When You’re A Spy: Things Unseen

With only three episodes left now, you’d think there would be more urgency in the events happening on Burn Notice but this week’s episode kind of felt like filler, albeit filler with a pretty high body count.

Michael gets his latest mission from James via Sonya and finds out that he is to assassinate one of his former allies, ex-British spy, Roger Steele (probably the closest Burn Notice has gotten to a James Bond analogue).  Steele has uncovered evidence about James’ organization and Michael’s involvement with it, so he has to go.    Michael and Sonya visit Steele under the guise of Michael needing work but really to scout out his security and find his beachside villa to be a fortress.  They plan an ambush on his vehicles but that plan fails and Sonya wants to just use an air strike on his villa but Michael convinces her to let him draw him out and kill him with a sniper rifle, which he does.  It’s very simple and blunt for Burn Notice, which usually has multiple cons and elaborate trap/ambush setups.  It’s even finished with ten minutes left in the episode, so Michael can save the day back in Miami.

Speaking of which, the rest of the gang is involved in a fairly typical Burn Notice scenario: Carlos (Fi’s boyfriend) finds out that word is going around his old neighborhood that someone is looking for him and he meets one of his old gang buddies, Mateo, who tells him that Nando, a high-level gang member that Carlos helped put away, is out and looking for revenge.  Carlos works with a Detective Holloway, who remembers that Carlos said he possibly had a witness who saw Nando kill a fellow drug dealer.  Jesse and Sam go into the bad part of town to find Lloyd, the witness, and Jesse manages to accidentally put him in a sleeper hold and they drag him to Maddie’s house, where an emotional speech from Maddie convinces him to help Carlos.  Holloway betrays him though and Nando captures Carlos.  When Michael conveniently arrives back in Miami just in time to help, he has Fi bring him into Nando as the witness while he has Sonya find a way to stop Nando.  Just as Nando is about to kill everyone, Michael gets a call on his cell that turns out to be one of the big bosses in Colombia, who orders Nando killed and one of his henchmen does it and releases the gang.  Carlos tells Fi a few days later that he found that an attack helicopter attacked the bosses compound and killed seven people, forcing his cooperation.  He tells Fi that she and Michael have always been going down a path that he can’t follow and moves out.

For getting near the end, nothing much happened this episode, Michael did kill a former friend but it’s just reiterating the fact that he’s “in too deep” with James’ organization while the Miami story was basically just to get Carlos out of the way so that Fi and Michael can get back together.  Hopefully things ramp up with these last three episodes.

• Who Am I?: Michael doesn’t change identities this week but Sam and Jesse do go undercover as Health department officials.
• Spy Tip of the Week: Setting up roadside ambushes and their weakness against signal jammers
• Sam Axeism of the Week: “Jesse…he stopped fighting” (after Jesse accidentally knocks out Carlos’ witness)