#shock wave

3DO Blaster

Shaped by its strong internal magnetic field and the incoming solar wind, Jupiter has the largest magnetosphere in the solar system. It also has highly active aurorae at its poles, though they are most visible in ultraviolet wavelengths.  (Image credit: NASA/JPL; research credit: R. Giles et al.; via Eos)

The podcasters aren’t buying Fi’s faked escape from prison – they buy that it happens and it works to avoid her ‘appointment’ with the British dude, but…

Chris: Does that not put in jeopardy her CIA deal?

Bri: It is a stretch. It feels like this should get her into way more trouble.

Chris: It feels like it should, and at no point does she question that it will. Motivations don’t make sense in this episode, and plans that should not work work, and people execute them as if they assume they will work.

Bri: This is what I call A New Hope plotting, where stuff happens and people die, and Luke just goes, ‘Okay, I guess I’m a Jedi now.’ Everything’s incredibly convenient.

(It’s true, Luke does speedrun past the trauma of losing everybody 🤣🤣🤣. It’s also true that Fi having the whole prison turned upside down looking for her and a massive woman-hunt launched doesn’t seem to have any worse consequences than a day in solitary. Maybe it could have been part of her conversation with Ayn, like, ‘Yeah, there’s a risk this might fuck things up for me, but it’s still better than getting my friends and family in Ireland killed.’)

Michael, Pearce, Jesse and Nate are waiting for Anson at a hotel that he and Rebecca have set up as a dead drop.

Chris: They hear some noise suddenly, and it turns out there’s a party in another motel room. You know how people have parties in motel rooms?

Bri: It feels like the Burn Notice pilot and like it’s a Spring Break thing. People do have parties at motels then.

Chris: It’s also – they hear it, it’s quiet and then suddenly there’s party noise.

Bri: And they look out and there’s like fifty people.

Chris: They’ve clearly been there for a while.

Bri: It’s a surprise party! The person whose surprise it was got there and then suddenly they all erupted into noise. (It’s true, LOL, I hadn’t thought about it, but yes, it is a very sudden noticing of a very loud party by people who are supposed to be spies who notice things 🤣)

Michael is worried that the party-goers might attract a noise complaint and the police might come, scaring Anson away. Nate goes over and tells the party people they should leave because there’s a bedbug problem.

Chris: He’s trying to be Michael here. It’s very sweet. But Michael immediately goes over and yells him out, because everyone else might leave the hotel too if word of bedbugs gets around, and that might also scare Anson away. Which seems like a bunch of leaps. I would give Michael in this episode a lot more credit if they established that Michael was trying to out-think Anson and he’s being paranoid about Anson’s chess-master behaviour.

Bri: I think it would also help if there was more tension. Last week the tension was really good, so if mistakes are made, it’s just a result of shit, the stakes are so high. The stakes are technically high here, but everyone’s just sitting around in a hotel room. I don’t feel it. Michael’s not at his breaking point, he just comes out and yells at his brother. If we saw that Michael is spiralling, it would help explain his reactions.

(I agree that this episode doesn’t really cover that ground. We’ve seen Michael go off the rails in earlier episodes this season, and Pearce reminds us of that at the start of the ep, when she says she’s running the op personally, not Michael, because of his past behaviour. But she says it in a scene where she and Michael are sitting in a bench in a park, and he’s being perfectly normal and making jokes about Sam accepting payment in cheap beer. Michael could have been twitchier in that scene, maybe saying dark things about what he wants to do to Anson when he gets his hands on him. It could definitely have been built up more.)

While everyone else waits for Anson, Sam and Barry are having a plot of the week in which people are trying to kill Barry.

Chris: Barry explains that now Fi’s turned in her gun supplier from last week, she’s got guys after her, and they’re coming for Barry to lead them to Fi.

Bri: Different guys? Is that ever explained? Why a totally different gun supplier comes after him? Because the other guy was arrested, Grayson’s arrested. This other guy just shows up and is also bad and important. How is he related to Grayson?

(That is something that’s not explained. It would make sense if this guy was Grayson’s boss, maybe? So he’s lost a good worker as well as a bunch of weapons and his reputation will take a hit if he doesn’t make Fi pay for it? (He very much does not seem like a man who would have been Grayson’s underling.) But the whole time he’s after Barry in this ep, he never once mentions Grayson or Fi, only how badly he wants to get to Barry.)

Chris: Sam cuts up a beer can to shape it into something like a police badge, which is the first of many beer can-related crafts that happen in this plotline.

Bri: This is my favourite plotline. I love this plotline. We get the best spy tips out of it and Sam is fun, we get the improvisation that we always love. And no-one’s being rude to anyone I care about.

Chris: Just Barry. There is a good joke when, amid all the beer crafts, he asks for a glass, and he’s like, ‘We don’t waste beer in my family.’

Bri: And then later, after so many beer things, he pours another beer, and Barry’s like, ‘What’s that one for?’ and Sam’s like, ‘This is just a beer, it’s for drinking.' Jason Tracey’s a really good writer, this is the wrong episode for him to be writing.

(I would agree that he’s great at the comedy, and less strong with the drama and plotting. The podcasters also discuss something I notice every time I watch it - the guy who gets injured by Sam’s motion detector-activated shotgun cartridge at the back door. He gets shot, he runs away, and Sam says, “Now there are only three guys trying to kill us.” He’s injured, but clearly not that badly. Why can’t he still shoot? You would think he’d now be more highly motivated to kill them, but Sam instantly writes him off. Also how later in the episode Nate smacks Anson out of nowhere and pulls a gun on him in the middle of a casino, and casino security don’t instantly grab Nate! He's able to just march Anson out of the front door.)

Back at the stakeout hotel, Nate orders pizza for them all, and Michael has a go at him that it will look suspicious, because nobody orders four pizzas for a hotel room.

Chris: It could be one of these motel room parties that happen.

Bri: I was thinking that too!

Chris: Four pizzas isn’t that many.

Bri: I’ve gotten depressed and eaten a whole pizza. If you have a family of four in this hotel room, four pizzas is nothing.

Chris: And Michael freaks out because he’s playing out these weird, eight-dimensional chess moves with Anson, like if Anson sees the pizza he’ll know that we’ll be here, but it’s not played like paranoia, it’s played like him being a reasonable spy.

Bri: And Nate doesn’t understand, because he’s just a fuck-up.

Chris: And Michael ells him to leave out the back, which I think is way more suspicious.

Bri: Way more suspicious!

Chris: And Jesse’s like, that’s your brother, dude. And Michael’s like, this is for Fi, there’s no margin for error, and that does explain why he’s being like this.

Bri: But I don’t feel it! The last episodes have led us here plot-wise, but emotionally I’m starting this episode from scratch. The emotional tension isn’t there.

Chris: This doesn’t feel like a big stakes episode, like a mid-season finale or something. This doesn’t feel like an episode where they’re going to get Anson. This feels like an episode that’s setting up an episode where next week they get Anson. I genuinely had no idea that this was coming. I never dreamed that Nate would die in this episode, because nothing about the tone of this episode, nothing about the way it’s presenting the story, suggests it. This is a goofy Jason Tracey episode.

(There is a huge discrepancy between the Sam and Barry hi-jinks and the high-stakes Get Anson plot. Which definitely makes the dramatic ending come as a surprise! I’m pretty sure nobody was expecting it.)

Bri: We can only put so much of this on Jason Tracey’s shoulders, because this seems like a very random point in the series to wrap up a major storyline. But we also have to get Fi out of prison, because we’ve already had six episodes with Fi wholly separated from the rest of the cast. It has to happen sooner rather than later.

Chris: They really wrote themselves into a corner, and they needed someone to write them out of it, and Jason Tracey was not that person.

Bri: You know who I think would have been really good for this episode was Rashad Raisani. He has a good balance of the levity of Burn Notice, but I also think he’s a stronger plotter. I think he could do a lot more with the locked-in tenseness of this episode. (He did write some good eps ❤️)

Meanwhile, back in the plot of the week:

Chris: Barry bemoans the fact that he’s about to die, and he never climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, never watched The Wire, never had a four-way, and I love any excuse to remind people that The Wire exists. (Bri has also not seen The Wire – disappointing!)

Bri: I also appreciate the sentiment that Barry has had a three-way. (that is a really good moment 😁) I feel like a four-way is just two people having sex next to each other and sometimes they switch. Or is it more like a human centipede of fucking? 🤣🤣🤣

(There is then a digression into the possible mechanics of sex between four people, and what genders they might be, which gets quite involved…)

Chris: There’s a lot of holes available, there’s a lot of things that can happen 😭

(Having written three-way sex, which gets complicated enough, I am definitely not signing up to write a four-way! 🤪)

Chris: This episode is trying to do too many things.

Bri: Last week was doing a lot and balanced it really well structurally, this episode is just a mess.

Chris: By the end of the episode, Burn Notice is a very different show than it was before it, and this doesn’t feel like an episode that will change things.

Bri: The end of this episode is not what I was waiting for.

Chris: I was legitimately shocked. He fucking dies and there’s a lot of fake-outs on this show, and this was not an episode to do this. I was convinced Nate would be fine until the sad indie-pop music started playing (that specific genre of Death Music was very much a feature of US TV around this time… 🤪)

(I’m in two minds about the tonal disconnect of this episode – it’s definitely there, but I don’t find it as objectionable as the podcasters do. It does make the ending very much a surprise – I don’t think anyone expects this to be the ep which kills off a recurring character who’s been there from the start. But then I think of when Person of Interest killed Carter, and that was the end of a super-tense, claustrophobic episode, and it still came as a surprise, and that was better.)

And then Michael has to go home and tell his mother that Nate’s dead.

Chris: She sells this. This is the only performance in this episode that sells it, because Sharon Gless is a fucking class act and she always sells it. (Indeed she does 😍)

Then Fi gets out of prison.

Chris: This is the one part of this montage that works as intended.

Bri: You can feel that there’s a sweetness in Michael’s eyes. I think Jeffrey Donovan’s actually doing a genuinely good job here.

Chris: They bring out the best in each other. Him not telling her Nate’s dead on screen is the only bit of subtlety.

This doesn’t get to be a great episode of Burn Notice – Michael doesn’t have an alias and only Sam gets a good role of the other main cast. Fi hides in a hole, Jesse hangs around, and Madeline gets one good moment to act in a single incredibly brief scene, which they decide isn’t enough to count.

They don’t even bother to discuss whether it’s a great episode of television – they get sidetracked dissing on the Supernatural finale 🤣🤣🤣

Chris immediately assumes that with Anson gone, the main ongoing plot of the season is going to be finding the sniper.

Bri has three theories about who it might be. 1) Rebecca, because she hates Anson. She thinks that could be interesting, but doubts it’s the case, because that plot couldn’t hold up the rest of the season. 2) It’s someone from the CIA and that’s why Michael parts ways with them again. 3) It’s another rando who pops up from nowhere to be the new Big Bad, like Gilroy. She hopes it’s not 3) because she feels like Burn Notice is a better show than that now.