Burn Notice: The Rambo Edition

This week, Burn Notice opens on the most orgiastic, sensational image in the show’s history: Fiona, scantily clad, drenched in sweat, kicking and punching the sweet living bejesus out of a set of focus mitts that Michael is holding. She’s hitting them so hard that she almost knocks Michael over with every blow. That is until she actually does knock Michael over with a spinning backhand to the face. Uh, gee, that was an accident, right Fiona? Michael wonders the same thing, though Fiona insists that she is indeed being supportive of Michael’s commitment to get back into the spy game.

This is the Fiona I like to…no, love to see. Not the crying Fiona from last week, but the angry, smirking, incredibly violent beauty who kicks the crap out of anybody and everybody she feels like. The only other woman on recent tv I can think of who compares to Gabrielle Anwar in the brutal beauty department is Emily Deschanel, who used to unleash all kinds of freakin’ awesome martial arts fury on Bones before the writers started to mellow her out (unfortunately). There’s something about a beautiful woman who could put Arnold Schwarzenegger in a wheelchair. But I digress.

Michael hears a noise outside his loft and goes out to investigate. He finds a gift basket filled with gourmet yogurt and a note telling him to be at a frozen yogurt shop the next morning. Fiona speculates that it’s from Michael’s agency friends, and that he is getting back in. You know she’s thrilled about it.

Michael obliges and shows up, though he harkens it to a blind date. And his date is…Tom Strickler, who describes himself not as an agent to the stars but an agent to the spies. He offers to throw Michael paying gigs that Michael would be well-suited to, all for a ten percent commission. Michael is reluctant. If he’s not going to be working for the government, he’d just as soon be his own boss. Strickler tells Michael that an old Ukrainian associate of Michael’s is heading for Miami. He says that he has to do more research on who it is, but already you can see Michael’s mind working, trying to piece through his checkered, globetrotting super-spy past and figure out who is coming after him. He knew this could happen when he willingly gave up the protection that the people who burned him were giving him.

So Michael goes back to the only people he can trust, namely Sam and Fiona. He asks Sam to check out Strickler, while Fiona offers that she knows a guy who might know if a Ukrainian was coming to town. So Michael goes on another blind date of sorts, this time with Fiona’s friend. This guy’s name is Beck, a “guy with connections.” The problem is, Beck is an asshole who gives Michael the cold shoulder. Michael tells Beck that a shipment Beck was expecting a while back was diverted and that he could make sure that kind of thing wouldn’t happen anymore. But Beck isn’t interested in Michael’s I-do-for-you, you-do-for-me proposition. Beck starts threatening Michael to leave him alone.

But Beck’s threats pale compared to an extraction team of big, hulking, angry Ukrainians. Because that’s what tears through the doors of the coffee shop Michael and Beck are inhabiting at that very moment. They set off flash-bang grenades and make a huge ruckus. Michael has just enough time to snap a photo of the head honcho with his phone and hide his phone for Fiona to find before he and Beck are grabbed and thrown in the back of a van.

They only grabbed Beck because he was with Michael at the time. Beck recognizes that, and starts pleading with the armed baddies to let him go. They figure Beck is expendable and are about to shoot him when Michael puts on a show and starts beating up Beck, speaking in Ukrainian that Beck is trying to buy his freedom by selling Michael out. “The same things that get you killed will extend your life” in a hostage situation, Michael says. He puts on another show soon after and succeeds in throwing Beck and himself out of the speeding van and onto the road. They scramble to their feet and dash into the thick swampy woods of the Everglades that surround them. Michael has to take Beck and venture deeper and deeper into the brush to evade their pursuers and turn the tables on him. He also has to contend with Beck, who fights Michael at every turn and questions Michael’s infinite wisdom and strategy. Personally, I would have just punched Beck in the nose and left him for dead, but I’m not Michael Westen.

Fiona finds Michael’s phone and she and Sam take it to Strickler, who recognizes the picture. Strickler was very helpful and cooperative. That may have been a result of Fiona holding an automatic shotgun at his head. Strickler tells them that the guy’s name is Vlad, and he works for a dude named Chechik. Sam recognizes Chechik and tells Fiona that Chechik definitely wants Michael’s head on a lance because Michael blew up a whole bunch of Chechik’s property a dozen years ago.

Sam and Fiona try to hide all this from Madeline, but Madeline knows something is going on and demands that they tell her the truth. “Did I fall apart the last time something like this was happening?” she asks rhetorically. She also rubs salt in the wound that Sam blew up her house (even though he did it to save her life, she still holds it against him). And in her best scene this season, she even interrogates the pilot who brought Chechik and Vlad into the country when Sam and Fiona can’t get anything out of him. She takes a decidedly different approach to interrogation, and it works. It’s a really funny, really fresh scene.

So now Sam and Fiona know that Michael is out in the Everglades and they go after him. But until they find him, he is on his own against a small army of deadly thugs. The rest of the episode thus becomes Rambo lite, as Michael hides in the jungle and uses his genius, tactical mind to lay all kinds of traps for his enemies and use the environment to overpower and defeat the superior numbers. That’s not a criticism. For an episode of television, there’s an amazing amount of walloping action and production values. It’s also interesting to see Michael fight a nemesis from his spy past, because it gives us insight into what his life was like before we met him.

I wasn’t a huge fan of the first three episodes of this season, but these last three have definitely delivered the goods.

Season 3, Episode 6:  The Hunter (originally aired July 16, 2009)

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Thursdays at 10/9c on USA

Photographs courtesy of Glenn Watson, NBC Universal, and USA