Burn Notice – “Company Man” – review

Season 4 ended with Michael being debriefed in Washington, DC, welcomed back by the man who recruited him to the CIA (a.k.a., “The Company”). Season 5 opened with a montage of Michael working alongside his recruiter Raines (Dylan Baker) and CIA agent Max (Grant Show) to neutralize more than thirty operatives named on the NOC list. Officially, however, Michael was still burned, which gave him a little more freedom to interrogate people and get to the man behind the organization.

An operative apprehended in Canada gave the mastermind’s name as Kessler and gave up the location of Kessler’s compound in Caracas, Venezuela. Michael convinced Raines to let him bring along Fiona and Sam in addition to Max’s official team. Jesse, meanwhile, had been exonerated, but had quit intelligence work to join a private security firm.

In Venezuela, the CIA’s plan was to bribe Comandante Armando Puente (Carlos Sanz), who supervised a checkpoint through which Kessler regularly drove on the way to his compound. If all went according to plan, Kessler would pass through the checkpoint without his security and be apprehended by the CIA.

Fiona and Sam were assigned minor roles in the operation, which took almost half the episode to set up. Things went awry, of course, and the size and structure of the operation were partially to blame. Kessler somehow found out the CIA was watching him and jammed their signals. He then hid from Michael and Max in a steel-reinforced safe room of his compound. Michael finally got into the safe room by sneaking a grenade through the ventilation system. Michael and Max entered the room to discover Kessler had killed himself, meaning Michael would never know why he was burned in the first place.

The premiere was definitely a change from Burn Notice‘s client/case-of-the-week formula. As often as Michael has dreamed of having the CIA’s backing over the course of four seasons, I don’t want to see Burn Notice become a traditional spy show. I still want to know how Kessler discovered the CIA was watching. Perhaps Raines or Max betrayed Michael. Perhaps their taking down everyone on the NOC list was a set-up. On the other hand, if we take the premiere’s events at face value, Michael has pursued the mystery of his burn notice as far as possible, and now he’ll have to move on. For the first time in the show’s history, there was no hint of a larger mission that would take up the first half of the season.