Seen it Because I'm a Spy

 Every spy themed form of entertainment always seems to end the same way. Stop me if you’ve heard this before: the guy gets the girl, his ideals are unwearied, and he saves the entire operation when everything seemed hopeless. This all, of course, just after a main character sacrifices himself for the good of the team. Oh, you HAVE heard it before? That’s exactly why Burn Notice took the complete opposite route in their series finale and decided to defy stereotypes! The writers completely avoided predictability by changing up the formula completely.

Burn Notice is a series about a man named Michael Scott who was “burned” from the CIA and acts as a hired intelligence advisor and spy while burned. Throughout much of the series, he wants to once again become an agent for the CIA. However, he eventually begins to come to terms with the seemingly corrupt nature of the CIA and lives his own life. That is, until they give him the opportunity to rejoin. He goes undercover to help bring down one of the CIA’s targets, until he once again realized just how corrupt they were with killing people.

Well if the good guys aren’t the good guys, then that must mean the bad guys are the good guys. Right? Well this seems to be Michael’s way of thinking because he briefly joins them in their escape from the CIA. Of course, until the girl in danger, and that is where we find ourselves beginning the final episode. Think of how intense this moment is. A gun is pointed at his long time love interest. He must think of a way to save her without compromising what he now knows to be his new guidelines and morals. He doesn’t want her to die. YOU don’t want her to die. How is he going to get out of this one?

He shoots his new friends of course! Wait- that means that he’s on no side now, the he’s on his own side. So he’s back to his old ways. He’s back to being his own team. He thinks he can bring down the bad guys while he is being chased by the CIA. Well, obviously that’s not a good idea because this puts his family in danger as well. Don’t worry though, because Michael’s mother came up with a plan to keep him and the rest of the family out of harm while Michael is trapped with sensitive information. She’s going to blow herself up with the guys coming to get her, while the rest of the family is safely hidden!

Then, of course, Michael now just wants to live for himself and doesn’t care about what side he’s on, kind of like how he used to think for a lot of the series. This, of course, leads him to take down the leader. This means that he won! That is, except for that bomb James, the boss, had to blow up the building. In the climactic scene, Michael dies with the girl. You can sigh that sigh of relief you were holding in now, because this does not at all end like a typical spy story.

Wait what’s this?  Is it more scenes? Is Michael alive? Yes, yes he is. It looks like his significant other escaped too. They jumped out the window and survived, I should’ve expected it. Well at least they didn’t have his unwavering resolve at the end. Although, I guess it was unwavering because he originally disliked and wanted nothing to do with the CIA.  Much like it is now. No one sacrificed themselves! Well, no one else except for Michael’s grandma who is technically a main character. Okay well at least he didn’t move to his dream house with his dream girl. Wait, he did. That was the last scene. So, I guess it is just a typical spy form of entertainment. Totally should have seen all of that coming.

Ozymandias

To be honest, if you haven’t at least heard about Breaking Bad at this point, you are a really special person in your own aspect.  Therefore, for those who are not typically the type to watch television and its hit shows, I’ll try to depict a portrait of what’s happened so far. Walter White, a man with a son, a wife, and a daughter on the way, contracts lung cancer and believes he is about to die.  Walter White is a man who would do anything for his family. He is a chemistry school teacher with an absolute passion for science. He is the type of man who takes a back seat to his brother-in-law as a role model for his own son, Walter Jr. He is a typically nice man who rolls with the punches and doesn't let his feathers get ruffled. He is the type of man who has never, allowed his problems to get the best of him while he lets them sit in the back of his mind. He is a lover and not a fighter. Most importantly, he is a genius. In what appears to be his first act of defiance, he wants to fight for his family. Of course, he picks a fight against three of the most abstract and surreal opponents: time, poverty, and death.

In order to win, Walter needs a way to make money.  He needs money for chemotherapy, to beat time, and money for any treatment thereafter, to beat death. After teaming up with Jesse, a former student, he begins to cook Meth Amphetamine. He doesn’t make just any Crystal Meth, because that would just make a boring show. Remember, Walt is a genius, and therefore he makes the purest form of Crystal Meth the Drug Enforcement Agency has ever seen. Of course, in order to make money from this, he needs a network to sell his goods. To make good money, he must therefore team up with The first four seasons deal with the family problems this secret causes Walter, the trouble he must avoid with his DEA agent brother-in-law, and the psychopathic distributors of the product that Walter must work for and eventually overcome. However, this last season has dealt with Walter’s creation of his own distribution empire for his product.

I should probably also mention the dramatic change in character Walter goes through throughout the series. In order to keep his identity a secret, Walter goes by the guise of Heisenberg. This Heisenberg, however, is literally a completely new person. Heisenberg is the antithesis of Walter White. He is the type of man who would kill someone to save his own life. He is a fighter not a lover. He is the type of person who refuses to let someone control him. He is the type of man who thinks five steps ahead of everyone and uses emotions as a tool to manipulate those closest to him. He is the type of person who actually battles his brother-in-law for his own son’s affection. So how is it that these two completely contradicting personalities have existential equality within the same man?  Well this episode seems to answer just that question.

I apologize for the lengthy recap, but it’s hard to run a review for a four season long character development.  This post, however, is mostly related to the most recent episode, “Ozymandias”. Any quick Google search of “Ozymandias” will leave you with a poem by Percy Shelley about a man who lost an empire. I think it’s the perfect title for the episode

Warning, this will contain spoilers. To start with, Walt’s DEA agent brother-in-law, Hank, is shot dead in front of Walter. Walter’s whole reason to begin cooking Meth was to protect his family. He wanted to leave them with enough money after his death so they could comfortably live life without him. Hank, although not his immediate family, is a close part of it. In the past season, Walt went as far as to put himself in danger to keep Hank safe. Once hank’s life was in danger, he immediately notified the authorities and quickly dealt with the threat. He attempted to deal with this threat many times prior, but once his family was in danger he knew he needed to come up with a fool-proof plan to dispose of the mass distributor, Gustavo. Up until the last episode, we can tell Walt is still close enough with his family to do anything for them. He attempts to leave them behind by going out on his own, but knows he cannot leave them. Through this we still see a little bit of Walter in-tact. However, I believe that when he sees his brother-in-law die, after trying so hard to save him, he knows for sure that he has to leave himself behind, in order to protect his family by leaving them behind. This, in a sense, is the beginning of the end of Walter White.

Walter could probably win the lottery for the least lucky man in the world though, because of course his whole life would fall apart at once. His family, whom he has held so dear up to this point, seems to want nothing to do with him upon the discovery of Hank’s death. His wife, Skyler, tells Walter Jr the big secret.  This may come as a shock to many of you, like it did to Walter Jr., but Walter was cooking Meth. Walter gets into a physical altercation with Skyler and his own son calls the police on him. His own son, whose affection Walter had finally received after years of competing with Hank, calls the police on Walter. The emotional torment that Walter must have been presented with couldn’t be any harder to imagine. He just lost everything dear to him. In a fit of rage and anguish he kidnaps his own baby daughter. It is his last resort to try to hold onto the humanity he knows as Walter White.

He soon realizes though, that his whole family is still in danger with the DEA. Skyler’s been laundering money for him, and if the DEA finds out, his children grow up without a parent. He knows he must make it clear to DEA that all the blame is to be put on him. He calls Skyler, possibly for the last time in this series. During this blatantly tapped phone conversation, he yells at her. Walter screams into the phone, “…you were always whining and complaining about how I make my money while I do everything.” Skyler knows what he’s done with this well worded sentence and for that she is grateful. Meanwhile, Walter is holding back tears because he knows what this means. He can never talk to his family if he is able to escape. The one thing keeping him from completely turning into Heisenberg must be left behind. With that he has lost everything. He has lost his empire, he has lost his family. Most importantly, he has lost himself. He may have fully transitioned into Heisenberg, but he is more than that. He is Ozymandias.