When You’re A Spy: Brother in Arms
Burn Notice is wasting no time this season as Burke, who seemed to be the main antagonist for the season, is dispatched, although he may not have been that bad of a guy after all.
After capturing crime kingpin Rafael Serrano last week, Burke dispatches Michael to Serrano’s house to threaten his daughter and get Serrano to reveal the location of one of Burke’s comrades, Sonya, who is being held in a Russian prison in Cuba. Serrano gives up the location but says that his family won’t be safe now, to which Burke says they will be if he’s dead, and leaves a gun with one bullet. Burke asks Michael to contact Sam and Jesse and the gang reunites in Cuba.
A frontal assault on the prison, which is disguised as an old refrigerator repair shop, is out of the question, so Michael comes up with a plan to reveal himself to the Russians and convince them they have to move Sonya because there is a CIA team coming to raid them. To sell it, Michael contacts Fi, who reluctantly agrees to kidnap a Russian spy in Miami named Ivan and set him up as the traitor. She inexplicably brings Maddie along, who almost blows the whole thing as you would expect.
Back in Cuba, Michael meets with the head of the prison, Vladimir, and plays his typical mind games while Jesse and Sam fake an abandoned CIA safe house and then capture another Russian, this time one of Vladimir’s men, to make him seem like a traitor working with the other traitor, Ivan. It’s like kidnapping Inception. Vladimir finally buys Michael’s story, although he was waterboarded in the meantime, and they are set to leave when Vladimir gets a call from Moscow that a Russian sub is diverting to Cuba to pick them up with an armed commando team. In order to prevent this, Burke goes into the prison posing as Michael’s CIA source and sacrifices himself with a laptop rigged with explosives that blows a hole in the wall that Michael can escape through with Sonya, whom Burke tells him is “the future of everything”. The gang barely escapes after a shootout with the guards and makes it to the marina to escape by boat, but Sonya wakes up, jumps Jesse and escapes. So now the hunt is on to first find Sonya and then figure out who the hell she is.
Overall, another solid episode of Burn Notice. It was kind of the standard, “Michael tricks people to do things” episode but the twist of Burke killing himself, and him giving a speech about not leaving anyone behind, were unexpected. Sonya is the immediate threat right now but it’s not clear where we’re going after the gang catches up with her, we’ll have to wait 2 weeks to find out the answer since Burn Notice is off for July 4th. I really hope something more interesting happens in Miami soon, as the pairing of Fi and Maddie is getting kind of old pretty fast and their adventures with Ivan turned pretty sappy by the end. I’m really enjoying the somewhat darker and much more episodic nature of this final season of Burn Notice.
- Who Am I?: Just plain Michael again this week, although he does bust out his Russian
- Spy Tip of the Week: Hiding a listening device in a bandage, which you need to sell with a wound that no one will want to check.
- Sam Axeism of the Week: “All I see is a door leading to a very long stay in prison or a window with a very long fall to the cement”