Here We Go Again

Doctor Who We finally caught up with the Ncuti Gatwa stories from 2024, the ones that came after the Tennant/Gatwa mini-season. It was definitely a mixed bag (normal for Doctor Who) but there were a couple of stories in this season that reached heights not seen for several years. Capaldi and Whittaker were great Doctors as performers, but the writing for them was godawful. Gatwa and Millie Gibson actually get their teeth into some good stuff here and nail it. There was also some utter tripe - Space Babies OMG. And why would you make what was easily the worst story of the season the season opener?? But at least it was all uphill from there!

The Christmas special was enjoyable stuff too. Seeing the Doctor get to live a normal life, have to stay in one place and earn money and live like a human? Gold. But Anita deserves to be a companion, dammit, why doesn't she get to go and see the universe? She's been the most amazing friend to the Doctor. She deserves it!


Secret Level Made by the same people who did Love, Death and Robots, it's another animated anthology series, this time all based on video games. The usual anthology mash up of a few actually good, a bunch of just fine and one or two that seem to be pointless? Miss whatever they were aiming for? They're all short, so worth a look, especially if you're into video games and curious to see where people took the concepts. (Netflix)

Arcane season two Good. Really good. Not as good as the first season which was amazing, but still really good. The animation continued to be mind-blowingly good, especially the contrast in the different styles that were chosen as we moved between worlds/planes of existence.
I think the main problem was that this being the last season, there was a lot more time dedicated to the Plot and tying all the lore together, which came at the expense of time for delving into the characters. The character development did feel rushed for some of them - not wrong, but it all seemed to happen in a hurry. I think a longer season, or three seasons in total, to wrap up where we left off at the season one would have made this show dam near perfect. (Netflix)

Star Wars: Skeleton Crew Meh. So very meh. Star Wars does The Goonies, and not well. Some eps were better than others - it started out not too badly, but the one in the spa resort was dire. Plot holes you could fly an Imperial Star Destroyer through. Do Not Recommend.

Black Doves Fun! Not critically good, but fun! The cast are all amazing - Ben Whishaw as a gay assassin, Keira Knightley as a spy/politician's wife, Sarah Lancashire as the head of a secret non-governmental spy ring. Lancashire didn't really get to show off - anyone who's seen Happy Valley knows exactly how good she is - because her role didn't give her that scope, but she worked with what she had. Whishaw was fantastic. The plot was... far-fetched. Had some holes in it. But screw that, just go along for the ride.
It has been renewed for another season and I'll be there 😁 (Netflix)

A couple of months slipped by again, and we watched quite a range of things...

The Sympathizer (HBO) This was.. quite a trip. Satirical comedy about a Viet Cong spy in the southern Vietnamese secret police who gets evacuated to America at the end of the war. Less Vietnam war satire than you might think (though there is definitely commentary on the horrific stupidity of that entire situation), a lot of satire on the immigrant experience and the American assumption of superiority. Episode 4 is hilarious, as it tackles Hollywood and the making of a Vietnam war film with our spy protagonist roped in as a consultant. And a lot of commentary on how it really isn't nice to be a spy...
Robert Downey Junior plays multiple roles as every kind of American arsehole imaginable, from a CIA spy to a corrupt Congressman to a crackpot director. Is that a commentary on the racism of 'they all look the same to us?' Is it a commentary on how every kind of American arsehole is just as complicitly shitty?
Whatever the intention, it works either way.
Definitely not always a comfortable watch, but I'm glad I did. Be warned, though - satire, yes, but it's a spy series that involves war. There is brutality, there is torture, there is graphic stuff that some people might not want to see.

Slow Horses season 4. It's Slow Horses. It's good, twisty spy drama. The cast are great. I liked 4 more than 3, but not quite as much as 1 or 2. If you like it, you'll like this installment too.

Deadloch Amazon. (Yes, C, I know you told me to watch it about a year ago - it finally made it to the top of the pile!) Black comedy about murder in a small Tasmanian town being investigated by a lesbian police officer.
I'll be honest, I was pretty circumspect about this for the first three episodes. The Darwin detective was annoyingly OTT and obviously wrong, and why would anyone have assigned this idiot to help on a murder inquiry? But by ep 4, it's explained why she's behaving like that and what exactly is going on with her, and the whole thing settles in to tell a story and it becomes genuinely good. A murder comedy with a strong side of social commentary, as a progressive mayor tries to remake a small town into a queer haven. Definitely worth a look for something different.

Agatha All Along From the same creator as WandaVision, and you can tell. That's a good thing BTW, as WandaVision remains the standout among the onslaught of Disney Marvel TV shows. (Agent Carter was also standout, but that wasn't Disney.) Just like Wanda, Agatha begins cute and silly and gets darker and more tragic with a couple of hard-hitting last eps. Kathryn Hahn really gets to show her range in this one and the supporting cast are solid too. Jac Schaeffer knows how to tell a story.

Dungeon Meshi. Very typical anime - a combination of the silly and the serious. It started out very superficial and ridiculous and whatever, but gained substance as it went on and the characters became real people with backstories. It was fine. If there's another season I'll watch more, but I won't miss it if there isn't.

Masters of the Air. I grew up in England, watching films about the second world war, so I'm very familiar with what the RAF did and the Battle of Britain and all that. And I know that the RAF flew a lot of night missions, because they started out flying daylight missions and got the shit shot out of them.

I had no idea that when the US joined the war in 1942, they looked at what the RAF had learned from experience and said, 'Nah, we can do better than that.' So they flew daylight missions and got the shit shot out of them. And it's not like the RAF weren't suffering, they still had a high attrition rate flying at night, but I definitely learned something from this series.

It was well made, with a solid cast, and it covered a lot of ground, including touching on the racism and the fact that there were entirely separate units of Black pilots with inferior planes. It was interesting that they did the historical take on the Great Escape, it being an entirely British thing, with no American involvement at all. Well worth watching the final ep end credits, with all the info on what happened to the RL people after that war. Good stuff. (Yes, it's Apple TV, use your alternatives accordingly. We did.)

Fargo season 5. Damn, this was good. The usual Coen Brothers Fargo style, with a very black humour and a lot of social commentary beneath it, but this was one of the better Fargo series, for sure. It opens AWESOMELY, and builds hard and fast. Jon Hamm and Jennifer Jason Leigh get to chew the scenery as the Worst of America stereotypes. Steve Harrington from Stranger Things gets to play a total arsehole, while also being a victim. The Cat King from DBDA gets to play an absolute scumbag loser 🤣

I'd never seen Juno Temple before (I understand you know her if you've seen Ted Lasso), but she's fantastic. She holds the whole series together and she's brilliant and vulnerable and smart and scared; she's everything. And apparently she's another person with a lot of accent skills doing a good fake Minnesota XD

I finally reached the end of my watch through of MASH - all 11 seasons of it. And yes, I'd have reached the end sooner if 2023 hasn't been The Year of Burn Notice when I watched BN all through four times and barely anything else...

I saw some MASH when I was a kid - my grandma used to watch it, and I saw some eps sometimes when I was visiting her, but that's different from a serial watch. The first few seasons are... patchy. It's a comedy very much of the time, with some entertaining moments, but also some moments that make you cringe with the sexism and racism.

Around season four and five, you can see when the creative control started to change hands. When the cast took more power and began to shape the narrative. When Loretta Swit walked out and wouldn't come back until her character was treated as a career woman instead of a sex object. And damn, do those later seasons hold up, even all these years afterwards. They address serious issues on every scale, from the traumas of war to the aforementioned sexism and racism, to overpowering familial expectations, to queer narratives. And obviously there are pure comedy episodes too, but the comedy stops being at the expense of any particular group. The character development is beautifully done, and yes, the ending absolutely made me cry.

MASH really shows what can happen when the people controlling a show care about what happens in it, are invested in it, and pour their souls into it. And unlike some shows where the creator was a visionary from the start, MASH was appropriated by the people who cared, and was completely transformed by it.

Now I'm considering what retro comedy from the American past that I missed out on to go to next, and I think it might have to be The Golden Girls...

I finally got around to watching season 2 of Leverage Redemption (yes I know it was released a little over a year ago, but 2023 was The Year of Burn Notice so...)

I was... distinctly underwhelmed? There were some episodes that were good. The one at the record company from the POV of characters of the week who kept falling over the Leverage cast was a delight. The one where Eliot went home to his dad was lovely. The reveal of more of Sophie's backstory had its moments. But for around half the eps that season, I found myself mentally checking out. Bored.

I was aware in the first season of Leverage Redemption that I wasn't enjoying it as much as the original Leverage. It isn't the same without Hardison (and I much prefer geek!Hardison to current cool!Hardison when he is around). The writing in Redemption doesn't seem as tight as it was in the original Leverage. And yet the two head writers are the same. Is it because they're running out of ideas? Is it because they're opting for fun over clever?

There were things that jumped out at me so hard as being plain wrong. Like in The Walk in the Woods, when it was revealed that Parker had previously removed the clip from a guy's holstered gun. Even if she can be that light-fingered and he's talking/distracted enough not to notice the click it makes when you release the clip, he then draws that gun and holds it on people like he expected it to work, and just... no. Bullets are heavy. Remove the clip from a pistol and it weighs about half as much and the balance is completely off. There's no way in hell he wouldn't realise as soon as he drew it.

And the reveals were bugging me too. Intrinsically. It's not clever writing when you fix a situation by telling the audience something they didn't know but the characters did. In Burn Notice, the audience always knows everything the characters know, and the twists come from outside influences. The characters are caught by surprise at the same time as the audience.

And I'm left wondering... has the writing for Leverage genuinely got worse? Or is it that watching Burn Notice has ruined me for something so similar but inferior? Genuinely looking for people to tell me here if they think Leverage is getting worse or not.

I'm playing catch up with the latest Who, now that there's going to be a gap again. I watched The Star Beast and wow - it was the first Who that actually made me have feelings in years. Welcome back Russell T Davies! Thank the lord for that! Then Wild Blue Yonder immediately did it again, with the Doctor telling 'Donna' about the trauma of his back-story, and then asking her later if she remembers any of that, because he desperately needs someone to talk to. But she doesn't.

The Power of the Doctor was such a Chris Chibnall episode. Let's throw everything in there! Let's have the Cybermen, and the Daleks, and the Master! It'll be amazing! And what actually happens is there's too much going on the whole time; everybody spends the ep yelling and running away and jumping off buildings and blowing things up and the impact that should have been there with the return of Ace and Tegan just wasn't. The only moment that had any emotion was the very end, with Dan's gathering of ex-companions and especially seeing Ian there.

So Russell T Davies comes back to write a bottle story with nobody but The Doctor and Donna and shows exactly how powerful writing can be when the characters have time to talk.

Or potted opinions on various things I've been watching over the last few months that aren't the endless cycle of Burn Notice.

The Witcher season 3. It was fine? I didn't dislike it, but I wasn't much invested. I think the main problem I'm having with The Witcher is that it has a large cast, few episodes per season and long gaps between seasons. I spend half of each new season trying to remember who all these people are, what their relationships are to one another and who's previously betrayed who. There's a lot of intense politicking, which is something I normally enjoy very much, and I probably would here if I could remember what it all meant. I get the feeling I'd be into it more if I watched the whole thing straight through instead of one season every couple of years. Jaskier continues to bore me intensely, though his fling-wait-er-mayberelationship?? with the prince was cute.

Good Omens season 2. This was exactly what I expected, given what I'd seen from the trailers. Okay, not Gabriel and Beelzebub, that came as a surprise XD But the overall tone, with more great flashback scenes, the increasing gayness but definitely not with a happy ending (because that's for season three) - it followed the middle-of-a-trilogy pattern, and I enjoyed it.

The Great season 3. More of the same, but also not. One of the things I really enjoyed about this show is that despite the endless chaos and smutty humour, there is plot going on underneath it all and some serious commentary on society and some of its more appalling aspects. Characters are killed off, some unexpectedly, others less so, and it manages to balance being crazily funny with stuff actually happening. I particularly enjoyed the character development of Marial's child-husband this season, he was glorious XD Which of course makes it even more annoying that this show has now been cancelled, because of the usual streaming service bullshit. It costs too much per episode and it's no longer bringing in new viewers, just keeping old ones, which isn't good enough for the business model...

Strange New Worlds season 2. Love! It took me about half way through the first season to really get into it, and get used to some of the characters, but season two picked that right up and ran with it. I haven't enjoyed a Trek series this much since DS9. Everyone involved knows and cares about what they're doing, and it shows. The whole series captures the mood of original Trek so well, with the same entertaining mix of silly fun and serious drama. The writers know what they're doing, and their love for Trek and other genre shows really comes through. The cast are all great, there isn't a single character who doesn't work, and the crossover with Below Decks was hilarious.

Barry season 4. Partly what I expected? This was clearly never a show that was going to end well for just about anybody involved, and in that I wasn't wrong. I absolutely was not expecting the time jump and Sally's decision, but she certainly came to regret it. It was well written and brilliantly acted as always, if a little bizarro, but that's always been true too. It stuck to its guns the whole way through and ended when it should have done.

I finished rewatching season 7 of Burn Notice a couple of weeks ago now, and on second watch, it worked better for me than it did the first time. The first time, the ending felt rushed, and I didn’t entirely buy into Michael’s switch of allegiance; but knowing it was coming, and watching the details more carefully, it seemed more realistic. And I’ve been pondering over it since, poking over what I felt were flaws on first viewing, and it holds together a lot better than I thought.

It always made sense that Michael would turn against the CIA, given how they treated him and everyone he cares about, given the corruption he uncovered among them. On first watch, though, I didn’t buy that turning against the CIA would immediately mean siding with James. There had to be a third option.

Except there pretty much wasn’t, from Michael’s perspective. He didn’t know that the rest of the gang were already working on the ‘get the hell out of the country’ plan – and even if he had known, the last time they all tried that, it went appallingly badly.

Michael’s first choice for getting out was to die. He expected James to shoot him in the head, and he was so done with everything, he was fine with it. But James didn’t – instead he exploited Michael’s weakness. He knew that Michael was doing everything to keep the people he loved out of prison, and he offered Michael another way to do that. When Michael was in the world’s shittiest frame of mind and not likely to be making good choices, James dangled a carrot in front of him. And Michael being Michael, if he decides he’s going to do something, he goes for it 100%. That’s always been one of his primary strengths, but applied in the wrong circumstances, it becomes a massive flaw.

In Nature of the Beast, Michael admits to Sam that he’s struggling, that he likes James and Sonya despite who they are, and he says he’s relying on Sam to help him. Two episodes later, when Fiona confronts him about it, he’s all, ‘Nope, I’m fine, nothing to worry about here.’
I don’t think he would have said that if he and Fiona had still been an item. But he knows that she’s moved on with Carlos, and there’s a combination there of Michael not wanting to dump his crap on her when she wants nothing to do with the spy world anymore, and Michael not wanting to rely on her when he’s no longer her priority. It’s a case where he’s protecting both of them from each other, I think, but it results in him turning away from support even though he knows he needs it.

And he turns away from it more after some of the things he has to do. After he has to kill Roger Steele, after he watches James shoot the useless dude. Michael’s got some pretty bad self-loathing going on at that point, and he’s deliberately dodging the rest of the team because he doesn’t want them judging him too. When he needs help the most, he won’t ask for it anymore.

It's been apparent for a long time that Michael’s the most dangerous of the Burn Notice crew. Fiona’s dangerous because of what she might do when she’s furious, in a particularly bad moment. Michael’s dangerous because of what he might do when he’s cold and semi-rational. Because of that Larry-like part of him that’s he admits is in there. Michael might do terrible things when he’s not actually all that rational, but he thinks he is, and that can be so much worse.
Sam and Jesse, meanwhile, are the stable ones of the group. Which isn’t to say that they can’t get angry enough to want to murder someone – they absolutely can. But they nail that shit down.
It’s most obvious with Sam when they’re interrogating the guy who tells them how he took Sam’s friend out into the Everglades and shot him in the back of the head. At which point Jesse and Michael grab Sam and haul him out of there – good call, guys, you should absolutely do that. But literally a minute later, Sam’s back inside asking the guy who paid him to do it. Which makes sense, because you don’t make the cut for a SEAL team if you can’t get a grip on yourself under just about any circumstances. And Jesse somehow manages not to murder Michael after he figures out Michael was the one who destroyed his life. Those two guys are reliable pretty much anywhere and anywhen – they’re the stability Michael needs to be utilising and isn’t.

Another big flaw of Michael’s is that he’s willing to hurt people he cares about to protect them. He tells his mother early in season two that he ghosted her for ten years because he wanted to keep her away from his world. He knows the rest of the gang will vehemently disagree with what he’s doing, but Michael’s convinced himself he’s right. In his own head, he’s not turning on the gang, even when he is. When he and Sam climb out of the water after their fight, Michael leads his threat with, ‘Because we’re friends,’ - still present tense, even when he’s warning Sam to stay the hell away from him.

And that fight on the bridge is SO perfectly done. We’ve seen disagreements between these two turn physical before when Sam’s tried to stop Michael from doing something stupid. With the stakes so much higher this time, neither of them were going to back down, and it was always going to get ugly. Sam knows that in a straight fight he’s going to lose, so he plays it smart and gets them into the water. It takes him a couple of tries, though, because Michael sees it coming. They’re both smart.
And it works. Sam has the advantage, and if he’d wanted to kill Michael, he could have. He loses because killing Michael is the absolute last thing he wants to do, and because near-drowning is so unbelievably dangerous. He has to loosen his grip and head for the surface the second Michael goes limp, and so Michael fakes him out. They both played to their strengths and their understanding of each other, and Sam really couldn’t have done anything differently.

After the first watch, when I was thinking about it later, I found myself wondering why Sam hadn’t talked more. Words are Sam’s first weapon of choice, and he knows every weakness Michael has, every place that a verbal attack will hit home. When Sam says, “What happens when someone gets in your way?” the immediate and obvious follow on is, “What happens when I get in your way?” Given what the Burn Notice crew spend their days doing, it’s not that big of a reach. And it is, of course, the argument that ultimately works when Fiona hits Michael with it later, on the roof.

What I would have expected Sam to say is, “What happens when I get in your way? Will you shoot me yourself or have someone else do it?” It would have gone straight into one of Michael’s weak spots – he’s seen Sam get shot and nearly die, and he was a wreck. So this time I was watching for that moment – and it’s right after Sam says, “What happens when someone gets in your way?” that Michael turns and starts walking. And Sam goes after him and tries to stop him, and then they’re off, and it’s not a conversation anymore. Sam didn’t get the chance to say the rest of it, the thing that might have got through. It was scripted flawlessly.

There are a couple of things in season 7 that don’t really work. First of them is that it takes Michael any time at all to make his decision on the roof. Sonya vs the woman he’s been in love with a decade – he really shouldn’t have to think about that. Even if Fiona tried to move on emotionally, it’s obvious all season that Michael hasn’t. Dramatic tension and all, but... nope.

The big thing that bugs me is James’ change in security protocol. Sonya vouches for Michael, and then Michael gets put through days of sleep deprivation, drugs and interrogation before James will trust him. Which makes sense in a vile way. But then James takes Fiona, Sam and Jesse on trust because Michael trusts them? Meets up with them more than once, lets them see his face? Since when?
It’s not even necessary for them to ever meet James. Michael could have worked with the rest of the gang exactly as Michael worked with Burke and Sonya prior to meeting James, all at one step removed. That’s what I would have expected. Yes, they have to be able to recognise James when they see him with Michael at the end of the series, and know that Michael’s lying to them. But they didn’t ever have to meet James for that. By then, they’ve already got James’ full name and background and details from his ex-colleague at the mental hospital, so they’d only need photos to recognise him. If James had stayed away from everyone but Michael and Sonya, that would have been consistent behaviour and changed nothing about the overall plot.
The only detail that would have been different is that the others wouldn't have been there to see James kill the useless dude. But that could have been worked around. The others could have been all, 'Hey, where's useless dude these days?' and Michael wouldn't have wanted to explain. And they'd figure out he's dead quickly enough, and maybe they even start to speculate that maybe Michael killed him...

Season 7 still has its glitches, but fairly minor ones in the overall plot arc. The writers wanted to send Burn Notice out with a dramatic bang, and they certainly did that.

Why have I not heard more about Undone? It's great! I read one review of it after season two came out that said this is cool and amazing, why aren't more people talking about it? I thought it sounded interesting, so I put it on The List, and we finally watched it over the last couple of weeks.

Undone is a rotascoped animated series that's both sci-fi and a family drama about secrets and rejection and generational trauma. Following a car crash, Alma begins seeing visions of her dead father, a physicist who was researching the manipulation of time, and he believes she has the ability to go back and change his fate. But if you're changing one thing, can you change another and another? Can you create a perfect world, or is there a downside to any change you make?

Only one of the main cast is white, and that's Bob Odenkirk, so he's allowed :-) The protagonist was profoundly deaf as a child before she got a cochlear implant. It's inclusive, it's clever and weird, but the sci-fi plot is never more important than the characters and their relationships. So I'm going to tell you that it's cool and amazing, and why aren't more people watching it?

It's on Amazon Prime, two seasons so far with another coming. There's a trailer here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uWCNHQgfnc

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 a bit 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.