Burn Notice Season Five
Feb. 2nd, 2023 09:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tiggymalvern
AKA the season where it’s very, very obvious that the Michael Westen train is only going bad places for everyone on board. That doesn’t make a massive difference to Fiona, in some ways, because her entire life is a series of dangling threads, any one of which could be tugged on to unravel all the rest on any given day. Sam and Jesse – this would have been their cue to get off before the train crashes. Probably right around the time they were all deciding to destroy evidence in the murder of a CIA dude.
And I absolutely get why Sam can’t – that’s a commitment made too many years ago and reinforced too many times. But Jesse? He’s the late-comer to this party; he should have distanced himself before everyone picked up a shovel and dug deeper.
At this point, Jesse seems to be sticking around because he’s just too nice a guy for his own good. The season four plotline where it was suggested that Jesse was in love with Fiona appears to have been abandoned – it never came up again this season, which I think is a good thing, because I wasn’t seeing it. The chemistry wasn’t there. Though maybe that was originally intended to be part of his motivation for staying.
Michael’s mother – yikes.
In season four, the gang started borrowing Maddy now and then when they wanted a harmless old lady to provide a distraction by acting helpless, or playing a Karen, or ‘accidentally’ tripping a security alarm while they watched what happened next. The problem with that is that the Burn Notice team creep is very real – once they’ve done something a couple of times it becomes normal, and a basis to go a teensy bit further. And Maddy wants to help, and she has probably abit lot too much faith in Michael and his little pack of enablers, all of whom have a very strange concept of acceptable risk.
It’s an atrocious combination. Maddy’s role in the series has been completely transformed from where she started out, and the Doylist response to that is, ‘Yay! Sharon Gless gets to be awesome! Good for her!’ And the Watsonian response is, ‘OMG, WTF, you people have to STOP THIS RIGHT NOW.’
The Gang of Four needed to sit down one quiet afternoon when they weren’t juggling six different things on the fly and draw up some hard rules as to what they would and would not ask Maddy to do (mostly that should be NOT). And then they needed a mutual enforcement pact to actively police one another on it, because none of these people have a good record with boundaries. Anyone who thinks, ‘I could ask Maddy to help here,’ should have to run it by at least two of the others and get whatever passes for a sanity check among them. And Michael should always be a person they check with first because, you know, she’s his MOTHER.
Having said all of that, there’s one episode where they actually do the team sanity check, and everyone including Michael fails it. And they would all have said it was only because the circumstances were particularly dire that day, but there’s the other aspect of the Burn Notice team creep problem – particularly dire circumstances come along more and more often. It’s a thing that happens when everyone picks up a shovel and digs...
Jesse – I don’t know if it was the writers’ intention when they introduced him, but IMO the biggest effect of Jesse this season is to shine a very bright light on everything that’s wrong with Michael. Jesse and Michael spent the fourth season in pretty much the same circumstances, ie screwed over by other people, desperate to clear themselves of blame and get their old jobs back.
But when Jesse got what he wanted, he decided he didn’t want it any more. It wasn’t the same, working for people who’d kicked him out on his arse, desperate and destitute, when he’d done absolutely nothing wrong, and knowing they wouldn’t hesitate to treat him that way again. When Jesse’s circumstances changed, Jesse changed too, and then he made the decision to switch up his life. Good for him. Which brings us to:
Michael – sigh. In stark contrast to Jesse, he’s willing to accept even the kind of unpleasant, half-in, half-out set-up where he has all of the risk and not so much of the support. Risk that doesn’t end with Michael, obviously, it spreads to everyone, because they’re all getting drafted into the dodgy world of NOC (non-official cover, meaning, 'You get caught, we disown you.').
Michael can’t contemplate change. He wants everything back exactly the way it was, regardless of the time that’s passed or any of the other people in his life. He’s living with Fiona now, but still yearning to be the guy who vanishes to unknown places for unknown durations at ten minutes’ notice. Amazingly enough, Fiona isn’t thrilled with this plan for their future, and Michael is in no way oblivious to that – he just doesn’t much care.
Also, when Fiona’s telling you that you’ve passed the boundaries of acceptable risk, then you really have. I love Fiona now, but she’s always been the lunatic fringe of this particular outfit. Except for those days when Michael outdoes her.
Fiona – I said back in season three that she’d developed a real sense of responsibility, and that’s what made her likeable. I wasn’t wrong. She’s still Fiona, but she has a perspective now that goes far beyond herself, and that wasn’t true at the start. (She’s also the one team member who isn’t responsible for dragging Maddy into the vigilante justice business, which rather illustrates the point.)
The current Fiona will protect not just Michael and Sam from the consequences of her actions, but people she barely knows as well. She was deeply unhappy about Jesse’s situation in season four, and she was the one pushing earliest and hardest to try and help him, to fix what they’d broken. Faced with a repeat of that situation, and inflicting the same damage on someone else, she flat out refuses to do it.
Michael, meanwhile, is firmly in the ‘protect Fiona at all costs and deal with any fallout later’ camp, with Sam wavering somewhere between them and desperately looking for a middle ground that isn’t there. Sam doesn’t do well in morally murky places, which might be an odd thing to say, given his life choices. But he always wants to see a situation as clear cut black and white – as long as he can believe that something’s the right thing to do, he’ll do any number of illegal and sometimes downright nasty things to achieve it, cheerfully and with zero qualms.
Sam’s loyalty to Michael has extended to include Fiona by now, and it’s when his loyalty clashes with the right thing that he really struggles, like when Michael had him steal the flight data for Gilroy in season three. Mostly in those situations, Sam’s loyalty wins, but he’s never happy with being forced to make a choice like that. Which is unfortunate, because I suspect the Michael Westen train is going to keep taking him there.
And on an entirely different note:
Have we actually seen the last of Larry? Can we believe a death without a body? It’s long past time someone permanently solved the Larry problem, so I’m hoping Fiona has.
The fic now has a complete first draft. The next plan to ignore it for a week so I can come back to it with semi-fresh eyes and say, 'Holy shit, that line's pure cheese, what the hell was I thinking?' before I kick it out into the world.
And I absolutely get why Sam can’t – that’s a commitment made too many years ago and reinforced too many times. But Jesse? He’s the late-comer to this party; he should have distanced himself before everyone picked up a shovel and dug deeper.
At this point, Jesse seems to be sticking around because he’s just too nice a guy for his own good. The season four plotline where it was suggested that Jesse was in love with Fiona appears to have been abandoned – it never came up again this season, which I think is a good thing, because I wasn’t seeing it. The chemistry wasn’t there. Though maybe that was originally intended to be part of his motivation for staying.
Michael’s mother – yikes.
In season four, the gang started borrowing Maddy now and then when they wanted a harmless old lady to provide a distraction by acting helpless, or playing a Karen, or ‘accidentally’ tripping a security alarm while they watched what happened next. The problem with that is that the Burn Notice team creep is very real – once they’ve done something a couple of times it becomes normal, and a basis to go a teensy bit further. And Maddy wants to help, and she has probably a
It’s an atrocious combination. Maddy’s role in the series has been completely transformed from where she started out, and the Doylist response to that is, ‘Yay! Sharon Gless gets to be awesome! Good for her!’ And the Watsonian response is, ‘OMG, WTF, you people have to STOP THIS RIGHT NOW.’
The Gang of Four needed to sit down one quiet afternoon when they weren’t juggling six different things on the fly and draw up some hard rules as to what they would and would not ask Maddy to do (mostly that should be NOT). And then they needed a mutual enforcement pact to actively police one another on it, because none of these people have a good record with boundaries. Anyone who thinks, ‘I could ask Maddy to help here,’ should have to run it by at least two of the others and get whatever passes for a sanity check among them. And Michael should always be a person they check with first because, you know, she’s his MOTHER.
Having said all of that, there’s one episode where they actually do the team sanity check, and everyone including Michael fails it. And they would all have said it was only because the circumstances were particularly dire that day, but there’s the other aspect of the Burn Notice team creep problem – particularly dire circumstances come along more and more often. It’s a thing that happens when everyone picks up a shovel and digs...
Jesse – I don’t know if it was the writers’ intention when they introduced him, but IMO the biggest effect of Jesse this season is to shine a very bright light on everything that’s wrong with Michael. Jesse and Michael spent the fourth season in pretty much the same circumstances, ie screwed over by other people, desperate to clear themselves of blame and get their old jobs back.
But when Jesse got what he wanted, he decided he didn’t want it any more. It wasn’t the same, working for people who’d kicked him out on his arse, desperate and destitute, when he’d done absolutely nothing wrong, and knowing they wouldn’t hesitate to treat him that way again. When Jesse’s circumstances changed, Jesse changed too, and then he made the decision to switch up his life. Good for him. Which brings us to:
Michael – sigh. In stark contrast to Jesse, he’s willing to accept even the kind of unpleasant, half-in, half-out set-up where he has all of the risk and not so much of the support. Risk that doesn’t end with Michael, obviously, it spreads to everyone, because they’re all getting drafted into the dodgy world of NOC (non-official cover, meaning, 'You get caught, we disown you.').
Michael can’t contemplate change. He wants everything back exactly the way it was, regardless of the time that’s passed or any of the other people in his life. He’s living with Fiona now, but still yearning to be the guy who vanishes to unknown places for unknown durations at ten minutes’ notice. Amazingly enough, Fiona isn’t thrilled with this plan for their future, and Michael is in no way oblivious to that – he just doesn’t much care.
Also, when Fiona’s telling you that you’ve passed the boundaries of acceptable risk, then you really have. I love Fiona now, but she’s always been the lunatic fringe of this particular outfit. Except for those days when Michael outdoes her.
Fiona – I said back in season three that she’d developed a real sense of responsibility, and that’s what made her likeable. I wasn’t wrong. She’s still Fiona, but she has a perspective now that goes far beyond herself, and that wasn’t true at the start. (She’s also the one team member who isn’t responsible for dragging Maddy into the vigilante justice business, which rather illustrates the point.)
The current Fiona will protect not just Michael and Sam from the consequences of her actions, but people she barely knows as well. She was deeply unhappy about Jesse’s situation in season four, and she was the one pushing earliest and hardest to try and help him, to fix what they’d broken. Faced with a repeat of that situation, and inflicting the same damage on someone else, she flat out refuses to do it.
Michael, meanwhile, is firmly in the ‘protect Fiona at all costs and deal with any fallout later’ camp, with Sam wavering somewhere between them and desperately looking for a middle ground that isn’t there. Sam doesn’t do well in morally murky places, which might be an odd thing to say, given his life choices. But he always wants to see a situation as clear cut black and white – as long as he can believe that something’s the right thing to do, he’ll do any number of illegal and sometimes downright nasty things to achieve it, cheerfully and with zero qualms.
Sam’s loyalty to Michael has extended to include Fiona by now, and it’s when his loyalty clashes with the right thing that he really struggles, like when Michael had him steal the flight data for Gilroy in season three. Mostly in those situations, Sam’s loyalty wins, but he’s never happy with being forced to make a choice like that. Which is unfortunate, because I suspect the Michael Westen train is going to keep taking him there.
And on an entirely different note:
Have we actually seen the last of Larry? Can we believe a death without a body? It’s long past time someone permanently solved the Larry problem, so I’m hoping Fiona has.
The fic now has a complete first draft. The next plan to ignore it for a week so I can come back to it with semi-fresh eyes and say, 'Holy shit, that line's pure cheese, what the hell was I thinking?' before I kick it out into the world.
