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He is seen in the likeness above in a rare, 19th century woodcut. This
image was rumoured to have been
commissioned after a bout of unpleasantness
in the White Chapel district of London. Do enjoy your stay and peruse our many, varied offerings, much of which cannot be found elsewhere!
:: Burn Notice season 1 ::
by William the Bloody
Michael Westen works for United States government intelligence, or at least he did. In the middle of a bartering deal with a wannabe warlord, Michael's phone call for a money transfer is ended abruptly and with bad results when all the voice on the phone tells him is there is a burn notice on him and he is out. That was that. One day, globe trotting government spy, the next you wake up drugged in a dank Miami hotel unaware of how you got there to find your bank accounts have been frozen, your passport revoked, and all of your agency friends claim to not know you or take your calls. What to do? Michael is from Miami, which both good and bad for him. Good because one of his oldest pals, a former Navy SEAL and retired intelligence agent Sam is about town and is able to get snippets of information on Michael's situation from a "friend of a friend" of someone still in the loop. Bad because, well, Michael's family is there. Michael would have preferred his mother didn't even know he was temporarily "trapped" in Miami, but is ex-girlfriend (and ex-IRA operative) Fiona phoned her up. Without a bank account, Michael is looking for a way to make ends meet while he investigates why he was blacklisted so abruptly, so he takes what he learned being a spy and uses it to take on odd jobs like rescuing kidnap victims and assisting an elderly friend of his mother's who had been swindled out of thousands in cash. Making a few grand in a couple days' worth of high risk work is old hat to Michael, but anything that can get him even a little closer to finding out who issued the burn notice and why is all worth it no matter how many drug dealers, dirty cops, money smugglers, assassins, and pimps he pisses off or hostile phone calls he gets from him mother.
The Good: The premise is actually quite interesting as are the "odd jobs" Michael takes on and how he chooses to work them. The show is in Michael's first person point of view with a voice over narrative. The narrative fills us, the audience, in on Michael's take to a particular situation, his opinions, as well as necessary exposition and quick explanations to what it is he is building (such as a listening or tracking device) and information on the plan he is forming for the task at hand. Now then, the acting by the four main characters, Michael, Sam, Fiona, and Michael's mother, is all quite good for this sort of show. I should take a second to point out that Sam is played by none other than the actor Bruce Campbell, for whom I have a warm and fuzzy soft spot. Yes, Campbell isn't the greatest actor in the universe, but for this show, he works some how. The four of them just mesh so very well, that while this is definitely Michael's show, you could make a convincing argument that it was indeed the ensemble that actually makes it work. The writing is rather smart and sharp, with fun and funny bits sprinkled throughout the intrigue and gun play. The characters develop and progress well, and you honestly do get a good feel for them and what makes them tick.
The Bad: While each episode has a unique situation to it, you can actually refer to this first season as being rather "formula." They go mainly like this: someone proposes a job to Michael, he begrudgingly accepts, he comes up with a cover identity with which to approach the bad guy, Fiona and Sam help Michael build a bomb/plant listening devices/do surveillance/take pictures/infiltrate the bad guy's lair, something doesn't go according to plan, Michael has to improvise, things look bad, but Michael "wins" in the end with even better results than initially hoped for. Mix in Michael getting a small teaser about his burn notice and an annoying phone call from his mother and there's the whole season for you practically. Also, one of the recurring "themes" in the way this show is directed is to "pause" the action for a couple of seconds rather randomly for no reason. I could see good use of this here and there to add emphasis to the voice-over narrative, but this wanton "freeze-framing" happens quite often when there is no voice over or even anything interesting happening.
Overall, I really did enjoy this show. You know how sometimes the first season of a television series can be a little unsteady as it finds itself? This isn't the case at all here. Burn Notice is a spy-mystery-intrigue-thriller-comedy, and it plays this part better than I have seen on TV in a while. Michael is an unlicensed freelancer and as such not feeling particularly restrained by laws or even rules, but more by what's right. Burn Notice is James Bond-meets-MacGuyver, and so far this makes the show every bit as fun as that sounds it would be.
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