(Season 2, Episodes 7-9)
After a suspiciously long absence, Tricia Helfer is back as Carla, the woman who is pulling Michael’s strings. The general consensus seems to be that she’s either behind Michael’s burn notice, or has something to do with it, but we still don’t learn much at all about her motives. What we do get, however, is the return of Vince, a former Home Improvement star, and explosions. All and all, it’s a good batch of episodes.
(Season 2, Episode 7 “Rough Seas”)
Michael is still trying to find out more information about that gun he x-ray’d, so he enlists Fiona to help him figure out where they may have been taking it. She hooks him up with Seymour, a coked-up arms dealer who jerks Michael around for the entire episode before actually giving him the info. Turns out, there’s one place in Miami that works on that type of gun, and it was burned to the ground, and the proprietor was murdered. So… yeah. Before they set the fire, though, a man named Bill Johnson got a fiber optic camera and some other mods for the gun, so who knows what they’re planning.
The mission of the week was pretty cute: Virgil came back to help his ex-partner’s daughter retrieve some stolen vaccines, which allowed for more Madeline/Virgil cuteness. Michael tried to keep him away from his mother for most of the episode, due to Virgil’s propensity to be followed around by bullets, but by the end, he relented and Virgil and Madeline went out to dinner.
Michael also got to pretend to be a lab geek, which was pretty amusing to me. The asthma inhaler was a bit of overkill, but the whining about seasickness was pretty funny. I also learned an important lesson: if you want to blow up a vehicle, put some Acetone Peroxide underneath the gas tank before you shoot it. Car go boom.
(Season 2, Episode 8 “Double Booked”)
I really enjoyed everything about this episode. The fact that the mission of the week involved an ex-spy was kind of cool for me, since it kind of made everything flow together. Larry, the ex-spy in question, is now a hired killer who outsources his latest job to Michael. He also mentions something very interesting: Michael’s dossier is floating around, and it talks about how he went off the reservation and started doing unauthorized kills and whatnot. It seems like whoever burned Michael is serious about smearing his reputation, as well.
Michael, of course, doesn’t randomly kill civilians, so he makes it his job to protect the woman whom he was hired to kill from her step-son, Drew (played by Zachary Ty Bryan, aka the oldest son from Home Improvement). Unfortunately, Drew is a total idiot, and ends up getting himself killed by Larry. I guess he had it coming, but he was such a dumbass, that it’s kind of hard not to feel sorry for the guy.
Michael gets a little further in finding out exactly what Carla is up to. He and Sam locate Bill Johnson, who has been forced into acting as a sniper on Carla’s behalf (she’s withholding his pension). Michael doesn’t know who the victim is yet, but the badge that Bill uses to get into the building is the same one from a few episodes ago that Michael had made. So it looks like all of Michael’s jobs that he’s done for Carla have been in service to this one big job that’s coming up. Hopefully, we’ll finally find out exactly what that is in the next episode.
The best part about the episode, though, is that Michael and his mother are trying counseling again. The counselor gives him an assignment: to make a list of five things that he is grateful to his mother for. Michael’s list starts out like this:
Grateful to Mom List:
1. Outfitted me with a cover ID.
I can only hope that thirty years from now, my own son can write something that awesome about me.
(Season 2, Episode 9 “Good Soldier”)
The mission of the week is, quite frankly, pretty boring. Although it was fun to see Michael playing first a divorced alcoholic bodyguard, and then a divorced, alcoholic, bible-thumping bodyguard, the actual kidnapping plot was pretty blah. This could be just due to the fact that this episode had a lot of other things going on: mainly the return of Carla and her nefarious ways.
She finds out that Michael has a copy of the card key and used it to find her sniper’s perch. Apparently, the target is going to be someone on a ferry boat, but Michael has no idea who yet. However, just getting that close may be enough to make Carla change her plans, because right before the job is supposed to be done, Bill Johnson is murdered.
So not only is Bill Johnson not killing whomever he was intended to kill on that boat, but Carla thinks that Michael has outlived his usefulness, as she plants a bomb rigged to his front door. Michael narrowly misses getting blown to bits, and we end on a To Be Continued.
We didn’t get the resolution to Carla’s plan that I was hoping for, but it definitely took an interesting turn. Plus, explosions make everything more fun. I’m still confused as to why exactly Carla needed Michael in the first place; it seems as though other people would have been qualified to do what he has done for her. So I’m looking forward to finding out exactly what is going on in her head, and why she now wants Michael dead. The death thing has to be somewhat of a rash decision, because otherwise, why bother to shake down Nate and threaten Michael’s mother with losing her house? It seems like a lot of unnecessary work if she’s just planning to kill Michael anyway.
Clacked by Kona Gallagher 
on Jul 19, 2009 @ 16:00 EST5EDT
