Burn Notice Mind Games

Madeline, his mother, holding a screaming infant, Michael Weston asked his brother: "Are you sure it doesn't need medical attention?" Calmly, Nate responded "his name is Charley… your nephew just needs a nap," then thanked Madeline for the "thoroughly cooked" meatloaf. His wife, Ruth, had chosen to miss the homecoming meal in favor of a pedicure which Michael pointed out in the garage when he was demanding the "real" reason Nate had moved back to Miami. Exasperated, Nate revealed that he had been attending Gambler's Anonymous and needed to get out of Vegas. M told him that he was welcome to help fix the charger and surmised that it needed a carburetor. He and Fiona had moved in together and, as expected, she had begun to rag on him to shred all his burn documents. In voice-over M talked about "Post Operation Paranoia" because he was shown to erroneously attack a guy who he had spotted following him then slammed awake during a nightmare pointing his under-the-pillow gun toward the loft door. Sam got him a gift certificate for a massage at the Darabant Hotel, owned by his new girlfriend Elsa, in order that he didn't go "crazy, crazy." That didn't sit well with M and he left the certificate on the table when he went to answer Nate's call for help. Jessica, the wife of a recently deceased gambling friend, was being targeted by Carter, a loan shark wanting to collect her husbands 100 grand worth of debt. She said that Carter was going after her fathers fishing boat, the only thing of value she had. When she confessed that the only thing she could pay them was in was free yogurt, Nate knew that M would help.

 

Sam showed that Carter had a "rep of squeezing people until they were squeezing plasma" and that his boss, Wallace, was suspected in a couple of murders. Ms idea was to convince them that the boat they wanted was mixed up in a police investigation to get them to back off. M put on a shirt from the "Nate Weston Collection" and pretended to be Trey, another loan shark from Vegas who also owned some of the debt. M finally was able to convince Carter that he had connections who could forge ownership documents for the boat which they could then just take and got an audience with Wallace. As part of the scam, M decided to have Fiona and Sam plant fake documents and a gun in Carter's apartment which would convince Wallace that Carter was a police plant. After they had given Carter the fake documents, and he had visited the phony boat with Wallace, M had Jesse act as a police informant to plant the seed of doubt that Carter was an undercover cop. When Wallace went to challenge Carter, his men actually found evidence that Carter was really an undercover FBI agent! M had to call "audibles" in order to switch to "plan C" and have Sam and Fiona "sweep up" Carter when they took him for interrogation to Key Biscayne and M figured a way to let him escape. As M through a fake punch at Carter he whispered "I'm under-cover too… come out swinging" and cut loose his bonds. Carter did escape and was angry that they had ruined his six months worth of under-cover work. M convinced Wallace that he could get them new identities in Vegas so they would go back to their office and load up all their records. When Wallace went out to the car, Carter and his FBI buddies were there waiting to arrest him.

 

Carter didn't seem to want to ask any questions about Ms involvement and thanked him for "saving my life." M was upset that they had nearly "got a good man killed."  Sam said "nobody said what we do is easy." As Jessica was handing him a certificate for "free yogurt for life," M told her about Carter and that she would have only been put in witness protection. Nate wanted to talk to M about "addiction." He said that he had been up $700 at the Horseshoe Casino and couldn't leave the table at 11:42 on the Thursday morning Charley was born. "That was rock bottom," Nate said. "No one can tell you to stop… until you're ready. And it doesn't look like you're ready." Uncharacteristically, M asked "what do you think I should do Nate?"  "I think you should see this through," Nate said, "either you're gonna find out that you are crazy, or maybe this thing with you being burned isn't over. Either way it's gonna hurt." Back at the loft, Fiona woke up to find that M was over at the table going through all the burn papers she wanted him to shred. He told her that he had found many inconsistencies and when she launched into her typical tirade it was obvious that he had decided on a new tactic to take with her: tell her what she wanted to hear and do what he thought best anyway. She said that he should come to bed and she would help him go over them one more time in the morning. He told her that he would "be right there."