This post contains spoilers through the Sept. 8 episode of Burn Notice.

As someone who gets prickly and discontented about the fact that it would be really extraordinary difficult to do what Michael, Fiona, and Sam do, I was glad to see the half-season finale of Burn Notice actually address that trying to pull off running a sophisticated covert network without the backing of an agency is something that would be difficult to the point of being impossible.

As it turns out, when you don’t have the infrastructure of an agency behind you, the following things can happen. A deeply twisted shrink can a) fake his own wife’s death, b) infiltrate your mother’s therapy to learn about your vulnerabilities, c) present himself as your client because you have no mechanism to do a background check and figure out that he’s a fraud, and d) set you up to kill several people, putting you in his debt so you have to work for him. Being independent makes you as vulnerable as it makes you free.

A couple threads back, someone said that rather than have Fiona do something out of line, they’d prefer to see Michael cross over, testing a reformed Fiona’s limits, rather than seeing her relapse into her old IRA ways. And I actually thought the show, which has been somewhat slack this season, did a nice job with that idea tonight. When Fiona accidentally kills two innocent bystanders in an operation that’s been tweaked by said twisted shrink, she’s genuinely shocked and traumatized. And the episode plays with the idea that Michael’s actually the bad guy, who has gotten everyone he’s working with way in over their heads. “I know someone that no one else knows. You deserved to be burned,” Larry, who has rematerialized to cause trouble, tells Michael. “You stood there. You watched it happen. You killed those people. And then you helped me cover it up. Because that was the job.”

The show has acted all season as if the unit Michael’s built around himself is sacrosanct and at risk if he returns to the CIA. “You had no friends, you lived by yourself, but that isn’t true anymore. you have roots here now,” Michael’s mother tells him. “Anything happens, it affects all of us.” But it seems that unit, the fact that Michael has people, is precisely what’s made him vulnerable. His greatest enemy has attacked him through his mother, a profound if accidental betrayal. Michael’s concern for Fiona means that he feels a responsibility to her when she is framed. If he was genuinely part of an agency, he’d have resources, he would be protected. But when your agency is your family, you don’t have a layer of backup to protect them from you.

This post contains spoilers through the Aug. 25 episode of Burn Notice.

One of the things I find most interesting about a season of Burn Notice in which my interest is fading is the role of Madeline, his mother, in Michael’s life and in his operations. Particularly after he and Jesse get her involved in an operation where they dramatically underestimate the intensity of the crime being planned and the willingness of the people committing it to employ fairly extreme violence.

Maybe my favorite episode was the one, earlier this summer, in which Michael enlists her in an operation where she has to pretend to be a nurse treating a Yakuza agent Michael’s captured. As the situation escalates, Michael and Madeline act out the abusive dynamic between Madeline and Michael’s father. She’s both necessary to the operation, and the operation provides a setting where she and Michael can work out some deeper-seated psychological issues. It was a nice little bidirectional bit of plotting.

It’s interesting that an older woman without preexisting criminal tendencies would not only turn a blind eye to the activities of her son and his associates, but actively enlist in them for things like simple photographic surveillance, when it could risk her spending her retirement years in prison. Certainly Michael, for all of his extralegal activities, is the more functional of her two sons, and it makes sense that she would want to be close to Michael, even to understand better the son who left her at 17 by involving herself in his work. In this case, it seems like she might have taken an assignment from Jesse, her surrogate son, because it makes her feel valued by someone other than her preoccupied boy. And there’s no denying that by comforting hostages or duping criminals, she gets a kind of power and influence that would be otherwise unavailable to women in her life situation.

But it can be risky to have her there, as when she blows his cover trying to convince the hostages that Michael is credible and has a plan for their escape so they shouldn’t surrender. At some point, he’s going to get her in enough danger that he will have to make a choice and compromise an operation, or one of his other cohorts — or the show risks getting incredibly boring. Right now, Fiona can outrun cops chasing a guy under house arrest. Jesse can walk into a federal facility and impersonate an FBI official. Even vicious criminals never pull the trigger before getting taken out themselves. Burn Notice‘s lawless Miami-Dade County is increasingly uncomplicated, and as a result, uninteresting. It’s time for the characters to face some real costs, and I don’t mean murdered semi-anonymous CIA contacts.

This post contains spoilers through the August 11 episode of Burn Notice.

I’m getting to the point with Burn Notice, like with House, where I don’t really care about the case of the week, so I want to take this week to talk about my favorite character on the show as it exists now: Fiona. Fiona strikes me as an interesting — and underdiscussed — action heroine. Sure, she fits some of the stereotypes that people criticize in the genre. She dresses beautifully, uses her sex appeal on targets, and is preternaturally talented. But she can also take damage in the field — she gets shot, and recovers — and she’s flawed in reasonable and interesting ways.

Among them, she’s impulsive, and has a genuine appetite for destruction. “A timer attached to a depth finder,” she sighs, examining the bomb that was meant to take out Michael. “I’m kind of jealous I didn’t think of it myself.” She doesn’t fit lady-like stereotypes of only using violence when it’s absolutely necessary. She’s got an appreciation for the craft of violence, and more restrained people like Pearce envy it in her. “As an employee of the U.S. government, I’m probably not supposed to say this, but wow,” Pearce tells Fiona when they meet, a meeting that’s already giving Fiona anxiety given how pretty Pearce is. For most of her relationship with Michael, Fiona’s had a way to channel those appetites in a way that’s in line with Michael’s interests. But it would be interesting to see what happens when they reach an actual impasse. Michael’s already pushed Fiona by having overall goals that differ from hers. If their conceptions of justice diverge, they’re in real trouble.

And there’s the long-term question of what happens if Michael does get fully reinstated. Does Fiona settle down and become a well-behaved CIA wife? Do they split up? We’ve seen Fiona consider alternatives to Michael, Jesse in particular. But with Armand, we see a guy who values Fiona for her darkness. “After all the effort you put to get to Miami, I expected something more,” Armand asks Fiona when he arrives at the loft she shares with Michael bearing fancy guns in lieu of flowers. “Are you happy? Was it worth it? To come here and live with an absentee boyfriend?” He’s not the only one — Michael’s mother thinks Michael needs to take Fiona out more.

And when he does, their dinner turns poisonous, and their fight is interrupted, unresolved, by the arrival of Michael’s mother and her new boyfriend Ben. “To supportive partners,” Michael toasts. But if he’s going to reduce Fiona to that, he might as well give her up. And he might not like the cost if Fiona demands equal support, no matter what her goals are, in return.

This post contains spoilers through the August 4 episode of Burn Notice.

If Burn Notice were a more self-aware show, it might use the occasion of Michael, Sam and Fiona bringing down an anti-government militia as an excuse to consider the position, moral and otherwise, of their nifty little paramilitary operation.

I actually would have liked a bit of reflection if the episode wasn’t going to substantially move forward Michael’s investigation into his burning. That half of the story mostly involves finding the man who impersonated Michael, Sam handing him over to Fiona, who he describes, accurately and hilariously as “a tiny little woman in a Hyundai who’s going to protect you.” Instead, things heat up when Michael, who’s agreed to look into a child custody dispute involving another former veteran, finds out that the man has been behaving erratically because he’s a member of a what Michael describes as “a fringe militia with some very anti-government views.”

What’s funny is that, except for the fact that their operation is smaller, and that Michael, Sam, and Fiona’s views about government are more complex than just being anti-, the two organizations that square off against each other are relatively similar. They have a well-developed internal culture, access to a lot of weaponry, and they’re able to operate with essential impunity in the unincorporated areas in Dade County. And there are two potential analogues for Michael within it—the fellow veteran gone down the wrong path (who of course ultimately redeems himself through love of his son), and the militia’s leader. The episode doesn’t spend much time with the veteran, since disempowered, deluded men tend to be less interesting than messianic wildmen to television programmers. But it would be interesting to see what pressures lead him into the militia, to see how he and Michael went in different directions.

The miltia’s leader may be a heavy, sweaty slob with crazy views, but when he and Michael square off over the question of whether you’re validated by government service or not, given Michael’s experience since he’s been burned, the guy has a point. Michael questions the leader’s patriotism, telling him “Correct me if I’m wrong, you never served in the U.S. military. I didn’t think so. A real veteran…I didn’t run around in the woods acting like a soldier with my beer buddies.” It doesn’t shame the man like Michael expects it will. “You think having served somehow makes you a man?” he tells Michael. “Well it does not. You are not a man. A man questions what he is told. A man does not willingly accept the lies that are shoved down his throat by government. You are of the blind, the ignorant.” It’s a perfect summation of this entire season, of Michael’s single-minded pursuit of reinstatement at the CIA no matter how the agency’s treated him and his friends, and no matter how little-suited he might be for the organization he once so revered.

When the militia leader declares “I am the hand of god. I am his righteous soldier,” he sounds ridiculous. But that’s essentially the thing that Michael believes about himself. There is apparently no functional child services system or SWAT teams or government agencies of any sort in Miami who could possibly get productively involved when a child custody situation leads investigators to a militia—and in the logic of the show, why would you want bureaucrats involved when you could have Michael, Sam, and Fiona instead? Michael may not be convinced of his infallibility, but he does seem relatively sure of his inability to commit moral error, to pick the wrong side. The militia leaders on his bad side may have taken that sentiment to a whole different level, but it’s a question of degrees rather than of alternative worldviews.

This post contains spoilers through the July 28 episode of Burn Notice.

Confession: like in Bones, I find myself at a point in Burn Notice where I find it almost impossible to pay attention to the case of the week because I’m so vastly more interested in the larger narrative, and because frankly, the faux-louchness of Michael Westen’s Miami is starting to feel a little contrived. At the rate Michael and company burn through drug dealers, arms dealers, flesh peddlers, and assorted lower-level ne’er-do-wells, the larger Miami area’s going to end up with a desperate surplus of white suits and a seriously depressed underground economy. More than that, I worry about the way that the show’s handling the larger arc of the season.

It’s not so much that I worry about Michael being back to square three or four with the people who burned him and his tense relationship with the CIA. I just worry that it’s getting cliche rather than prickly and interesting. “It’s been personal since Max bled out in my arms, since he told me to say goodbye to his wife,” Michael declares at the beginning of the episode, when his cohorts point out how hard whoever framed him worked to make the setup plausible. It’s a dreadfully cliche line, and delivered without any particular sense of conviction, and of course it’s false, because the burning was always personal.

And it’s not just that we’re stuck in retreads. Last week, Pearce, Michael’s new CIA liaison, was talking about what a tough bitch she was. Now, she’s dissolving into tears at the thought of blowing an asset because “They do that, and my asset gets killed…The guy coaches soccer and he’s got a life…This happened to me before…he was more than an asset. We were getting married when it was over. The brass got impatient…I buried him a month before our wedding day.” All of which serves as a setup for Michael to shout at a couple of squeaky, patently fake CIA functionaries that he’s not flip because “I put my friend in the field,” by which he means he had Fiona scrape up Sam’s face with a zester so he’ll look like he got grazed with a bullet and let him be taken into the uncertain custody of a volatile Miami drug dealer. Which…whatever, we’re back in the haze of Miami corruption.

But I think the show needs to figure out what it thinks about the CIA. Is it a desirable, competent, admirable organization to belong to, or is it just the only thing Michael can visualize as a goal, so he, and we, are expected to overlook the expendable handlers and squeaky bureaucrats who are totally out of keeping with the styling and presentation of the show? Is being loyal to Michael worth it? As Fiona notes about Michael’s decision-making tonight “He knew it was dangerous. He knew it. And now Sam is in real trouble.” If the show wants us to believe that there are serious consequences for Michael’s singlemindedness, it might be worth it to start demonstrating that, rather than playing another round of Michael’s-loyal-to-Sam-and-Fiona-but-the-CIA-couldn’t-care-less-but-Michael-wants-to-rejoin-the-CIA. Michael doesn’t need a lecture from his mother on why not to play with fire. He needs to get burned, but in a whole different way. Burn Notice has succeeded by being fizzy and sunny and not exceptionally substantive. But it’s time for the show to actually start laying down some value judgements and using them to drive characterization.

This episode contains spoilers through the July 21 episode of Burn Notice.

The core action on last night’s episode of Burn Notice was an interesting look at what Michael might have been like when he was starting out at the CIA. But I have to admit, I was more intrigued by the things happening around the edges of the core case. Burn Notice is such a slick, hilarious presentation of certain kinds of masculinity that it doesn’t often present a lot of fodder for serious gender analysis (though the episode this season where Michael and his mother acted out an old abusive family situation was right in that wheelhouse). But last night, we got two very different looks at tough women.

In the wake of Max’s death, the woman investigating his death (and thus, inclined to believe Michael killed Max) is also Michael’s new CIA contact. Agent Pearce is sort of exhausting in her efforts to warn Michael that if he’s guilty, she will bring him down in the most painful way possible. “I’d offer my condolences, but I’m much better at catching bad guys than shedding tears,” she tells him when they first meet. And when Michael tells her, in all honesty, that he wants to catch Max’s killer as much as she does, she warns him “I have a pitbull at home and I learned how to run an investigation from her….she is a very, very determined bitch when she wants something.” It’s a mannered performance (by the character, not the actress), one that’s meant to demonstrate her conformance to stereotypes of very tough women, that she’s unfeeling, that she doesn’t feel wounded by sexual slurs, etc. I’m intrigued to see Michael spar with a woman at the agency, but I hope there’s more to Pearce than simply asserting that she’s a badass.

By contrast, there’s a lot of more traditional femininity everywhere in the episode tonight. Michael’s client hires him because a con man had his sister beaten into a coma. “She was so beautiful,” he sighs at her bedside, before getting all inconveniently noble on Michael and company. Jesse’s tweaking Michael about the extent to which Fiona’s taken over Michael’s apartment. “I knew Fee was going to shake things up in here…but you got a bread basket,” he editorializes. “Is that potpourri I’m smelling? You’re killing me, man.” It’s funny, especially since that frippery aside, Fiona is firmly on Jesse’s side in telling Michael that he’s got to be much more hard-nosed about the CIA’s investigation into Max’s death. And Michael’s mother is vexed about her soap operas.

These days, I find myself a lot more interested in Fiona than in Michael. As Michael told his client at the end of the night, “I don’t know how to be anything else.” And now that he’s had a setback in building his relationship with the CIA, I wonder if he might continue to be the same rigidly professional operative. Fiona, on the other hand, keeps choosing Michael, even as he tries to rebuild a life that doesn’t line up with hers. Her redefinition of her apartment may be silly and feminine. But unlike Michael, she knows enough about who she is to have a sense of how she wants to live.

A programming note: the Louie thread will be up later this afternoon. I had some scheduling complications last night.

I doubt that Michael’s actually over his obsession with the people who burned him, even after Max promises him, “We broke them into people. We ground them into dust. It’s over.” But it’s interesting this week to see Michael take his dilemma, his halfway home status with the CIA, and his ongoing attraction to working with Sam and Fiona, and to solve that problem, at least this time, by luring Max into working with him. When Michael gets asked to look into the antics of a singularly nasty hacker, Michael calls on Max to help him get into her phone lines. “If I get busted using NSA resources to help a burned spy with an unproven mission, I’ll get shipped off to Siberia,” Max complains. “And my wife hates the snow.” But he does it anyway — and pays a high and unexpected price.

Michael isn’t a typical charismatic leader — he can be tense, obsessive, and focused on his own problems to the exclusion of other people’s desires. But his being burned, and the needs that resulted out of that, created circumstances in which other people could pursue their own goals and interests. It’s a different kind of leadership. If that function ever comes to an end, it remains to be seen if Sam and Fiona can stay in Michael’s life in the same way, or if Jesse or someone else will supplant Michael in their lives and in Miami. But now, with Max dead and Michael framed, it looks like we’re back to the same old game, which is too bad. Burn Notice needs to make a transition, and if they’re going to back away from that, it’s unfortunate.

Beyond those larger questions, one thing I think is a bit odd about this episode is the stock evil hackeress villain. The whole hackers are “all about using their brains to dominate and control” thing strikes me as partially true. And maybe that resonates with folks who are freaked out by the antics of Anonymous, or who are annoyed by the Sony shutdown but otherwise don’t know much about hacker culture, or whatever. There are, of course, hackers who do really bad, malevolent things. But treating them as criminals who happen to have a lot of technological skills, missing the clever, playful sides of hacking strikes me as a weirdly old-school characterization. As does portraying them as folks who do IRL things like kidnapping petty criminals with aspirations, which is a really easy way to get yourself traced and treated to the full wrath of law enforcement. In a world with things like the Sony hack or Adrian Lamo’s role in Wikileaks, this storyline feels like it’s an inverse of over-the-top action storylines: it’s actually thinking too small.

This post contains spoilers through last night’s episode of Burn Notice.

Increasingly, it feels like this season of Burn Notice is a comment on the whole series’ unsustainability. Tonight, Michael’s inveterate freelancing leads him to accidentally blow the cover of an FBI agent working a long-running operation, something that illustrates exactly why, if he were actually burned, he’d never be allowed to carry on as he’s been carrying on, the mayhem he causes in Miami notwithstanding. Similarly, tonight’s episode raised the prospect that Michael’s inability to let go of the people who put said burn notice out on him is an addiction, something he’s unable to shake and that the show needs to find a way around if it’s going to transition into a long-running program that isn’t centered around a single problem.

I think the second meta element is a bit less interesting, and at least in that last episode, was a bit more heavy-handed. Fiona’s buying Michael a shredder and then urging him to trash the files of his investigation didn’t actually spur him to action. Instead, it provides a physical reminder of Michael’s obsession smack in the middle of his and Fiona’s newly-shared loft that seems likely to be an irritant to both of them all season. And I’m curious as to whether that division will break them up, particularly with Michael’s mother lurking around the sidelines saying things about their decision to live together like, “It’s moving fast. At this rate, they should be married by 60.” That tension between wanting to behave like a normal person and being drawn to live in ways that are sort of inherently deviant is an interesting one, but I’m curious to see how it’ll shake out, since Michael’s not a particularly dark character. His impulses are almost painfully rectitudinous in end goals, they’re just abnormal when he considers what tactics are most likely to succeed.

The more interesting plotline centered on the acknowledgement that in the name of reeling in bad guys, undercover government agents often have to do pretty terrible things. The best-case scenario for Michael’s client, the frozen yogurt store proprietor stuck with her husband’s gambling debts, is that her store got smashed up a couple of times and then was safe. The worst-case scenario for her was a best-case one for the government: an undercover agent kept smashing in her display cases, and then she went into witness protection. Either way, that’s a pretty miserable outcome, and a high level of disruption, if not of personal damage. Burn Notice has already suggested that Michael might find government service boring. Now, it appears the show’s suggesting that he might find some of the things it requires of him repellent. I think the show absolutely had to try putting Michael back in government service as a way to move the plot forward. But if it turns out that he doesn’t want to work for the government any more, I have no idea what he, and his network, are going to do next.

This post contains spoilers through the second episode of the fifth season of Burn Notice.

Early in this episode, Fiona explains to a real estate agent who’s showing her and Michael an apartment that “That man doesn’t really focus unless an international conspiracy is threatening to ruin his life.” And therein lies the problem with the fifth season of Burn Notice. Michael Westen qua Michael Westen isn’t actually that interesting. He eats a lot of yogurt. He doesn’t know what Frogger is. He interprets his entire life through the lens of operational doctrine, which when it’s applied to something like dirt bike racing with Fiona, feels more than a little pretentious. What’s intriguing about him is the collection of people who have become loyal to him over the years, and his zeal to get back to the CIA. Now that he’s reinstated, the show needs a new conflict to animate Michael, to make him more than a man in a sharp suit and a blank expression.

It appears that the central conflict is going to be about whether government work is exciting enough to engage Michael’s interest — and whether he can do more good work inside the CIA or outside of it. This week, that question comes in the form of Michael’s official assignment — babysitting a physicist with a lot of access to secrets and an infinite capacity for alcohol and women — and the help someone outside the government is asking him for — saving 20 girls who are being trafficked in from Asia by a Yakuza gangster. That’s a little too on-the-nose for this particular choice to seem like a real one. If the CIA’s going to keep him doing make-work, then obviously Michael will be back to running his own outlaw operation by the end of the season, and there’s no dramatic tension. More to the point, it’s not a critique of the CIA and of the government more generally that any reasonably intelligent viewer can take seriously, especially not with constant promos for Covert Affairs airing in commercial breaks.

The more interesting part of last night’s storyline involves the ongoing problem that Sam, Fiona, and most importantly, Michael’s mother, have grown to like working as part of Michael’s unofficial agency. And when Michael brings in his mother to take care of an injured gangster, a role that requires her to play a coerced nurse, they end up playacting the trauma of her violent marriage — and Michael’s violent childhood. Watching him take on the role of his father in abusing his mother is genuinely uncomfortable*. You know he doesn’t mean to hurt her, but the episode’s very clear that what’s happening between them isn’t meaningless pretend, either. The moment when she tells him “It’s not like I haven’t been hit before” is a reminder of both her power and her weakness. She couldn’t stop Michael’s father from abusing him when he was a child, but she can make the choice to be hit now if she thinks it’s necessary. “You can play your father in there, but not out here,” she tells Michael. And that’s the exciting and scary thing about what would happen if Michael chose to walk away from the CIA: he’d have to accept Sam, Fiona, and his mother as full partners, people who are no longer engaged in the temporary project of rescinding his burn notice, but in the more permanent enterprise of working together to make up for the limitations of government. That would require a significant shift in the balance of power, and that’s where interesting stories happen.

*I’m watching Luther right now, and so thinking a lot about intimacy and violence. Longer post to come next week.

A quick programming note: since we’re having recaps of Louie and Burn Notice starting this week, the Louie open thread will go up around 11, and theRed Mars book club will go up later this afternoon. This episode contains spoilers through the first episode of the fifth season of Burn Notice.

I have to admit I’ve watched Burn Notice, mostly in marathons and, to a certain extent, out of order, but I thought last night’s episode did a nice job of moving the series forward on the momentum of issues that have been building up over the last four seasons. Namely, that while Michael being burned is bad for him, it’s actually been a good thing for Sam and Fiona, putting him in a situation where he has to reconnect with them and rely on them. What may have started out as an inconvenience has become meaningful to them. The central problem of the season, it seems, is going to be what extent Michael can balance his renewed relationship with the CIA with the surrogate agency he’s built in the CIA’s absence from his life—and to what extent he wants to.

That tension’s evident from the moment of his reunion with Fiona after a CIA mission, when she throws him to the floor in a combination of a fit of passion and well-honed combat instincts. Over pillow talk, she complains “It doesn’t seem fair that he should get to have all the fun.” But when Michael tells her, “It had to be someone, Fee. The agency wasn’t just going to let me go out there alone,” he’s kind of missing the point. It’s not that Fiona cares that Michael is palling around with CIA agents. It’s that those missions trade off with his work with her.

Even when Michael negotiates to have Sam and Fiona as his team in South America, it’s not enough for them simply to be there. “Operational security? What happened to the way we do things?” Fiona asks Michael at one point, only to have him tell her, “It’s their show, Fee.” But Sam’s there, reminding him, “It’s our show too, brother” — that the partnership Michael built with Fiona and Sam was a good thing independent of whether it achieved Michael’s goal of getting revenge on the people who burned him and getting himself reinstated.

There’s the usual complement of Michael sniping at an agent who “bombed the embassy in Albania, you lost the glasses and bleached your hair” and mixing sensible aphorisms about intelligence-gathering with advice about how to use a fan to distract a bunch of gunmen. And I liked the way they handled an interrogation that should have turned rough, having Michael roll up his sleeves as he tells us “”the biggest obstacle you can face in an interrogation is yourself…the stronger your feelings are, the hotter your hate burns, the more important it is to put it aside,” even as he picks up a chair such that it looks like he might be able to beat a suspect, keeping what happens a surprise until he puts the chair down, sits on it, and tells the guy he’s not going to hurt him. Having fictional CIA agents denounce torture doesn’t stop real ones from doing it. But there’s something refreshing about a clearheaded affirmation that it’s not just wrong but ineffective.