kind of an unusual situation vis-a-vis serialized stories. It isn't a serialized show - we don't want people to feel like if you missed last week's show you shouldn't watch this week's - but at the same time we want to create something that's rewarding for people who watch each week. We don't want to do a long "Previously on...," or make it seem like a show that's not friendly to people tuning in in season 4. So we're limited in our serialized stories to things we can explain succinctly at the top of an episode. That's what USA does. We're not on a network that wants a heavily serialized show, so even if I wanted to go in that direction, USA would have strong words with me. We can never be "Lost" or "The Shield," but neither can we ever be just a straight-up episodic show.

I also think it's the way of the world now, that shows get more serialized as they go on. "House" was very self-contained in the beginning, but now has heavy serial elements.

Well, the longer that you're on the air, and the farther you get from Michael having been burned, does it become more challenging to keep coming up with these larger spy arcs?

We're trying to keep things fresh and do different things. As I say, Strickler was, "Let's do a guy Micael's not fighting." And Gilroy was "Let's do a guy that Michael is going to volunteer to fight, and he has to prove himself," and we hadn't done that before. Honestly, the first season was more challenging than anything that came after. Is it maybe more challenging to reproduce the immediacy of season one, like, 'Who burned me a few days ago?' Yes.

Bear in mind we have two (half) seasons, so we're doing at least two, that's kind of the deal. We're going to have some version of a serialized arc for the winter episodes, and some for the summer. So we're doing two of those a year. Do I have my favorites? Are some more successful than others? Absolutely. And that is just to be expected. I don't feel like it's just a law of diminishing returns, because there are different ways of coming at those arcs. Some of them are going to be really fun. that also has to do with the chemistry of actors, how things mix thematically with A-stories. I can't say that it isn't sometimes a challenge, but it's not as simple as, "Michael is going to forever try to figure out who burned him." We haven't searched for the person who burned him in a long time.

So when you have an arc that maybe isn't working as well as you had hoped, what do you do? Do you bail on it early? Or do you have to stick with it for as long as you had planned and hope you can make it work by the end?

I would say, in any show, you just have to adjust on the fly. You make contracts with actors, you don't bail out on something. You don't call the network and say, "I know we have this guy for 12 episodes, but..." I've never wanted to do that. But certainly you find a groove with actors. For any particular arc character, there will be fans who say, 'That was the best one ever!' and others who say, 'Why did you do that one?' But watching the evolution of Michael's relationship with Strickler, that started in one way, and what we found was what we were enjoying about that relationship was Strickler did not seem like a physical threat, did not seem particularly evil. And so what became fun about him was seeing him kind of blandly get his hooks into Michael and then start working it. So seeing him transform from this guy who's kind of smiley to this guy who shuts down Fiona really sharply and makes very reasonable arguments for why Micahel should betray the people he loves, that was really fun with us. But can I say, when we started out, we said, "Let's make him just like this! In episode 4 of his arc, let's make him snap at Fiona. That'll be pretty badass"? No.

I actually really liked Strickler. Michael shooting him to save Fiona was one of the seaosn's high points, but was there ever a moment where you felt you didn't want to lose the character so soon?

My wife and I watched "The Sopranos" together, and she was very clear with me when I started working on "Burn Notice," that as far as she was concerned, what made "The Sopranos" good was, when characters died, they stayed dead. And part of you didn't want it to happen. There's certainly not a network problem or a writer problem, but I would have great marital strife if I ever shied away from kiling characters I like. She's hardcore about it. There were a lot of big Victor fans from season 2, Michael Shanks became a friend over the course of that, I loved him. People asked, "Can't Victor come back to life?" And one time that came up, my wife was like, "If you do that, don't come home."

Speaking of relationships where threats are sometimes involved, you kind of casually had Michael and Fi hook up again a few episodes back, and it hasn't really been mentioned since. Where does their relationship stand at this point?

Bear in mind that "at this point" for me is different from "at this point" for you (because he's working on writing season four). One of the things that they have sort of fallen into is a kind of defacto relationship that does not involve them living together and cooking dinner for each other, and that has its challenges and ups and downs, and may even include them being with other people at certain points. But I think that I have come to think of Michael and Fiona as, essentially, a particular kind of couple, with an extremely unconventional relationship. But let's just call a spade a spade. It's not like they date a lot of other people or can date a lot of other people. That doesn't mean their relationship is always comfortable or easy or even alive. It may be on hold at any particular time. I think that even when Fiona was nominally with Campbell, was she really with Campbell? of course not. She was with Not-Michael.

(MILD SEASON 4 SPOILER WARNING)
At this point for me, we've ended on Michael being taken to a prison that has a really nice drawing room. What do you feel comfortable about saying will happen in season four?

In season four, Michael finds himself in a whole new relationship with the people that burned him that has a whole new set of opportunities and a whole new set of challenges. Michael, Fiona and Sam make a new friend who is both very useful and very complicated. Is that coy enough? I can say next year we're going to see a new character who's going to be helping Michael, Fiona and Sam in their exploits around Miami, but there's a lot of reasons for him to work with them, and when he's working with them he's a great member of that team, but for various reasons, he's not someone they can get entirely comfortable.

Alan Sepinwall may be reached at asepinwall@starledger.com Click here to read the full post

Burn Notice, "Good Intentions": Lipstick it

Snow removal Thursday and Friday and then family stuff on the weekend is putting me behind the eight ball on a couple of shows (I have yet to even watch "Caprica," for instance), so in the interests of letting people who want to discuss "Burn Notice" get to it already, I'll simply say the Fiona showcase went to a darker place than the show normally goes, but in a way that nicely filled out what we know about Fi, and Carlos Bernard delivered a nice guest turn as a more morally-ambiguous-than-usual bad guy. Also, given events late in the episode, I hope Matt Nix really has a good ace up his sleeve to make the Gilory arc feel worthwhile in retrospect.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Burn Notice, "Partners in Crime": Crimes of fashion

A review of last night's "Burn Notice" coming up just as soon as I question the credentials of a lowly crime scene investigator...

After all the recent complaining about the Gilroy arc, "Partners in Crime" did a few interesting things. First, Fiona came right out and asked Michael why he can't just shoot the guy, and Michael gave a reasonable answer. Second, it kept Gilroy himself (and the hammy actor playing him) off-screen and just had Michael and Fi dealing with the Polish security guy. And third, the revelation of what Gilroy's trying to do - bust a terrorist supervillain off of a secured private flight - finally has me wanting to see where this goes from here. This mission has nothing to do (that we know of) with Michael getting unburned, but Michael trying to foil a mid-air hijacking, or whatever Gilroy's specific plan is, could be cool.

The case of the week was a mixed bag, I thought. Michael's cover identity was an entertaining one, particularly in the scene where he's going through the trinkets in his mark's office looking for something to kill him with. (And, since Jeffrey Donovan had already busted out a Russian accent earlier in the hour, he wasn't asked to provide a second, potentially goofy one for this guy.) We also need to see Michael take paying gigs every now and again just to explain how he affords to pay for yogurt and explosives and such.

But while I like the idea in theory of Michael screwing up and letting a client die, it didn't feel like "Partners in Crime" did enough with that, as it was too busy moving on to the new client, and contact mic shenanigans, and Bruce Campbell doing a Horatio Caine impression.(*) One of the series' big emotional arcs is Michael developing a conscience and a sense of compassion for others, and I think the writers missed an opportunity here to show how Michael dealt with the death of someone he wouldn't have cared about two or three years ago - particularly a death he felt like he could have prevented.

(*) Didn't love that, either. The "lowly crime scene investigator" line was about as meta as this show should ever get, and having Sam say a cheesey kiss-off line and snap on his shades - not once, but twice - was way off-tone for the way "Burn Notice" usually rolls.

Weird that we only have two episodes left of this season, but that's the way these USA shows roll in terms of splitting things up. The plus, I guess, is that the wait for season four won't be nearly as long as the gap between seasons of, say, "Breaking Bad."

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Burn Notice, "Enemies Closer": I've got a name

I'm almost relieved the NBC comedies will be off the air for a few weeks, because the Thursday programming pile-up means I only just got done with last night's "Burn Notice." Was very glad to have Tim Matheson back as crazy Larry, because the show is always more fun when Michael's dealing with an opponent who's as smart as he is. And the story was also a good showcase for Sam and Fi, and Michael's relationships with each.

I'm still unenthused about the Gilroy arc, which leads me to a question: at this point in the life of the series, how necessary are the arcs? Michael knows who burned him, and he's evolving into someone who doesn't seem like he'd want to be a spy again, and the show's serialized elements have only occasionally been as entertaining as watching Michael, Sam and Fi help the client of the week. I know some people feel the show would be too lightweight if Michael wasn't working towards some larger goal, but given how much better the show is when he's dealing with other people's standalone problems, I don't know that I'd mind if we got a long stretch where Michael stopped worrying about getting unburned and just built stuff to blow up.

What does everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Burn Notice, "Noble Cause": Micro-rave

The Thursday night TV show pile-up meant I didn't get to this week's "Burn Notice" until last night. But even if I'd watched it on time, I don't know that I'd have a lot to say about it. Chris Vance is being a little too hammy and eeeeevil as Gilroy, and the case of Sugar and his slow cousin Dougie felt like that occasional instance of a "Burn Notice" plot that wasn't so much a retro story with a twist, but a story you might have seen on a show 30 years ago.

On the plus side: Michael's microwave shenanigans, the return of Chuck Finley, the reason behind Madeline receiving a crime-stoppers award, and Erik King (Doakes from "Dexter") getting some employment. Not a bad episode - just a blah one.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Burn Notice, "Friendly Fire": Devil inside

A review of "Burn Notice" from last night coming up just as soon as I pack my 8-tracks...

"This man is a freelance psychopath - and I'm the only one in a position to do anything about it." -Michael

"Friendly Fire" was a mixed bag of an episode, illustrating many of the series' strengths, but also some of its pitfalls.

On the one hand, it was a good Sam showcase, and offered a lot of spycraft tips (warehouse roofs are easy to bust into, ice cream carts can be rigged to blow) and cool action beats (Michael, Sam and Mack walk down the side of a building under heavy fire). And it followed up on last week's Michael/Madeline confrontation in showing a Michael who now accepts he's more vigilante than spy, and that helping people comes before any attempt to get back in.

On the other, Michael's satanic gangster character was too much to swallow. Michael's undercover characters always skirt the edge of caricature, and this guy - particularly in that goofy whisper he used - fell over it. Even though things kept blowing up whenever he snapped his fingers, I kept waiting for Omar or someone else to refuse to take him seriously until he talked in a normal tone of voice.

(Also problematic, but not in a "Burn Notice" structural way: how do you cast Danny Trejo in an episode where a bad guy wields a machete, and not make Trejo the guy with the machete?)

I'm reserving judgment on Gilroy until we see where this is going. Giving basically the same performance he did on Fox's annoying, short-lived international production "Mental," Chris Vance fit in much better as a cartoonish "Burn Notice" bad guy. But he also seemed very much like Michael Shanks as Victor. Gilroy's situation is different than Victor's, but "Burn Notice" has been on long enough that the danger of feeling repetitive is very real, so we'll see if this winds up seeming like a Carla retread or not.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Burn Notice, "A Dark Road": Cagney vs. Lacey

A quick review of the "Burn Notice" winter premiere coming up just as soon as I have the sewing skills of an orangutan...

"People need me. So I have to." -Michael
"Yes, I guess you do." -Madeline

The first half of this season of "Burn Notice" set up a couple of story arcs - Michael loses the "protection" of management, and Michael tries to get unburned - with a lot of potential I'm not sure the episodes entirely lived up to. But the back half of the season starts very strongly with "A Dark Road, which sets up an intriguing new adversary in the unseen Mason Gilroy, while also presenting a terrific episodic story for Michael, Sam, Fi and, especially, Madeline.

Like Chuck Bartowski, Madeline Westen is a character who's reluctantly learning the tricks of the spy trade through someone she cares dearly about. Even if the casting of Sharon Gless's old "Cagney & Lacey" partner Tyne Daly didn't give the intelligence asset story an extra kick, seeing Madeline wrestle with befriending and then having to destroy Tina was a great showcase for Gless. It was also a nice exploration of the mother/son relationship and of Michael's dawning realization that being a vigilante isn't what he does just to kill time until he's unburned, but a calling he can't ignore.

The insurance scam plot also displayed the show's reliance on good old-fashioned practical stuntwork, as we saw with the various high-speed car chase scenes. At press tour, "Burn Notice" creator Matt Nix turned up to talk about a show he's doing for Fox called "Code 58," about a cop with a mindset stuck back in the '80s, but who's effective despite his throwback methods. I watch a scene like Michael out-racing Ryan as a job audition, or Michael and Sam racing to stop Ryan from pulling the train scam without them, and I can see where Nix is coming from with the "Code 58" character. Car chases used to be a staple on television and in movies, but they fell out of fashion, partly because there were too many of them, but mostly because people started getting lazy about them. When you do them with enough imagination and energy - and add them to a story and characters we care about even without the muscle cars - they can still be very, very cool.

And on top of that, we got the usual spy advice, like the value of using an acetylene torch as a kind of bullet-proof shield, or that you can fit a bug inside a car remote control keyring.

Couple all that with the intriguing marine stadium location, and the fact that Michael has no idea what Gilroy's game is, and the usual Bruce Campbell-related comedy gold ("What's wrong, Sam? I've never seen you drink a beer that slowly."), and I was very happy to be back in this world again.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Burn Notice, "Long Way Back": You can't go home again

Spoilers for the "Burn Notice" summer finale coming up just as soon as I steal all your screws...

"You're still the same person." -Michael
"No, I'm not. Who I am now is so much to do with what I've done here." -Fiona

As we've come to the end of the first half (give or take) of "Burn Notice" season three, I think we should take stock on the season as a whole as much as "Long Way Back," which on its own lived up to the show's standard for tense, emotional, action-packed finales.

By taking away Michael's "protection" at the same time that Michael gained the ability to try to reclaim his job, I wonder if Matt Nix has bitten off more than he can chew in one season. There have been a lot of great individual episodes (like this one), but it feels like the overall story arc is trying to do too much at once, and is therefore not doing anything quite as well as it should. When Michael tells Fi in this episode that one of the reasons he wants to get back in is to make his friends and family safer, it reminded me that we've only seen a couple of examples of Michael's old enemies coming after him. We spent a while on the idea of the police suddenly gaining awareness of his activities, but that was hampered by the casting of Moon Bloodgood (and/or poor writing for the character of Paxson), and then we moved more actively into Michael trying to get back into the CIA.

In hindsight, I think we might have been better off with this entire first half of the season devoted to the headaches that came with Management's exit, leading up to a moment in this episode where Michael decides it's time to get his old job back already. And at that point, we could have met Strickler, Diego, etc., and focused entirely on that in the season's second half.

That said, they've been doing some good things in these last few episodes, particularly with Michael's estrangement with Fi. Other than the one exchange quoted above, I don't think "Long Way Back" was too overt in spelling out the parallels between Fi's situation and Michael's, but it was there if you wanted to see it amidst all the shoot-outs and explosions and fake brogues. (Note the brief return of Fiona's accent from the pilot when she was yelling at Michael and her brother.) Great work from both Donovan and Anwar tonight, and even in the midst of the comedy about Miss Reynolds' car, Bruce Campbell got the nice moment where Sam admitted that he'd lay down his life for Fi if he had to.

And seeing Michael cold-bloodedly blow away Strickler -- trading his potential ticket back for a chance to save Fiona -- was very satisfying, and moreso because Nix for the most part tries to avoid having Michael kill the bad guys to solve his problems.

So while I haven't been thrilled by everything so far this season, there's still enough uniquely "Burn Notice"-y goodness that I'm going to just look at it as a case of being a little too ambitious, and I'm eager to see the remaining episodes when the show comes back in early 2010.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Burn Notice, "Friends Like These": Thrilla in the villa

In the interest of getting discussion going about last night's "Burn Notice" even as I head out to cover all things press tour, here are a few quick thoughts of mine: 1)Is Callie Thorne now going to be on every show on cable? And how much better is she these days (or, at least, how much better is the writing she gets) than when she was on "Homicide"? 2)The bit with Sam's stolen gun was wonderful, and a nice contrast to Sam whining about the villa. 3)I'm glad to see that Michael's quest to get back in is turning out to have some major personal (and, for that matter, professional) drawbacks.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Burn Notice, "Shot in the Dark": Michael gets domestic

The usual jet lag at the start of one of these California trips means I woke up early enough to watch last night's "Burn Notice," but also means I'm not quite coherent enough to comment on it. (Though it's now startling to see Jay Harrington away from "Better Off Ted.")

Instead, let me point you to two accounts of Bruce Campbell's time here at Comic-Con(*): Fienberg's highlights of Campbell predictably owning the room for the "Burn Notice" session, and Mo Ryan doing a video interview with Campbell.

(*) That "Burn Notice" panel was one of two events I'm bummed I missed because I chose to fly in during day one -- the other being the cast of "The Middleman" doing a table read of the script for the unfilmed final episode, which was also turned into a graphic novel that I saw several fans toting around yesterday afternoon. Don't forget that the complete series DVD comes out on Tuesday. I didn't have much of a chance to peruse the special features before I left for California, but the episodes alone are as joy-inducing as ever. Click here to read the full post

Burn Notice, "Signals and Codes": Michael Westen vs. Michael Weston

Some quick thoughts on tonight's "Burn Notice" coming up just as soon as I lie about ice cream cake...

The meta-joke aside, Michael Weston the actor fit in very well with the world of Michael Westen the character, and it was fun to watch our usually super-cool, ultra-rational Michael struggle to keep his temper under control while dealing with a client who's anything but rational -- and, for that matter, to see a situation where Fiona gets to be the one keeping a cool head.

I'm still taking a wait-and-see approach on Michael's quest to get back in with the CIA, but swapping out Detective Paxson for Michael's reluctant new government contact seems like an upgrade so far.

All that, and Sam Axe leading a team-building seminar. How can you not like that?

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Burn Notice, "Fearless Leader": Stacy's mom has got it going on

Spoilers for tonight's "Burn Notice" coming up just as soon as I deduct a mojito...

After the awesomeness of last week's Westen-Brennen II rumble, a letdown was inevitable, and while I enjoyed parts of "Fearless Leader," it played to disappointing type.

Detective Paxson remains something of a dud character (and I think that's on the writing as much as it's on Moon Bloodgood), so an episode in which she was more central wasn't as much fun as I suspect the producers were hoping. And for a character sold as being so tough and smart, Erik Palladino's Matheson made a real rookie mistake by letting Nick Turturro's Tommy (whom he viewed, rightly, as an untrustworthy loser) and his random new crew play such a big role in his next heist. (I assumed at first he was setting Tommy up to be humiliated or worse while he went off and did a job elsewhere.) And because Michael had such an easy time evading the police tail, we had an episode where neither of Michael's adversaries were nearly as potent as they were being sold as.

And yet there was a real charm to Michael's interactions with Tommy, to seeing Michael have to carry this guy while making it seem like he was buttering him up, and then to see him realize that both he and Tommy were better off if he turned Tommy from sap into ally. Admittedly, I have a soft spot for Nick Turturro due to his time as Flying James Martinez on "NYPD Blue," but I thought he and Jeffrey Donovan worked well together.

But the real highlights of "Fearless Leader" were the personal subplots, both the comedy of Sam suffering through an audit from what turned out to be the grown-up son of one of his old flames (though was the headache in his eye from the audit, or from Madeline's inedible cookies?), and Fiona's frustration at everything Michael has been up to, from screwing up the gig at the start to his insistence on getting back in the spy game. When you see what a soft touch Michael was with a guy like Tommy, you understand where Fi's coming from. He's not cold enough to be a spy anymore, not that he seems to realize it.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Burn Notice, "End Run": Smarty-cat and mouse

Spoilers for tonight's extra-special-y awesome "Burn Notice" coming up just as soon as I park eight inches off the curb...

"You're not this good. Nobody is this good." -Brennen

Actually, he is this good, Brennen. And in episodes like "End Run," so is "Burn Notice."

Jay Karnes' first appearance as Brennen in "Sins of Omission" was one of the highlights of season two. When you have a hero whose brain is his greatest weapon, it's always more fun to pit him against an adversary who's as smart -- or almost as smart -- as he is, and to see how the hero reacts when his usual tricks won't work. Because Brennen more or less knows what a guy like Michael is capable of, and because Karnes plays him with such confidence, it's a lot more fun to see Michael triumph over him than it is to see him outwit some of the other people he's scammed over the years.

Brennen did, of course, get over-confident in allowing Michael to operate without being watched, and in underestimating Michael's ability to hack a cell phone using nothing but a potato chip can, a hanger and some metal washers. The Cantenna may be my favorite bit of improvised "Burn Notice" technology to date, and not just because it got its own chyron in an episode full of good chyron humor (see also Brennen quickly going from "Arms dealer with a grudge" to "Michael's new boss"). One of the things that got cut from the Matt Nix interview (because it gave away too much about the plot of this episode, which he also referred to as the show's homage to "Collateral") is that their tech advisor, Michael Wilson, had been telling them about different methods of Bluetooth snarfing for a while, and they'd been waiting to find the perfect story to use it in. This was that, and it was great to see how that one maneuver gave Michael enough intelligence to carry the day.

And while he was waiting for Sam, Fi and Barry the money launderer(*) to help him out on that front, we got to see him do his usual Michael Westen thing, switching into different identities (alcoholic custodian, d-bag aging frat boy) to handle each situation, then efficiently taking out all the security guards, just because he could, before confronting Brennen and getting his brother back. As Nix says, the show never tries to hang an episode on whether Michael can win a physical battle, because we know he'll win every one of those, but it's still a pleasure to see him do it so easily, even when it turns out to be non-essential to winning the day.

(*) Best Barry episode ever? Not only does he go to a salon near Madeline's neighborhood, but he's now hired both a life coach and an intern.

My only real concern is that Detective Paxson is still not that exciting. Also, wouldn't she find out about Nate showing up in a hospital with a bullet wound? Or is that another counter-intuitive spy lesson that got cut for time? ("A lot of people think that if you go to the hospital with a bullet wound, the doctors have to call the cops. But if you happen to coat the wound with lime and salt...")

The rest of it, though, rocked. Hard.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Burn Notice, "Question and Answer": Nightmare on Michael's street

Spoilers for tonight's "Burn Notice" coming up just as soon as I snort lactose...

"Loving Michael is always trench warfare." -Madeline

"Question and Answer" continues to get good mileage out of Michael being a man without a country, or a protector, by introducing Moon Bloodgood as Detective Paxson, aka "Michael's worst nightmare." She's very much in the mold of Carla from last year -- gorgeous actress, knowing more about Michael than he wants her to know, and frequently getting in the way of his jobs -- and while I don't think Bloodgood's nearly as good an actress as Tricia Helfer, I like the way they're using the character so far. We've talked so much in the past about why the cops never seem interested in this guy who's been blowing up half of Miami -- now, thanks to Management cutting its strings, we have a cop all up in Michael's business.

Still, the heart of "Burn Notice" is and should be the episodic missions, and we got a very good one here. The kidnapping case gave all the characters some nice moments -- I was particularly amused by Fi helping the mom meditate by feeding her a fantasy about killing the kidnappers ("You're taking a rock from the stream...") -- and Michael and Sam's reverse interrogation scam was a great two-hander by Jeffrey Donovan and Bruce Campbell. The junkie snitch ID was one of Donovan's better cover performances to date, and Campbell had fun playing dirty cop. And, as Matt Nix said in our interview, "there probably aren't other TV shows where the two main characters are beating the crap out of each other for the benefit of the bad guy." It does end, once again, with the bad guys being tricked into killing each other, which Nix said he was going to try to do less of this year, but it felt less like a solution to the problem (Michael had already grabbed the kid by then) than a public service, so I was okay with it.

I also continue to love what they're doing with Madeline. By making Sam her temporary roommate (which also gives us the delightful image of Sam talking to his borrowed car) on the heels of him blowing up her sun room at the end of last season, the writers have knocked down most of the remaining barriers between Michael's mom and his work life, and it's fun to watch a Madeline who knows pretty much everything.

Good stuff all around, and this wasn't even the best of the three episodes USA sent out for review. (That would be next week.)

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Burn Notice, "Friends and Family": Wanted man

Quick spoilers for the "Burn Notice" season three premiere coming up just as soon as I mix beer with yogurt...

"You might as well tattoo a bullseye on your forehead." -Harlan

I already wrote a lot today about "Burn Notice," between today's column and my Matt Nix interview, and I don't have a lot to add at this point, save that, as with the introduction of Carla last season, I feel comfortable that Nix has found a way to shake up the serialized aspects of the show without in any way undermining what makes the episode-to-episode stuff so much fun. There's a lot of potential in a Michael Westen who's constantly being hunted -- by cops, by old enemies, even by old friends like Harlan -- even as he, Sam, and Fi do their usual thing.

One question: how do you feel about the use of the subtitles in this episode? There were a couple of instances -- the introduction of Harlan, and of Falcone as "the gatekeeper" -- where the subtitle flew up so fast, and just rehashed what had been in the dialogue, that it's clear the show is trying to have more fun with that device this year. But do you think it's too much fun?

Also, one observation: I was at the doctor this afternoon, and the guy brought up the column today. Turns out he's a "Burn Notice" fan, and we very quickly devolved into doing dueling impressions of Jeffrey Donovan's narration, as applied to every day situations. "When you go to to ear, nose and throat specialist, you want to make sure that..." or "When ordering Thai food, most people think..." It's fun. You can apply it to virtually any situation in your daily life.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Burn Notice: Matt Nix talks season three

I've been doing a lot of post-mortem interviews lately, so I thought I'd try something different and chat with "Burn Notice" creator Matt Nix in advance of season three, which I also reviewed (along with "Royal Pains") in today's column. No real spoilers, though Matt does allude to some small plot points this season (like which recurring character might become a client for an episode). It's nothing I feel uncomfortable knowing about as a spoiler-phobe, but click through at your own discretion.

Let's start off with how you feel Management agreeing to leave Michael alone -- but withdrawing their protection -- changes the series.

What they've said is, "We'll leave you alone and see how you like it." They're not necessarily saying, "We're completely done with you," but for the moment, they're going to leave him alone and he'll see what life is like with no protection. That's truly a very dangerous thing for anybody who's worked in that world. What that launches him into is a circumstance where the protectiosn that they've been affording him are no longer there. There are people from his past that are going to be interested in him for various reasons, but that also includes friends. He's fallen off the grid, he's been hidden, there are potentially other people from his past that can engage with him. It means Michael's been disappearing off of police computers for a while, and that's no longer the case. That's something he has to deal with. Then there's a whole range of reasons that people might want to engage with Michael, having to do with his past, but one thing he also deals with is there are a huge number of people interested in brokering the services of people with Michael's skills and knowledge.

Overall, though, the fact that he no longer is under the thumb of the people who burned him gives him a chance to get back in with the intelligence community. While he's dealing with the cops, with this character who's trying to broker his services, he's also focused on trying to re-engage with the intelligence community, and in the process, discovering that, while it may be very easy to send out a burn notice on someone and savage their reputation, it's a lot harder to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. It is a multi-faceted situation.

In terms of him trying to get his career back, it seems like he's been developing more of a moral compass over the course of this series than he ever had as a spy. He's started to care about people now. Could he really go back to that world?

That is absolutely a question that we are exploring. One of the things that we started exploring last season, and are continuing to look at, is the idea that Michael may seem to regard taking clients as kind of an inconvenience, but really, there is something in Michael that compels him to help the underdog. There is something in Michael that needs these clients and these projects. Because otherwise, it's not enough money to justify what he does. It's something he needs to do. So, yeah, one of the things he deals with -- and it's a big subject of his discussions with Fiona over the course of the season -- there's a sort of moral clarity to the jobs that he does. He's dealing with people that he knows. Occasionally, he comes across a bad apple, but even then, he's dealing with that bad apple. Ultimately, he's dealing with bad guys on behalf of people with real problems. Re-engaging with the inteliigence community means going back into this murky world where you're never sure who's on the up-and-up. Fiona's attitude is, "Why would you want to go back to that?" Michael's attitude is, "That's what I was trained to do, that's where the real action is. Right now, I'm saving individual people, but I can do things on a much larger scale."

When you say he's not making enough for these jobs to be worth it, I've been struggling to think of any example where we've ever seen him take money -- and, in fact, there have been a few times where he outright refused payment.

It's funny, because of the questions about this, it's begun to dawn on us all as a writing staff that maybe we ought to answer the question more for the audience the way we have for ouselves. Basically, Fiona is doing a fair amount of work. She's buying and selling various bits of weaponry, she's got a lot of gear around. In our minds, it's two-fold: 1)He's getting all of his product wholesale from Fiona, and 2)Fiona has a fair amount of money. You see her apartment this year and it's pretty swank, and once she's engaged with something, there's some access to cash there. And then, though this isn't something we talk about a whole lot, but there's some thought that he may be doing money gigs off-screen. You'll see him helping out a gig with Fiona, so to some extent, there are jobs you're not seeing, but they're not the big ones.

One of the things we discovered is that there's really no amount of money that justifies the lengths that Michael, Fiona and Sam go to to solve problems. Because of that, it always feels a little bit silly to have them say, "Okay, depserate person who's trying to have their child saved, I just put myself to unbelievable danger to save you, so thank you for this $1400." It feels silly and cheap to say, "I saved your entire family from that gang of vicious criminals, now I'm going to stand in your modest middle-class home and take your cash." From a behind-the-scenes perspective, those scenes, we've filmed them, and we're terrible.

But I can think of at least one occasion, in the Method Man episode last year, where the guy wanted to pay, and had more than enough money to do so without it being a problem, and Michael still refused.

It would not have bothered me to take money there. We had two thoughts on that score. One was that Michael had been really good friends with the client's older brother, and so why did he do the job? Not really for the money Ricky could hand over, but because he was bummed one of his old friends was in jail now. The other thing, and this is a larger thing: as we go through the seasons now, one of the things we're more conscious of is we have a bit of a unvierse of characters who can recur, both bad guys and good guys. In some ways, it's more interesting for us to establish a network of favors that Michael is owed and owes. For example, this season, Barry comes in as a client, and also as a much more integral part of what they do on a regular basis. So that means that now we can bring Barry, who's a money launderer, as a client. He'd be a pretty unclean client for season one, but by now, you've seen that Barry has been actively involved in doing good stuff. Ricky was played by Ben Watkins as a writer on the show -- we look at it as, we can have that guy back any time we want.

How hard is it to write a show with a main character who's super-competent without making it dull?

Now you're making me self-conscious. Is it dull?

No, not at all -- I'm just impressed that you're able to maintain suspense when we know Michael is good at everything.

I'm glad you say that. One thing is, there are a lot of things in the show that Michael experiences as very difficult. They're just not the things you expect to be difficult: something with his mother, something with Fiona, some emotional story that he is less equipped to handle. So that's one thing. The other thing is, when we think about how Michael is solving a problem, the kinds of things that he's very good at -- like cobbling together a bug, or fighting, or tactical combat experience -- if you think about it, what carries the day is never a well-executed battle. What carries the day is never a gadget that he has assembled that solves the problem. The things he's really good at, they're instruments, they're useful, but they never solve the problem. The problem that Michael is solving involves an interaction with another character, and a set of challenges that go well beyond simple questions like, "Can Michael beat this person up?" or "Can Michael build something to get out of this situation?"

It's always hard for us to think of a really big challenge to hand Michael that is an overall strategic challenge, that's tough and that's exciting to see, while at the same time, never hanging a scene on, "Can Michael beat this person up?" Because the answer to that is always "Yes." But we've had a lot of conversations as writers about the fact that almost all of the violence on the show is part of a character interaction rather than -- we never hit someone to make them do something. It's much more likely that we'll let the bad guy hit us to make him think he's much more powerful. When we were shooting (one episode this season), I commented to the writer that there probably aren't other TV shows where the two main characters are beating the crap out of each other for the benefit of the bad guy.

It seems like a lot of what Michael does, and what he tells us in the voiceovers, runs completely counter to what we've been taught to expect by other action shows.

I feel like, what we're on the hook for, as a spy show, is counter-intuitive technique. Our goal, one of the kind of standards that we apply to voiceovers is, is this a good piece of cocktail party knowledge? Is this something fun to know? It's not fun for everybody, but if you're a fan of the show, is this fun for us? There are certain things we do that are straightforward, but we don't voiceover those. The voiceovers are the things you wouldn't expect that are interesting. I always think that what's fun for us about that is it also gives us an opportunity to showcase a kind of technique that you can't really showcase without calling attention to it and slowing things down, like letting the audience know that this is what's being done here.

If you say, for example, "This wristlock is far more effective than beating someone up," or "It's far more painful to bend someone's thumb in this way," it allows us to do a really fun and interesting scene where someone's bending the crap out of someone's thumb, and it wakes you up. It's easy to get numbed by just action or running around. So we always think like, if we're going to blow someone up, it's fun to see explosions, but it's much more fun to know, if you needed to make something blow up in this circumstance, what would you do and what would it look like and how would it work?

One of the dangers of having a super-competent hero is it can really cut down on the audience's investment in that hero, he becomes this guy who can do anything, you don't know how. By having the voiceovers and explaining some of these things, hopefully the other tone we try to strike is, "You could do this, too. You just aren't trained in this. If you put your mind to it, these are things you can understand. He's still a human being, if he gets hit in the mouth, it hurts, but this is how you get hit in the mouth so it doesn't hurt as much as the other guy thinks it will." You get that, "I may not be a spy, but this spy is not a superhero."

When Michael is cobbling something together, is it more often a situation of you having a problem and asking the technical advisor how he'd solve it, or you knowing about a weird bit of spycraft and writing a problem you can apply it to?

As you might expect, it kind of happens two ways. One is, we hear something neat, and it hangs around the writers office, and we wait until we can use it. Michael Wilson is our consulting producer who has a background in intelligence. He keeps up with those things, he's good at coming up with those. Specifically, if we have a problem to solve, we'll go to him and say, "What is a way of doing this?" And then he just has enough of a library in his head to be able to kind of generate something that fits with the show, with the characters, and explaining what's hard about it. What's nice about the fact that he's done some of these things is he'll tend to give us the details, like, "You can't use Scotch tape, because I used it once, and it gums up the works." He's very insistent about those details, but it gives it a sort of a lfie. Part of it is that, and part of it is us researching things and going, "Oh, this is cool." Last year, in doing research, I ended up getting interested in different kinds of shotgun rounds, and what they can do. I was looking for an opportunity to use that over the course of the season.

A third category would be nods to particular spy techniques or spy equipment that exist, that's in the world. One of the things we talked about is, a big thing in the spy world right now is unmanned aerial drones. Michael's not going to buy a drone, but the principals are pretty simple to get your head around, and we've talked to people about how those are built and launched, and it turns out that Michael could easily do something along those lines, and that we get to showcase all the things we think is cool about that, but we're not just going to buy it. Now we're looking for an opprotunity of where are we going to use that.

I enjoyed the show in season one, but it felt like there was this big improvement at the start of season two, and again after the summer episodes of season two ended. What was it you learned in the first season that led to that?

You sound like my wife, She always tells people, "Watch season two, not season one. Especially the second half of season two." The truth is, I can point to very specific things. Really, it's not as if, when you're making a pilot, you can necessarily project forward and go, "Okay, the actors are going to be able to do this, this is how much we're going to be able to shoot in a day." There's a tremendous learning curve. Over the course of the first season, there's not really a contemporary template for how a "Burn Notice" might work.

One of the things we talked about in the first season was that it's a procedural show in which the procedure is different every week. So this week, it is the procedure of being safecracker. Next week, it's going to be the procedure of interrogation. While other shows would do, this is an interrogation show, or an evidence show, we might do an evidence episode, or a medical episode, or anything. We could easily do an episode that turns on Michael's field medicine expertise, and is all about Michael as doctor, and it's something we've talked about doing. That's kind of all over the map, so we had to find the deep structure of the eipsodes, and how a "Burn Notice" would work on a week to week basis. The first season was trying a bunch of things and seeing which ones worked better and which didn't work as well, and I can point to some episodes from season one and go, this is what we learned from that.

Over the first half of season two, you can see us nailing down the structure. It's funny. There was actually a point in season two where we noticed some fan reactions were, like, "Oh, now we get it. This is what the format's going to be from now on. Now it's going to get repetitive." And that was exactly the point where we felt, "Ah-ha! Now we've got it! This is what a 'Burn Notice' looks like," and you can see starting at episode 7 of season two, when Michael was pretending to be the geeky chemist, that was kind of a mold breaker for us. We'd never had Michael making an approach that was totally submissive. After that, we felt, this is the essence of how this show can work on a week to week basis, knowing the technique is going to change on a week to week basis: what if we turned this part on its head, what if we changed it this way? And you can see it throughout the season, it reflects our confidence in knowing the structure.

One of the cool things is that you've created such a specific character that you can do an episode like the bank heist from season two, where we've seen this particular story on a million other shows, but because Michael's involved, it's nothing quite like what we've seen before.

This season's third episode is another example of this; it's our nod to "Collateral." This season, you'll see more of us playing with our own format. The audience knows what to expect: "Oh, this is the point in a burn Notice where they make this plan," and we can turn this upside down, and they won't be lost. One of the ways we think of episodes now is, let's think of a circumstance where everybody knows how that episode goes, like a bank heist goes. Everybody knows what that episode looks like, so let's try to turn it on its head. Our sixth episode is Michael on the run with bad guys in the wilderness, and there are some really fun things to flip around in that format. We use a booby trap in a way youy've never seen a booby trap go off before

Getting back to Michael as the geeky chemist, how long did it take you to realize just how much range Jeffrey (Donovan) could show in these undercover identities?

All of the writers go out to the set for episodes. So you end up hanging out with Jeffrey a lot. We've all become friends with him and have come to know him, and so we are very fortunate in that Jeffrey is a very flexible actor, and he has this range of characters that he can do. A lot of times, we don't necessarily know exactly what he's going to do, but we'll write to it, in a direction, and we'll give the lines a rhythm, or we'll give him a tonal touch point -- "This is a character a little like someone from this movie." -- and then we trust him to run with that and get the cadence of the lines. Usually, we're on the same page. There aren't really a lot of surprises anymore. In the first season, one of the ones that we were all, "Ohmigod, what is he doing?!?!" turned out to be one of my favorite cover identities, when he was in Little Havana and he had the eyeliner on. At first, I was getting calls (from USA) and I was going, 'No, no. I'm going to go out on a limb and say I like this. I trust him."

Jeffrey and I have always had a connection. I kind of have a sense for what he's going to do, we can kind of finish each other's sentences. That's a really useful thing, and we've learned how to set him up well. What are the things he's going to gravitate to? A lot of times, we'll ask, "What does Michael sound like yelling?" If we start with, "What is the highest point of conflict for this cover identity? What does this person look like in his most extreme moments?," that's what Jeffrey is going to key off of. It's not about giving him an accent. Michael's not doing these things to entertain himself, but because they're the most effective way of dealing with a situation. But the fun thing is, now we get to know the range of the other actors on the show as well. The episode after the ones you've seen contains Fiona's best cover ID ever. She is hilarious. It's awesome.

It felt like it took you a while to get a handle on writing both Fiona and Madeline, where Michael and Sam were more fully-formed. What was it that helped you master writing for the two women in Michael's life?

Gabrielle (Anwar) is a very instinctive actor, and she's someone who really keys into the emotion of a scenario. And so one of the things we realized in writing for her is there's so much overlap between Gabrielle's personality and Fiona's, which meant that in some ways, the learning curve was a little harder for me. Jeffrey and I tend to approach things in a similar way, it's more about the words and the logic of something, and we go from the logic to the emotion. Gabrielle, as we were working with her, we found that when we give Fiona something to be passionate about -- and you can see that especially in the second half of last season -- when she connects with a client, she comes alive on screen. She's not an actress who really wants to know first what's under the lines and find her way to that stuff. We found that giving her something to be passionate about really made her come alive, rather than explaining a situation to her. She doesn't care about the situation, she wants to know, "How do I feel and what's important to me?" That was really instrumental in getting my head around her instincts as an actor, and you can see it makes a huge difference. It's really exciting for us.

In the case of Sharon and Madeline, I've always been very upfront about the fact that Madeline is sort of one-dimensional and underwritten in the pilot. I'm not ashamed of it, but I don't look at it and go, "Yeah, that's my best work." But I was incredibly fortunate in that I had Sharon there to interact with, and I could just look at Sharon and go, "Okay, I'm now going to pull Madeline out of these aspects of Sharon Gless." So I can pretend that I had a really full-formed, three-dimensional view of Madeline, but I didn't, at all. What's fun, in the thrid season, is Madeline is completely aware of what Michael does. There's no pretending, or being shocked. At this point, her house has blown up. She can be a more integral part of his life, and she can help what he's doing. It's not in a silly way, like she's running around with a shotgun, but it's dumb for us to pretend like they wouldn't ask for help. She's like the client dormitory. Finding that, and bringing Madeline's character into that world, it's just gotten a lot richer. A lot of that was me finding Madeline in Sharon. It's a more organic way to write and a lot of fun. She's such a smart and canny actress. In our discussion of those early episodes, we said, 'In this episode, what does Madeline do that really brings home the point that she is Michael's mother? She's not just some mother." That is really the thing we key off of

Last one: There was a string of episodes last season where Michael's solution to the problem was to maneuver one bad guy into killing another bad guy, and when Michael accidentally threw the assassin to his death, and then shot Victor, those stood out to me as the first time in a long time we'd seen Michael directly (if not intentionally) kill somebody. I'm wondering if that's a rule you've imposed on yourself, something USA requested, or just happenstance that he only very rarely uses lethal force.

There are a few answers to that. There's no "rule," but: 1. It's true, that while Michael will do what's necessary, he generally avoids violence when possible. 2. Michael needs to conceal his involvement in stuff. When two bad guys shoot each other, or a bad guy gets caught by the cops in the middle of a crime, there are no uncomfortable "Who shot this guy?" questions. Michael's involvement is invisible, as a spy's should be. 3. In general, we really focus on making Michael outwit his adversaries rather than best them physically. Which is, I suppose, more or less a preference of mine.

We did have a bit of a run of that in season two, actually - the one bad guy kills the other thing. It wasn't intentional, it had to do with how the episodes laid out. In any case, while it's a useful thing to do sometimes, we try not to go to that well too often.

Alan Sepinwall may be reached at asepinwall@starledger.com Click here to read the full post

'Royal Pains,' 'Burn Notice' reviews - Sepinwall on TV

In today's column, I look at the return of "Burn Notice" and the debut of its new (and very familiar-looking) USA partner, "Royal Pains":

Imitation is the sincerest form of television. Once a network has a hit, it's going to do everything possible to copy it and copy it until viewers lose interest. It's why most of the shows on CBS involve the solving of crime with the help of electron microscopes, why every NBC sitcom of the late '90s was about attractive New Yorkers looking for love, and why tonight USA follows the return of "Burn Notice" (still the most fun you can have in front of your TV set in the summer) with the debut of "Royal Pains," which is more or less "Burn Notice, MD."

You can read the full column here. My interview with "Burn Notice" creator Matt Nix should be right above this post. I'll have some kind of post up tonight for "Burn Notice" and possibly a separate one for "Royal Pains," but given time constraints and how much I've already written, it may be a simple "What did you all think?" Click here to read the full post

Burn Notice, "Lesser Evil": I guess this means we're not going to Disney World

Spoilers for the "Burn Notice" season two finale coming up just as soon as I ask On-Star for the nearest hardware store...

"You have no idea what hell will rain down if we stop watching out for you." -Management
"I'll take my chances." -Michael

And so an outstanding season of "Burn Notice" comes to an appropriately outstanding ending. "Lesser Evil" featured so many fist-pumping moments that I think I pulled a tendon in my forearm (my guess it was Sam and Madeline making explosive ordinance out of Christmas decorations, gunpowder and non-dairy creamer that did it). But it also featured some wonderfully poignant moments that not only didn't undercut the action, but enhanced it. When you see how much Madeline cares for her son, how scorching Michael and Fi's love for each other is, what a tragic figure Victor turns out to be (and, therefore, how much it pains Michael to put him out of his misery), it only makes those moments when our heroes get over on the bad guys feel more satisfying. This is a show that started off as a diversion at best, then became a fun summer lark, and now I consider it essential, terribly engaging viewing. It feels epic in a way that I never would have expected at any point in season one.

The finale takes care of both Carla and Victor, the former in one of those aforementioned "Hell yeah!" scenes (Fi was probably speaking for half the audience when she said, "Finally!" after putting a bullet in her), the latter in a moment that was deliberately the opposite of satisfying. Victor was introduced as Michael's opposite number -- just as competent, but crazy and overheated where Michael is cool and controlled -- and here we find out he's just another poor bastard who got a burn notice at a bad time, and the poor fortune to lose his family in the bargain. This could have been Michael, and he knows that, and that's why he hesitates so long before letting Victor help him pull the trigger. A great moment for Jeffrey Donovan and Michael Shanks.

And with this season's villains out of the way, the final moments introduce a potential season three bad guy in the always-wonderful John Mahoney. Michael's refusal to go along with the request to take Carla's place -- to take the hard, potentially fatal road instead of the easy, well-compensated one -- isn't a decision I think he makes at the start of the series. But "Burn Notice," when it isn't busy teaching us cool counter-surveillance techniques, is about what happens when an amoral, globe-trotting spy is forcibly dumped back into the real world, given a half-surrogate, half-real family, and introduced to the concerns of ordinary people. This Michael has a conscience, and a sense of the concerns of others -- see his refusal to simply kill the surveillance detail on the off-chance they're unwitting tools of Carla -- and he'd rather put his own life at risk then to make himself a cog in the machine that would kill a man's wife and son as an easy way to acquire a new operative.

I just feel incredibly satisfied by this whole season, and I can't wait to see how things play out next season now that Michael's unquestionably a man without a country. Was Mahoney exaggerating about the threat level, or will we see his weekly missions constantly being disrupted by disgruntled former colleagues popping up to take a shot at Michael, Fi and Sam? And how long do we have to wait, anyway.

Bravo, "Burn Notice."

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Burn Notice, "Sins of Omission": My fiancee Sam

Spoilers for last night's "Burn Notice" coming up just as soon as I see what I modify my disposable camera...

Why was "Sins of Omission" one of the best episodes of this very strong "Burn Notice" season? Let's count the reasons:

1)A bad guy who was not only well-cast, with Jay Karnes from "The Shield" (sporting his haircut from "Sons of Anarchy"), but well-written as someone so good at his job and so smart about the way people like Michael operate, that our heroes were never really able to trick him. The best they could do, when all else failed, was to push him into a corner where he had no choice but to do what they needed him to do.

2)Some good romantic and familial tension for Michael with the appearance of Dina Meyer as thief/ex-fiancee Samantha. It's always fun to see Michael, who's so in control of any professional encounter, be at a loss on how to deal with his mom, or Fiona's jealousy, and this particular scenario raised the stakes a little.

3)They didn't drag out the Karnes portion of the episode once they ran out of interesting twists for it, but instead put Karnes off to the side and did a quick one-act reverse heist story with Michael and Samantha breaking in to return the chip. The episode felt richer for all the stuff going on in it.

4)Victor, so crazy and intense and jittery, makes a great foil for Michael. Even when they're only talking on the phone from separate locations, there's an energy to their interaction that isn't always there with some of his other professional rivals (including Carla, who was pretty flat in this episode). While it's fun to watch Michael physically dominate bad guys who don't have his training, it's even more entertaining to see him triumph over an equal.

5)Dude, Michael made a taser out of a disposable camera. Dayeenu.

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Burn Notice, "Truth and Reconciliation": The Haitian

"Burn Notice" spoilers coming up just as soon as I get a ride to my partner stretching class...

It would be hard for "Burn Notice" to top last week's bank heist episode, which was kind of a pure distillation of all the things that make the show so much fun. But "Truth and Reconciliation" still felt like a let-down, and I'm struggling to put my finger on the reason why.

I made a note to myself halfway through the episode that it didn't feel like we'd learned that much in the way of spycraft from Michael in this one, though we did find out in the later minutes that "Killers are, by and large, whining losers." But even the gag about Fi overdosing the bad guy with cold medicine wasn't really that surprising to anyone who's taken even slightly too much NyQuil. (Cue Denis Leary's NyQuil routine.)

What I really think the issue was, though, is that this one felt pretty glum. We open with Michael killing the knife-wielding assassin(*), then move on to him dealing with a particularly tragic client and an evil but not particularly interesting target. I'm not saying the show shouldn't go to dark places -- I really liked the first episode of this batch where Michael was wandering around with broken ribs and yelling at people -- but it has to be compellingly dark, and this wasn't quite that.

(*) Is this the first time we've seen Michael actively kill someone on-screen, as opposed to arranging for one bad guy to murder another? Now, this was in self-defense, but it's always interesting to me to watch shows about people in deadly professions that try to keep blood off their hero's hands. (See also "The A-Team," where Hannibal and company fired approximately 8 million warning shots and never actually hit anyone over five seasons.)

There were some entertaining things on the margins, like Sam's charm offensive with the FBI guys from season one, or Madeline's successful attempt to fix the car and prove that she can be self-reliant. For that matter, I was glad to see Victor back, and now apparently blessed with parkour skills. But the bulk of the episode dragged, and I hope we get a bounce back next week.

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