Burn Notice takes a break from the client-of-the-week formula with “Enemy Of My Enemy”…unless you consider the United States of America a client, buddy! Michael’s gig comes courtesy of the CIA, which has accidentally misplaced a Predator drone. Miami arms dealers have sold this high-tech weapon to a Serbian crime syndicate, which is apparently a good enough reason for Michael to set aside his quest for Max’s real killer.
Michael comes up with a “Yojimbo ploy” to find the missing drone: He finds out where local heroin kingpin Carmelo Dante (Todd Stashwick) hides his stash house, intercepts a half-million dollars worth of junk along the way, and leaves Sam at the scene of the crime to direct Carmelo to the Serbians on the pretext that they’ve stolen his drugs. Now, this is why I could never be a spy, or even write a TV show about a spy. You could give me a million years and I’d never come up with this ridiculous plan. It takes a certain leap of imagination to think, “Well, this is a pretty sticky situation here with these Serbians stealing advanced U.S. weaponry—why don’t we bring some drug dealers into the mix?”
Ridiculous though it may be, there are enough moving parts here to ensure the episode is never boring, and that’s even before we get to the part where Fiona and Maddie team up to find the Michael Westen impersonator. Their plan involves—wait for it—adopting terrible Southern accents! I tell ya, it’s like a disease on this show, and Michael has infected everyone with accentitis westenis. Anyway, I didn’t really buy how easily the ladies were able to convince the county clerk to let them in the back room so they could use facial recognition software to copy the Westen lookalikes from the DMV database, and I’m still not sure how they narrowed down the 86 matches to the one they settled on. But again, this is why I’m not a spy.
In case you were worried Jesse got left out of the improv class this week, he did get to play “extremely buff drug addict” in a scene with the Serbians, which probably amused me more than it should have. I’m still not sure why Jesse is still hanging around, unless it’s to get killed at some crucial moment and set up some more blood vengeance, but he has his moments. That’s basically how I feel about “Enemy Of My Enemy” as a whole; it’s a pretty disposable hour, but the energy rarely flags, aside from a few regrettable interludes with Fiona whining about Michael taking too many chances and putting Sam in danger. (Since when does she care about that?) There are many Burn Notice episodes. This was one of them.
Stray observations:
- Carmelo appeared once before, in a first season episode of which I have no recollection. (The Burn Notice mythology does not exactly adhere itself to the deeper recesses of my memory.) Either he never encountered Sam in that episode, or we were meant to believe those glasses gave him Clark Kent-like powers of disguise.
- Speaking of things I barely remember, I guess Manero and his buddy were in the Fall of Sam Axe movie I reviewed just a few months ago, right? I tell ya, this show just goes in one eye and out the other.