Burn Notice - Season Six

Up until now, I’ve been keeping my Burn Notice posts vague and spoiler-free – just in case, you know, anyone’s actually worried about spoilers for something that ended a decade ago, but you never can tell. It becomes close to impossible, though, to talk about character arcs in season six without some of the key plot points, so herein lie a few major spoilers.

Season five was basically one long, desperate scrabble to try and stop any of the Burn Notice team from going to jail. When they failed and the worst finally happened, it hit the reset button somewhat and in a weird way things improved at the start of this season (once the immediate fall-out and recriminations had been dealt with anyway). The three not in jail could throw away the shovels and start climbing back out of the hole they’d all dug, with horse-trading and deals and leverage. Stuff they’re good at.

But after four seasons of the gang getting away with (occasionally literal) bloody murder, the writers decided the later series were going to be the seasons of Consequences. And obviously jail isn’t the worst thing that can happen with these people, so their bad habit of borrowing untrained civilians finally bites them on the arse, and suddenly Michael doesn’t have a brother any more.

Michael hasn’t been exactly stable through most of the last season and a half. He’s been plunging from one crisis to another with being framed and blackmailed, wracked by guilt over having someone in jail, and now he spends a chunk of this season looking for the sniper who killed his brother so he can shoot them in the head. This causes some team dissent, Fiona being fine with shooting killers in the head and Sam and Jesse not so much. Their plan is more to gather evidence and then hand the killer to the cops, and there’s a fair bit of Michael managing going on all round.

Aaaaand the Michael managing works to a point. Until it doesn’t. And since in the heat of the moment this team will stick together like glue, suddenly everyone’s an accomplice after the fact, and abetting a felon, and a whole list of things that’s getting longer by the hour, because everyone’s back with the shovels and the digging. Michael’s someone who will go to just about any lengths to get his friends out of the holes they’re in – but he doesn’t self-moderate from the other end either, and he won’t stop to think about maybe not putting them in a hole in the first place next time. It’s a combination that leads to a whole lot of digging happening very quickly.

Fiona’s all, ‘Whatever.’ She’s spent more than half her life as a criminal on the run. Her being in the US at all is illegal. She can pick up and move to another country no problem; as long as Michael’s going too, that’s all that matters to her.

Jesse isn’t thrilled, but he’s practical, and not one for wringing his hands over milk that’s already spilled. He doesn’t have real ties outside the team anyway – he never knew his dad, his mother’s dead, and if he had any other family, Riley would have used them against him, so he obviously doesn’t. The choice between many years in jail and a new identity somewhere else is pretty straightforward for him.

Sam is SERIOUSLY pissed off. And not just about the shooting people in the head part, because Sam definitely has morals about that, but they’re very situation-specific. Sam’s committed a couple of hundred felonies over the last several years and been an accomplice to even more, but it’s generally been as part of a plan, and he’s agreed to everything in advance. Suddenly having this dropped on him like an exceptionally hot brick with no plan for getting out or not getting caught, and with zero consultation beforehand, that’s different. Michael and Sam have had each other’s backs for close to twenty years, and Sam’s not likely to abandon Michael now, but he’s damn well going to resent the choices he's being forced into.
As I said in my season four post, Sam very much likes having a normal civilian life he can stroll back into any time he isn’t playing Michael games, and he’s seeing all that blown apart. And it wasn’t the new guy Jesse that did it, which was his concern back in season four, and it wasn’t his own screw up, which has always been a risk – it was Michael, making a unilateral choice and knowing the whole time it wouldn’t just be on him.

Michael’s mother has quite the emotional roller coaster this season. She’s upset at the start about having one of her adopted ducklings in prison, and then Nate gets killed and she’s (understandably) absolutely fucking furious at Michael and co.
She blames Michael, and she blames herself too, but mostly for the wrong reasons. She says it was her job to protect Nate from Michael and she failed, but she did tell Michael multiple times to stop involving Nate in his shit; it just had no effect, because Michael doesn’t listen.
Michael sometimes listens to Sam, though not as often as he should. He doesn’t listen to Fiona much. (And I’m the first person to say you shouldn’t always listen to Fiona, but it’s pretty easy to tell when you should. Is Fiona telling you to shoot someone? That’s debatable. But when Fiona’s telling you NOT to do something, it’s probably really good advice to follow.) There was no way Michael was ever going to take advice from his mother. What Maddy really needed to do was to lead by example. As long as she was allowing herself to be borrowed and getting actively involved in Michael’s dodgy life, she could hardly be surprised when Nate did the same.
Later in the season, when the whole gang are wanted criminals, Maddy’s sucked right back in again, of course, because having lost one son, she’s not inclined to lose the other. At that point, she simply has no good choices.

At the very end of this season, Michael makes another unilateral decision and cuts a deal. One that lets him keep the promise he made to Sam, but breaks the promise he made to Fiona. Then it’s Fiona’s turn to be seriously pissed off, because she thinks it’s actually more about Michael getting what he wanted, and there’s a good chance she’s not wrong. It’s always been a problem with Michael and Fiona’s relationship, that they want different things, and their relationship really only works as long as that choice never comes up. Because whenever it does, Michael chooses his way.


Other musings:
I wasn't generally a fan of the prison arc. This series is made by the group dynamics, and separating one of them for a prolonged period unbalances everything.

I was sorry to see Pearce go, she worked really well. She was efficient and smart, and she found a good balance between being professional/political and wrangling Michael, who got dumped on her after he’d spent four years doing exactly what he pleased with no oversight at all, and was no longer quite the company man he used to be. And also wrangling his hangers-on when everyone made it clear they weren’t optional. Imagine discovering your career might depend on your ability to deal with Fiona…
But having said that, it’s a very good thing for Pearce that she got away from the Gang of Four before things headed downhill again, because they do have a way of sucking other people into their worst places.

Schmidt was deeply annoying, but frankly everything about that mini-arc was made worthwhile when he nailed Michael down at the end of Odd Man Out. “You can say all that with a straight face. Wow. You're good. Is that the same load of crap that you shovel down your team's throat?” Burn.

Always good to see Sonja Sohn again, she’s awesome, even if I didn’t like where they took her character.

Is it me or is the make-up continuity in this show getting worse? There seem to be more occasions now when people have bruises one day that are gone the next. It’s particularly noticeable with Jesse after Riley has him beaten up – the next morning, all gone. And if Sam’s not wearing a shirt, someone needs to remember that he’s got a tattoo, because it only seems to be there when the script specifically mentions it.
I can’t imagine it’s budget – they seem to have enough money to pay for bigger explosions than in the early seasons. Did they fire the continuity person to pay for the bigger explosions? Or more likely it was all about the shooting schedule, and someone saying sorry, we don’t have an extra couple of hours in the morning for make-up to draw on the actors, and nobody will notice, right?

Overall, season six was very up and down. It moved fast, went through three or four different mini-arcs over the course of 18 episodes, and it had some eps that went off into ludicrous territory again (yes, I’m looking at you, Panama, among others). But I’m still very much there to see where the characters are going, and where the cracks start to show when they get pushed.

And now there’s only season seven left, which appears not to be popular with the two people who’ve talked about it. I guess I’ll find out…