Burn Notice "Identity" (2007)

Well after an excellent start I was looking forward to spending more time with our friends in Miami. You know I wish there really were cool people like this Florida. With these guys and the characters from Dexter, you would really have something. Maybe I should go to Miami more often. It is only a half hour away. While the pilot effectively set up the new characters we would be seeing over the course of the series, this episode delved deeper into the relationships between them. We get to see a little more detail about the troubled rift between Michael and his mother and we learn that Sam and Fiona have a history of their own. Of course the two relationships vary from the dramatic to the comedic respectively but both are highly entertaining and make this episode a superb follow-up to the premiere.

In an effort to discover who left the large amount of surveillance photos in his loft, Michael traces the camera angles projected from the pictures outside his mother's home. After a while he heads inside and tries, in vain, to question his mother about any suspicious folks in the neighborhood recently looking for info on him. But Mom would rather talk about her neighbor Laura (Elayne Wilks) who was recently robbed and assaulted by a small group of con artists. I was questioning the motives of the manipulative Madeline with her offer of his assistance with Laura's situation for her assistance with his investigation. I'm not saying she doesn't care about her friend, but I suspect she had a slight ulterior motive as it would give her a chance to see more of her son. Michael reluctantly agrees and he seems visibly shaken when he meets with Laura to discuss what happened. Whatever went on in Michael's life before he became a spy, obviously cost him his desire to be close to people. He seems uncomfortable around Laura, almost afraid to be too sympathetic and view her as an actual person rather than just a job. In the next scene he briefly snaps at Sam when he picks on Michael for helping out little old ladies. Obviously Sam knows when not to push Michael the wrong way and immediately offers to help.When he does finally get the better of the con artists, he returns all the money to all the elderly women who had fallen victim to this scheme. A minor point, but everything we have seen regarding Michael's professionalism is that he sticks to the job at hand and doesn't get distracted, at least until he returned to Miami. He doesn't have to help all these other women who will never know he was responsible for returning their life savings but he does it anyway without the benefit of any kind of reward. He is forced to spend more time with Mom and appears troubled when he finds out she told the men investigating him that he always put family first above all else. Her blunt statement that these lies were better than the truth seems to strike a chord in his otherwise calm veneer and make these family drama scenes, which could easily seem shoehorned into the plot, flow seamlessly with the narrative of the story and provide another dimension into the psyche of our main character.

On the comedic side of the plot, we discover than Sam once burned a deal of Fiona's costing her quite a bit of money. Fiona quickly invites herself to help out Michael in his current assignment once she realizes Sam in also involved and finds herself partnered with him while Michael goes undercover with the con artist. The scenes of the two throwing insults at one another while carrying out their assignments highlights that while both are pros at their jobs (aside from a few slip ups along the way) they are real people who are not as detached as one could expect from people in their trade. Through the course of the episode they grow into an efficient team and learn to have a certain respect for the other's skills. Their good cop/bad cop routine illustrates the true chemistry that these two actors have with one another while throwing in a pop culture in-joke: their aliases as Detective Cagney and Lacey are the main characters of a show co-star Sharon Gless was on in the late 1980s). I look forward to more pairings between these two and hope that just because they have found a way to work together that won't stop them from expressing their true feelings for one another: outright contempt.

Favorite moment: Almost being caught planting bugs on the yacht of the con-artists, Cagney and Lacey pretend to be in a tryst in the master bedroom. A ruse which has Sam being the dog and convincing Fiona that they yacht was his. Her slaps across his face and the silent rage Sam displays at being forced to take the abuse so as not to give themselves up is hysterical. Not to let Fiona take full advantage of the situation, Sam throws her over his shoulder in order to make a faster getaway and largely to prevent her from hitting him again. Michael better be careful or these two will certainly steal the show while he is off helping the next little guy he can't avoid getting involved with.