Burn Notice: Good Intentions, Great Episode

Both Michael and Fiona get in over their heads in this intricate and tightly-ratcheted penultimate episode of the season. The stakes are a little higher, the action is a little more frantic, and the explosions are a little bit bigger. It’s just about a perfect hour of television, effortlessly fun and entertaining, with the production values of a big-budget feature and rock solid performances.

Michael meets in an isolated location with Gilroy but brings Sam along for a little sniper backup. Unfortunately, Sam can’t be much help when Michael gets in Gilroy’s car and goes for a jaunt with him. I guess sometimes you have no choice but to go cruising with a psychopath. They go to a nice friendly spot: a white supremacist militia training compound/weapons cache. Gilroy wants Michael to buy a .50 caliber machine gun from them and gives him a metal case full of money. The case comes in handy when the baddies try to jump Michael and take his money. After some close-quartered combat goodness, Michael makes his getaway and learns that Gilroy set Michael up to be a distraction while he stole the actual gun. Jackass. The goons unload on them as they speed away, but fortunately Gilroy’s vehicle of choice is armor plated. I gotta get me one of those.

Michael returns to his loft but before he can even enjoy a nice yogurt, Sam gets on his back for getting in the car with Gilroy and Fiona follows suit because Michael didn’t return her recent calls (he was a little busy). Because Fiona is scarier, Michael pays a bit more attention to her. She wanted Michael to aid her in a job involving a “harmless weasel” named Coleman (played by Jonathan LaPaglia, younger brother to Anthony and the former star of an awesome time traveling show called Seven Days). He agrees to pay Fiona well, but wants her to commit to the job before he tells her what it is. Yeah, call me crazy, but that seems awfully sketchy.

Coleman gives her an envelope containing a cool $10,000 and takes her to meet his boss, Gabriel. Having bugged her phone prior to the meeting, Sam listens to all of this with apprehension. He now has two friends getting involved in ways they shouldn’t with psychopaths they don’t know enough about. “I gotta get some new friends,” he laments to himself.

Gabriel is a very serious fellow that immediately starts putting Fiona through tests to see if she is on the level. In tests like these, you either pass or get dead. The most enjoyable of these tests involves watching Fiona strip a Beretta and put it back together in under a minute while inflicting pain on a goon trying to stop her. She passes with flying colors, but she’s still in over her head. On more than one occasion, Sam and Michael have to scramble to save her life, and Gabriel has dug into her past more than she would have liked. He knows all about her IRA days and strikes a nerve when he brings up her murdered sister. Gabrielle Anwar is very good in these scene, which is especially powerful because we almost never see anyone have an edge over Fiona.

We eventually learn that Gabriel is after a computer chip company called Apex that moved into his town in Argentina and dumped toxic waste into the water that killed Gabriel’s young daughter. He kidnapped one of their lead scientists and is holding him for ransom…holding him with no intention of ever returning him, even though the scientist also has a young daughter. He also plans to kidnap Apex’s lawyer/negotiator head honcho. Fiona has to earn Gabriel’s trust so that she can stop him.

Michael, meanwhile, still has his hands full with Gilroy. He knows the plane with the mysterious prisoner is soon coming from Argentina, but he has to figure out how Gilroy fits in, what he plans to do with the .50 caliber, and how to stop him. There’s a fairly dramatic twist involving Gilroy at the very end of the episode that comes after a series of awesome infernos and explosions. Sharon Gless is only in a couple of scenes, but she certainly makes her presence welcome by providing solid comic relief. The upcoming finale promises to be a wildly exciting end to a near-perfect season.

Season 3, Episode 15: Good Intentions (Originally aired February 25, 2010)

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Thursdays at 10/9c on USA

Photographs courtesy of NBC Universal and IMDbPro.