At the start of “Burn Notice,” Season 5, Episode 15, “Depth Perception,” Madeline slaps her son Michael silly and orders him out of her house for not being fully candid about the true nature of her now-dead boyfriend Benny.
This episode is not beginning well for Michael. Spoilers follow.
Michael and company are required by Anson to retrieve $200 million from a Cayman bank account that has been flagged by a number of intelligence and law enforcement agencies. This jobs falls to Fi and Jesse.
This turns out to be a pleasure as well as business. The banker, a sleazy piece of work named Anders, has been a moneyman to a variety of drug dealers and terrorists. They use this to blackmail Anders into coughing up the money. Instead, Anders shows up to the meeting place with a gun – a bad move, as it turns out.
Plan B for Anders is for him to hand over the money, take as much money as he can from his evil clients, have Fi and Jesse fake his death, and then for him to hide for the rest of his life. This is a process that is both difficult and humiliating.
In the meantime, Beatriz, Sam’s old friend from his Colombian adventure, shows up in Miami with a problem. That problem is in the form of a Russian assassin who is miffed about a series of stories she wrote about the dirty dealings of Russian oil companies in South America.
Michael is forced to use Anson’s profiling skills to try to identify the assassin. His name is Oscar and was apparently by one of Beatriz’s stories. The trail leads to a Russian front company in Miami and Oscar’s handler, a man named Boskow. Boskow knows who Michael is and tells him to back off or he’ll be killed. Michael will not do this, of course, so long a his friends are in peril.
Finally Michael convinces Boskow to bring Oscar in from the code with a story that Beatriz is a Russian agent working off the books. This succeeds and all are safe again.
But not really. Sam has a plan to use his FBI contacts to find a way to deal with the Anson problem once and for all. But Anson has spread the word that if Beatriz is a Russian agent, Sam must be too. The resulting investigation has neutralized Sam for the time being.
There is something else. A big reveal.
Ready?
Anson had been gathering intelligence on Michael for a long time. This involved long, drunken conversations with Michael’s abusive father, who like many abusive fathers was sorry for what he had done. But he will never get a chance to say he is sorry. Michael’s dad got too suspicious and had to have a heart attack, courtesy of Anson.
“You’re welcome,” says Anson to Michael.