‘Burn Notice’ 5.09 Recap: “If You’re Lying, I’ll Kill You”

Last week’s episode of ‘Burn Notice’ was half good, and half not so good. I like the storyline with Michael and Sam kidnapping a bomb maker to find out what he knows about Michael’s situation, but Jesse and Fiona’s extracurricular job really gets on my nerves.

In ‘Eye for an Eye’, Michael and Sam find the man who made the bomb that tried to blow up Michael on the boat. They get this information from an international gangster. They go to kidnap him and find out that he’s an old war criminal living a somewhat anonymous life in Miami repairing clocks. He also makes bombs on the side. You know, when he feels like it. By the way, a guy who has a metal grate on the floor designed to electrocute any unwanted intruders is probably a guy you don’t want to be messing with. That’s pretty ingenious, really.

Meanwhile on the Jesse and Fiona front, Jesse gets a new private security job. He has to protect one of the world’s leading pharmacologists who invented an anti-viral medicine that could save the world. Unfortunately, he’s a bit of a douche. He has patented the gene sequence and locked it away in a safe. Afraid that someone has been snooping around his house, he hires Jesse to find out what’s been going on.

Jesse and Fiona soon find the culprit, but are surprised to discover that it’s the long lost partner of their client. Turns out that their client is just a big fat fraud, and this other guy is the real deal. What I don’t like about this storyline is that Jesse and Fiona take the new guy at his word so quickly that it’s almost like they have no control over their Robin Hood Complexes. They jump to help the downtrodden victim after just a few short seconds of talking to him. It just feels a little forced, is all.

That’s really the only part of the episode that I don’t like, though. The rest of it is pretty fun, especially once Michael gets involved in Jesse and Fiona’s plot to overthrow the douchebag medicine inventor. Michael plays the part of an unhinged stalker pretty well. The scene where he gets into the car with the guy and starts blowing up random cars with a remote is hilarious, although you have to wonder why the team has no qualms in blowing up innocent people’s cars.

It’s fun to see the pharmacologist descend into a state of manic madness after he realizes that a crazy person is after him. That’s when he gets careless, and the team is able to get the information from his safe that they desperately need.

Back to the other story: The bomb maker is less than helpful in giving up the friend who commissioned him to build the bomb. Then Michael and Sam pull their trump card. They threaten to deport his daughter. Before he can talk, the cavalry rolls in to silence this little interrogation. Michael and Sam escape the rapid gunfire, but the bomb maker isn’t so lucky. When his friend double-crosses him, he in turn gives Michael knowledge of where to find the guy who just shot up the interrogation warehouse.

All in all, this is another solid episode of ‘Burn Notice’, even if the beginning is a little ham-fisted. Oh, and isn’t it amazing that these guys can literally make bombs out of anything whenever they need to? Sam unscrews a couple of pipes there at the end and… BOOM!… easy escape.

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