Here be SPOILERS for the BURN NOTICE series 6 finale!
I was excited because I actually had a comment on one of my entries. I know about three people a month read this blog and that doesn’t bother me. When I get comments, though, I get excited. But apparently I’ve upset someone. I can’t say who, because they didn’t leave their name. I read the comment. I read it again. And it really pissed me off. Why? Probably not for the reason you’d think.
I wrote down my reactions to the Burn Notice season 6 finale. In it I stated why I was angry with Michael. This, apparently, did not go down well with one commenter:
Let’s put aside the obvious lack of spelling and full versions of words. That does not annoy me. (I know, you’re surprised, right? Me, one of the grammar police, not upset by a non-phonemic short-form used in a context not suitable for getting your point across? It must be Thursday.) Let’s also put aside the name-calling; it’s irrelevant. Let’s get to the crux of the matter:
“He promised Sam he'd make things right”
Yes, he did. Whose definition of ‘right’ are we going by? Sam was ready to go on the run, wounded or no. He didn’t think turning everyone in was ‘right’. How about Fi? She obviously did not want Michael taking any help from the CIA, friendly or not. Jesse? He looked like he was ready to go with any one of a million suggestions, except turning everyone in. So it was Michael’s own definition of ‘right’. At the end of the day, yes, you have to trust your own instincts. But the fact that everyone else would not have agreed might have been enough to ring alarm bells. We’ve seen this before - he goes off on one, entangling his friends in ops and using/abusing their relationship as a team to get things done. What happened then? His mother verbally slapped him and told him to wake up and see what he was doing. She saved him. The team saved him. And now he’s done it all over again. He’s decided, rightly or wrongly, that his solution is the only one, and there’s no point sharing his plan with the team because they either ‘wouldn’t understand how delicate it is’ or they wouldn’t get his angle on the ‘mission’. Either way, he listened to the team, yes - but then he just rode roughshod over them anyway.
“weather he gets locked up, or got a job back in, he got every else out, and everyone is ok, HE DID WHAT HE HAD TO DO TO KEEP HIS PROMISE TO SAM”
Yes, he was keeping his promise to Sam. But in what way? Keeping everyone out of prison was ‘making it right’, but after the way Sam was all ‘last time I said goodbye to my lady, she was crying’, do you honestly think he’d consider what Michael has done to his and Fi’s relationship ‘making it right’? And on the subject of keeping promises, when he and Fi set fire to his loft, what did she say? ‘This was the first place we lived together.’ And he said, ‘It won’t be the last’. Now I wouldn’t go so far as to call that a promise, but I think for Michael it’s right up there with Things He Must Make Happen - so when and how is he going to put that right?
“Fiona is mad, but whatever he did, he did it because it was best for the entire team”
Entire team? Leaving Fi with no contacts, no business, no home of her own - that was what was best for the entire team? And leaving Sam and Jesse to stop Fi from taking on stupidly dangerous jobs for money (since all their accounts were either frozen or are being watched), as well as figuring out where they all stand without their fourth member of the team (some would argue, leader of the team) - was that best for the entire team? Assuming Michael is either working for them or going to prison, if Fi becomes the unofficial head of their three-man-band now, what happens to her and Michael giving up these petty jobs and getting on with their lives? Is that what Michael wants for her, to be doing these jobs, possibly recklessly depending on her headspace?
I still consider what Michael did to be wrong. There were other ways. He should have thought about the entire team before doing what he did. And that’s it.
P.S. ‘Retard’ actually means ‘a person who has a mental disability (often used as a general term of abuse). I’m not sure on all the definitions of ‘mental disability’, but I do know I manage to work in two different primary schools correcting and re-inventing curricula. You might have noticed I also blog a fair bit, so you can judge my level of mental ability for yourself.
P.P.S. I can also refute the accusation of being ‘dumb’ because (1) I can speak, and (2) I have certificates and qualifications from Cambridge. I managed to pass the courses, and, at last formal testing, am a few points inside Mensa membership cut-offs.
Thank you for your time - and commenting! It's actually been fun to tease out why I disagreed (and I'm not even being sarcastic).
~ Burn Notice ~ Michael Westen ~ Fiona Glenanne ~ Sam Axe ~ Jesse Porter
No comments:
Post a Comment