I stopped watching Burn Notice when it was airing during the fall season against other primetime series such as Grey’s Anatomy, CSI, and Bones. Although I thought BN was terrific summer viewing, it didn’t really stack up to the other series, all of which I watch regularly. But since I actually do like the show, I continued to TiVo it, and am now catching up from where I left off, which is episode 2×10, called “Do No Harm”.
Odd Job of the Week: Michael recognizes that a man is about to commit suicide, so he pulls him out of the way of an oncoming bus just in time. It turns out the man, named Kenny, desperately needs money to get his sick son Jack into an experimental program in Arizona. Kenny was scammed out of $250,000 by people who approached him at a clinic with a “miracle drug”, and now he has no money left for anymore treatments for Jack. He thought that if he died in what looked like a traffic accident, Jack would at least get his life insurance money.
Michael, against Sam’s advice, decides to help Kenny recover the money. This involves Fiona and Mike posing as rival scammers encroaching on the other scammers’ territory. They kidnap Todd and Philip, a couple of low-level operators, who in turn reveal the name of the organization’s ringleader: Rachel. Mike and Fiona then go to work on nabbing Rachel, and of course succeed in recovering Kenny’s money (and then some) and putting Rachel behind bars.
Burn Notice Progress: In episode 2×09, someone rigged Michael’s front door to explode. He barely escaped, and was on the warpath this entire episode, convinced that Carla was the one behind the bomb. But she flat-out denies responsibility, meaning that there’s a third party in play that neither one of them knows about. Now Michael has even more work to do if he’s going to find out who burned him.
Character development: Sam and Michael got into a fistfight! This is the first time they’ve seriously been at each other’s throats, and I have to say that I agreed with Sam here. Michael should not be so eager to deal with Carla any more than he has to. Also, Fiona and Campbell broke up, which I think is paving the way for her to get back with Michael, which, meh…. Oh, and Michael used to blow up/destroy all his toys as a kid!
My Reaction: As much as I liked the OJotW, I thought it was rather strange that Michael would take it on with so much else to worry about. But I guess helping people like that is some kind of therapy for him. It must ease his conscience or something.
I have to say that the main burn notice arc is starting to get a bit too complicated for my tastes. Now there’s another entity involved, which means that there are many more layers involved than Michael initially suspected. This is starting to feel like Prison Break or The X-Files or something, where as soon as the characters get close to the answer, they find out that the person they thought was in charge was actually just taking orders. Sigh.