Burn Notice – “No Good Deed” – review

“No Good Deed” opens with Michael and Max (Grant Show) planting a tracking device on a computer thief. They follow the tracking device to Vaxelar Investments, a shell company with ties to the French government. From there, they must break into a room monitored by thermal sensors.

Meanwhile, in the case of the week, money launderer Barry asked the team’s help for his brother, Paul (John Ross Bowie), an honest money manager under whose watch a server had been stolen from a teachers’ credit union. While Michael once again split time between the two cases, Fiona, Sam, and Jesse followed the suspected thief (“The Big Show” Paul Wight), who had worked as a janitor at the credit union. Under pressure, he revealed that he worked for a young hacker named Eve (Aviva Farber).

Michael first approached Eve as someone looking to hire her, but she was clever enough to see through his cover. Being held captive by Eve, Michael switched to pretending he was a fellow crook. In this guise, he turned Eve against her partners.

Balancing the case of the week and Michael’s CIA work has been tricky so far this season. “No Good Deed” did a decent job of it. Eve seemed young to me, almost a girl playing with grown-ups, but that was probably part of how she outsmarted people. She was one of Burn Notice‘s more volatile villains, capturing Michael and getting the drop on the rest of the team.

Back on the CIA case, Michael fooled the thermal sensors at Vaxelar by turning up the heat. This allowed Michael and Max’s body heat to go unnoticed as they broke in. Once they broke in, the thief’s computer was in the open, and Max was able to copy the stolen file. This seemed too easy to me, and indeed, when Michael rendezvoused with Max at the end, he found Max shot and bleeding to death.

Framed for Max’s murder, Michael will have to uncover the real killer if he hopes to continue the process of being reinstated. The process has dragged on too long, if you ask me. The writers could have fully reinstated Michael between Seasons 4 and 5. Instead, reinstatement turned out to be the latest tease in the show’s history. I’m not that upset about it. The show definitely works better if Michael has no official backing, if he’s on the run, trying to figure out a larger mystery.