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." -BrennenActually, 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?
No comments:
Post a Comment