Burn Notice Sins of Omission

Michael Westen asked Fiona to show Victor’s photo around to "her people" just as Sam brought Madeline in to rag on him. Madeline was going to have to stay with M because of the danger with both Carla and Victor. Noise coming up the stairs unannounced sent them all scurrying for guns and even Madeline picked up a butcher knife. It was “Sam” (Samantha) Ms previously unrevealed ex-fiancé!  Samantha admitted that she had found M by breaking into his mother’s house and finding his address in her kitchen drawer. She was a thief who a black-market trader, Tyler Brennen, had made her steal an important piece of prototype guidance hardware from a A.F.C. Industries as a ransom for her kidnapped son. Now before the payoff, she decided to involve M to get her son back. Of course she made it sound like her nine-year-old son could be Ms although she denied that he was. They decided that they should grab Brennan after he had released the boy and while they were scouting the place Fiona delivered a speech so hokey that must have been written by a soap-box drama writer.  While M was hanging out at Carlito’s not wanting to go home, Sam brought information on Victor; he was involved in black-ops and murder – "you were just the first one he had missed." M said that if Carla’s people burned him it was all fiction. Sam said that in July ’03 a job got bloody in Mexico. "Victor denied the hits but Philip Cowan burned him anyway!" M said that after 5 years working for Carla alone Victor may be ready to make a new friend. Sam warned that “Victor was a lot like you, only you know, with rabies.”

 

When M snuck back into the loft, Madeline was waiting up to take another run at a soap-box drama sequence and nosily demanded to know everything. He told her: "She’s a Pisces, does 'security' and hasn’t been in my life in 10 years." Victor called wondering why M hadn’t shot at him the previous night – he wondered if M was trying to make friends. M said they had “so much in common, we should meet.” Victor said he would, but it would be a surprise and called him “sport.” Brennen came, took the chip, but delivered Charlie with a bomb planted inside an arm cast with a remote detonator. Therefore they had to let him get away. However, M wouldn’t let Samantha just get on a plane and disappear. He argued the point that Charlie was only seven (not nine like she had intimated) and it wasn’t fair to drag him to a hut in Nicaragua. They had until Friday to return the chip so decided to work a con on Brennen. When M returned, Sam and Fiona were on the steps of the loft because Madeline was “like a chimney” and “miss commando” wanted to do an armed assault on Brennen’s condo. M and Fiona broke into Brennen’s apartment without cover IDs, claiming to be disaffected ex-partners of Samantha’s who could help Brennen keep the chip safe because Samantha was coming after it. In his condescending, smug, arrogant manner Brennen said he just didn’t believe them, so they said he should check them out and call.

 

Carla said that M had truly given her good information, but it was ridiculous to think that he could “get his life back.” He demanded that she keep her promise and back off her goons so the guy doing the bombing would make contact. She said that she couldn’t give much time because “Management’s… getting anxious”; and M said to “tell them I know the feeling.” Brennan called M and took he and Fiona to an airplane hangar at gunpoint, calling Fiona “punkin.” Brennen had the chip in the air 23 hrs. a day and it landed to have a tech check to make sure that Samantha hadn’t taken a piece out of it as M had told him that she had. When the tech said that it was "all there," Brennen was going to shoot them both; except, that just at that time, Victor was staking them out and M used him to sell his cover story midst a blaze of gunfire. Brennen hired M and Fiona to make his hanger “secure” for 5% of the sale price “if it worked out.”  Then Victor phoned and called M an “enigma wrapped in schizophrenia” for first not shooting and then "setting up the firing squad.” M told him that it was nothing personal he just had to sell a cover ID; but, if he waited till Friday he could keep guns out of the equation. Back with Madeline, in her obligatory nosey-body segment, sneaked up on Samantha and wanted to know all about their engagement. M just happened to be outside the door listening. Samantha said that it was she who had proposed to M.  They had fun, she said, but one day he just said goodbye and he was gone. It was over and she never knew why. Of course, Madeline said "that sounds like Michael."

 

M and Fiona did the scam and Sam and Samantha snuck into Brennen's hanger in a false compartment of a truck; but, Brennen changed the plan and closed the hanger for the sale. M protested but was told that Brennen didn’t need Ms precautions he had just wanted to keep him where he could keep eyes on him. Inside the hanger with the door shutting, Sam improvised and began shooting when the buyers landed. That way there were scared off and Samantha drove a stolen car around and picked him up just to seal the point. M pointed out that when Samantha knew she’d be caught, because she couldn’t get the chip, she did the next best thing and took Brennen down with her. Brennen came up with the idea that M could put the chip back – and that was what M wanted all along. M didn’t admit it, but said that the only way out for all of them was to put the chip back – which Brennen very angrily allowed them to do, all the while casting treats at M. M and Samantha put it back, but the only way they could do it was to get out “dirty” with blasting and alarms going off. Brennan ostensibly was then on the run from his South American contacts and Samantha said she was giving up stealing in order to live with her son in Chicago. She was also supposed to never let Brennen find out that they were working together.

 

Madeline was feigning sleep, when M got back to the loft and explained to Fiona that Samantha and he had worked because they both lied and seemed to fit each other… "it was easy." Then, he said, he met Fiona and knew that he and Samantha couldn’t work, so he left her. He said that Fiona knew a side of him that Samantha didn’t, but "it was NEVER easy." He said left Samantha “because you don’t marry someone when you love somebody else.” The next day, M woke Madeline up by shocking himself with a Taser he was making out of a throwaway camera. He told her that, if his meeting with Victor went well, she could go home and not have to “pretend to sleep” in his bed. She opinioned that he had “picked the right girl.” Meeting Victor in the restroom of the Dade County Police Office, Victor would not agree to talk about any why or wherefores leaving M no choice but to zap him, conk him on the sink, wrap him in gauze and smuggle him out in a wheelchair for questioning. Hopefully in the next episode.