It's very rare that I want a show to come back from hiatus as much as Burn Notice. A case can be made that the fourth season is its best to date. Thankfully, the wait is over.
I don't think it shocks anyone that Michael is alive after being shot at the end of "Guilty As Charged." "Eyes Open" takes place a mere three days later, as all of John Barrett's misdeeds are being exposed, and he's recovering from his injuries in the hospital. There's a great callback to the Burn Notice pilot when Fiona kicks him in an attempt to get him to come around, just as she did to wake him up when he was first dumped in Miami.
Once Michael is up and moving, he wants to pick up where he left off, much to Madeline's annoyance. The hospital is the last place he'd like to be. However, being there means that he's in the right place at the wrong time, as he and Sam learn about a bomb that kills several people and injures more. Deafened in the blast is a guy named Walt who worked for the now-late Dale Lawson (Michael Rooker) - the kidnapper we met in "Guilty As Charged." Who would want Lawson and his people out of the picture? The lawyer whose daughter they kidnapped, of course! The lightbulb goes on over Michael's head and he pays a visit to Adam Scott (Danny Pino), who is much more cranky and much more armed than he was when we first met him. I know several of my regular readers picked up on the vibe that he was coming back, so have a cookie if you were one of them. I liked Danny Pino when he was on Cold Case, so I'm not complaining.
Scott's become kind of a smarmy pain in the behind in the last seventy-two hours, and while he doesn't admit to anything, it's obvious that he hired someone to do his dirty work. As if that's not bad enough, Vaughn is waiting for Michael to get home, just to say that he's leaving Miami and that "someone new will be in touch when the dust settles." I'm surprised he leaves so quietly, but I can only wonder who's going to be taking his place.
Once he's gone, Fiona tells Michael that she and Sam believe one of Barrett's men must have made off with the briefcase, and they've identified the one rogue among the bunch: Mark Sweeney. Sam is batting 1.000 this episode, as he has also done his legwork on Scott's clients, and fingered Dennis Barfield, who's not only a bomber but a clinical narcissist, and whom he describes as "a trust fund psycho." Michael tries to sneak into Dennis's apartment, but can't escape in time and finds himself looking another gun in the face. He makes the best of it and convinces Dennis that he's an admirer of the man's handiwork. It keeps him from getting shot, but Dennis tells him there's more mayhem on the way.
During the commercial break, we meet Artie Maleschi, the stunt coordinator for Burn Notice. The man deserves a cookie. Probably the entire bag of cookies.
Although unenthused that he didn't just shoot Dennis, Fiona tells Michael that Mark Sweeney's car is sitting in a police impound. He advises her to take Jesse with her, and so she meets Jesse at her brand-new house. Jesse is still cranky, which I can't exactly blame him for considering that it's only been 72 hours, but he agrees to help her. The two of them put on a great performance as a discordant couple, and bribe the impound lot attendant to get access to the car. Jesse finds a University of Miami parking slip in the vehicle and Fiona surmises Sweeney may have taken the Bible there for help in decoding it.
Michael picks around in Dennis's brain a bit more, so Sam can sneak in and search his place. Sam calls Michael to tell him that he's uncovered the existence of more bombs. Michael deduces from his chat with Dennis that they probably have some unreliable radio detonators. Armed with that information, he shows Scott just what Dennis has been up to. Scott tells him that Dennis said Walt is his next target, and where the bomb is. He decides to follow Michael's advice this time, and tries to call Dennis off, getting himself shot. "He's dead," Dennis says, calling Michael from Scott's phone. "Guess who's next?" Aw, Danny Pino. Your character turned into a real jerk this episode, but I'll still kind of miss you.
Michael and Sam find Walt and Alicia at the address given to them by Scott. They find the bomb is inside a mysteriously delivered flatscreen TV. To make things worse, Walt is legally deaf after the South Beach bombing so he can barely hear anything they say.
At the University of Miami, putting Coby Bell's years of chasing suspects on Third Watch to good use, Jesse pursues a guy who dealt with Sweeney. Once caught, the kid confesses that while he couldn't decode the files, he gave him the name of an engineer named Justin Walsh at a place called SXG.
Michael has the insane idea of putting the bomb in the pool, letting it blow up on schedule, and triangulating Dennis's location from the trigger signal. They find out he's in Fiona's neighborhood, and Michael realizes that Scott must have told Dennis about him and Fiona before he was killed. Fiona barely escapes before Dennis shoots her, and the cops turn up shortly thereafter. Realizing that he has to get Dennis to tell him where the bombs are, Michael goes into Fiona's after him, while Sam and Fiona get the cops to stay off their radios, lest the bomb in her house accidentally detonate.
Dennis knows that he's done for, and so does Michael. Appealing to Dennis's need for attention, Michael coaxes the locations of the bombs out of him by pretending that he can finish the crazy man's work for him. Once he has them, he walks out pretending as if Dennis had him taken hostage.
That's when Jesse, radio in hand, decides to detonate the bomb in order to prevent the cops from going in and getting blown up. Without hesitation, he says, "Sometimes you gotta put the rabid dog down." He certainly is right that a lot of cops could have been needlessly killed should Dennis have detonated the bomb when they tried to apprehend him, but it doesn't take a genius to realize that's not his entire motivation. One look at his face makes that clear. Jesse has certainly become a more hardened individual after what he's been through (again, not much of a stretch), and it will be interesting to see how that change of heart will affect his interactions with the other characters.
(I have to laugh at the "spoilers" people leaked for this episode, though. Saying Fiona suffers "a major loss" at Jesse's hands? Monetarily, perhaps, but it's not as if she lost an arm or anything. Wording it like that just seems a big fake-out, not to mention a way to wind up the anti-Jesse fans. Okay, off my soapbox now.)
At home after everything, Michael tells Madeline that even he doesn't know why he does what he does. Her Zen response? "Whatever. Maybe you've got some repressed crap, you know?" Oh, Maddie, how I love you. Especially because you've bought Michael another pair of awesome sunglasses.
With that, Michael's off to meet Jesse, thanking him for taking out Dennis and for saving his life from Barrett's men. The two go to check out Justin Walsh, and they find Walsh has killed Mark Sweeney and taken off with the information they need. "He has a three-day head start," Michael ruminates with a grimace. And here we go again...
As I said in my advance review, I'm impressed by how this episode matches so well with "Guilty As Charged," down to the details. Jason Tracey has written a very attentive script; I feel as if you could run those two episodes together and it would flow perfectly. He also doesn't take the easy way out and jump forward so he can ignore all the loose ends left by the midseason finale; he has the characters affected by what happened. Plus, that callback to the pilot makes me smile every time I watch it. The episode ties up what happened in "Guilty As Charged," while starting us off on a whole new adventure. I can't wait to see where the show takes us next.
It won't take us long to get there. We have just over a month left of Burn Notice: according to listings, the final two episodes of this season will air back-to-back on December 16. I do love, however, how Burn Notice airs right after Nikita. It's a perfect block of spy escapades in the middle of the week. (Shame, though, that Nikita is in reruns for the next three weeks.) Nothing better on a Thursday night than sneaking around, blowing stuff up, and saving the day. Welcome back, Burn Notice.
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