TV Review: Burn Notice - Season 2 Recap

Posted by Mister Hand (misterhand@filmschoolrejects.com) on September 19, 2008

Warning: If you have not seen all of Burn Notice season 2, there are spoilers in the article below. You have been warned.

The second season of Burn Notice is over, and it went out with a bang. Literally. Michael Westen, our hero ex-spy, gets his apartment blown sky high by the shadowy government agency that has been using him to run its nefarious errands. So I guess you would call this your prototypical “explosive season finale!”

Boy, do I hate “explosive season finales.”

It’s a pretty good rule of thumb that if the last four or five seconds of your season finale involves something “getting blowed up real good,” you’ve probably run out of ideas. Nonetheless, while the second season of Burn Notice was not quite as good as the first, this show still has enough going on to make it an easy recommendation for audiences of all stripes–despite the rather unimaginative finale.

In the first season, we met Michael Westen (Jeffrey Donovan), a former spy who’s been blacklisted by unknown forces within the U.S. government. Left to fend for himself in Miami with no money, no identity, and no prospects, he takes on odd jobs utilizing his skills as a master spy and expert tactician. These jobs usually involve getting someone out of a tight jam, which typically leads to…

1) beating up thugs,
2) creating booby traps, and
3) fashioning James Bond-type devices out of household appliances.

Michael is aided by a pair of old friends, Sam and Fiona. Sam (Bruce Campbell) is a former Navy Seal living the life of a freeloading beachcomber (but he’s still handy with a sniper rifle). And Fiona (played by the gorgeous Gabrielle Anwar) is a former IRA operative who has easy access to deadly weapons and loves to use them. Specifically, she loves to use them to shoot people. But she also likes to beat people with them when she runs out of bullets, or when she just wants to hear somebody’s bones crack. (And if I haven’t just described every red-blooded American male’s dream woman, then there’s something seriously wrong with this country in the new millennium.)

At the start of season two, the agency that got Michael “burned” has him running its errands, threatening his friends and family if he does not comply. By mid-season, Michael surmised that his handler, Carla (Tricia Helfer) was putting together an assassination plot. Having unwittingly helped Carla import a Dragonov rifle into the city, and having forged a keycard for a secured office building overlooking Miami Bay, Michael went about trying to subvert the scheme. But Carla got wise to his maneuvers. By the end of the final episode, it would seem that Carla was attempting to burn her bridges–blowing up the would-be sniper, and planting a bomb in Michael’s apartment. We know that Michael escaped serious injury, however, because he got tipped off to the bomb before the explosion and jumped away. And because he’s the star of the show. And the star of the show doesn’t get blown up. At least, not fatally.

This brings up a whole slew of problems for me. First of all, for the last two or three episodes, we’ve been watching Michael follow this thread of the Dragonov rifle, trying to figure out how and why Carla was looking to deploy it. Now we’re meant to assume that whatever Carla’s plan was, she’s merely abandoned it? And that she’s furthermore decided to go all General Sherman on Michael’s ass–and on the ass of anyone else who might have been involved in the now aborted plot?

(And when I say someone went “General Sherman” on some aforementioned ass, I’m talking about fire and stuff getting blowed up real good and all that. If the reference isn’t as clear as it needs to be, do a Google search on General Sherman, and that should pretty much clear things up. If you want to see a good example of someone going all old-school General Sherman on somebody’s ass, just check out how thoroughly General Sherman went Sherman on Atlanta’s ass towards the end of the Civil War. An end to the Civil War that might not have been possible had General Sherman not totally Shermanized Atlanta. And I say that with all apologies to Atlanta, a town I happen to like an awful lot.)

Please excuse my overused parentheticals.

In the end, I suppose, it really doesn’t matter. Burn Notice is an odd duck of a show. In many ways, it is extremely conventional, and in others it is something that seems honestly fresh and new. For instance: we learn early on that Michael and Fiona have had a past love affair. In most shows, you would expect this type of set up to lead to center stage sexual tension as the episodes progress. But it really doesn’t. And when it does, you get the feeling that these two are better off not trying to hook up. You really do get the feeling that they live in a very dangerous world, and that the slightest distraction could be fatal.

It does not behoove you to watch Burn Notice for the plots. They’re pretty much standard spycraft stuff. You really do watch it for the characters. But I will say that it is a step up from Monk, another successful USA Network show. While Monk, as played by Tony Shaloub, is nothing short of an awesome character (an obsessive compulsive private detective? How could it go wrong?), the plots are straight out of Murder, She Wrote, and the show, in my opinion, is really hard to take. Burn Notice is not that show. Even in this slightly subpar second season, it is superior to Monk.

New Burn Notice episodes will air sometime in the winter. This is a show with compelling characters who are believably intelligent and competent. Even when the plots feel contrived (and that was more often than not in this latest season), Burn Notice is still an awful lot of fun.

Want to learn how to make a functional GPS tracker out of a couple of cheap cell phones? Watch Burn Notice. I swear, the way Michael put it together, I think it would totally work.

For more coverage of your favorite shows, check out the Control Freaks Archive.

Did you catch Burn Notice Season 2? If so, feel free to share your thoughts in the comment area below.

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