Burn Notice 5.4 - No Good Deed

Plot: On rather short notice, Michael is called to a swanky, save the whales-type auction to observe the theft of a tablet belonging to some brilliant Swedish engineer. He's not there to stop the theft, merely note who does it, so they can be tracked and identified. Turns out to be the French using a company as a front. Having determined that, Mike and max then break into their offices, and copy all the information on it for the Agency's purposes. I note they don't bother to return it to its rightful owner. Lovely.

In the meantime, Barry has come to them with a problem. His brother Paul, has lost all the servers at his business. Servers which house local teachers retirement funds. It's only a matter of time until some breaks in, so the team will have to find the thief and retrieve the servers quickly. After a brief struggle with the Big Show, I mean, Griffith, he points them in the direction of Eve, a very smart, very cruel hacker. Michael approaches her as a low-level thief who needs some hi-tech work done, but needs to be there when she wipes the logs or somethin'. All seems to be going well, until Mike gets drugged, and now Eve has a hostage. Which complicates matters slightly, but they catch Eve and save the retirement funds. Bu blowing up the servers, but oh well. Omelet, eggs, you know how it is.

Things end on a sad note, though, as Michael arrives at the Agency office to debrief, only to find Max dying, the cops arriving, and Michael holding the murder weapon. Mike does make a rooftop escape, but in erasing his presence from the crime scene, he also erased the killer's. And out come the sunglasses.

The Players: Max (CIA Operative), Paul (The Client), Eve (Vicious Hacker)

Quote of the Episode: Sam - 'His brother? Dear God, there's two of them?'

Does Fiona blow anything up? One server, which also blew up the others servers, and most of Eve's Jeep. Might have overdone it on the boom-boom there, Fi.

Sam Axe Drink Count: 1 (6 overall). Sam got some crap jobs this week. Fight the Big Show, jimmy a lock to attract police attention.

Sam Getting Hit Count: 4 (4 overall). I counted the tackle, at least 2 times getting thrown, which, considering it was The Big Show, counts as a physical strike, and once getting hit in the ass with a beanbag round.

Michael's Fake Laugh Count: 0 (3 overall). Too busy ogling girls in his alias this week.

Other: And Mike's alias this week was Baxter, sleazy old-style, safe cracking thief.

I really appreciated how Michael put his foot on Eve's throat there at the end of the episode.  She's one of those villains I really want to just. . . stop. . . talking. I get it, you're smart.

On a different level, I greatly enjoyed Fiona slapping Barry and Paul when they were arguing. Not that I didn't enjoy the arguing, I did. It seems like a very sibling thing to do, especially if one brother is the black sheep and sort of resentful of it. At the same time, Fi's reaction seemed just about right. She wasn't really pissed, like she gets at Mike sometimes, so she didn't slug them. But they were being annoying right as she was trying to concentrate, and she wanted to get their attention.

Thinking about it, I'm a little surprised we've never seen Maddy do that to Michael and Nate. Course, the Brothers Westen don't argue much, at least for extended periods of time. And Maddy might not want to stir up bad memories of their father by resorting to violence. So she opts for threats (like in 4.15, when she threatened to put out her cigarette in Michael's eye if anything happened to Nate).

After 4+ seasons of being guilt-tripped into helping his friends with things, it's nice to see Michael has learned how to do the same to others. This time he used it on Max to impressive effect.

It appears Michael's paranoia about the people who burned him (we really need a short, catchy name for this bunch) was well-deserved, so it's off the find the killer, the Horrible Killer of Max. No, I don't know why my brain went in a Wizard of Oz direction just then.