Oh, Don't Let Tears Fool You Mikey

I've been watching my recently acquired Burn Notice Season 4 collection. I was planning to watch one episode a day, then I had Sunday off (first true day off in 3 weeks) and wound up blowing through 13 episodes. It's been nice, since I missed quite a bit of the season when it originally aired, so there were episodes I hadn't seen, and it's given me a better sense of who Vaughn was. I hadn't grasped why he specifically was after Michael in the season finale, rather than someone else in his organization.

Watching the show, I realized there seem to be a lot of episodes where the threat is thought to be a guy, but turns out to be a woman, and our heroes always seem thrown by this. At least I was able to come up with at least 3 examples off the top of my head. It makes me wonder if Michael has a blind spot. We know he has a tendency to be dismissive of bureaucrat types, because someone sent to kill him posed as one to get him to drop his guard. Maybe this is another one, where he doesn't tend to consider women threats, but rather as protector types. Which would relate to his particular upbringing, with his lousy dad. It was definitely used against him when an assassin portrayed herself as a mother trying to hunt down her abusive husband who has taken their son away from her to get Michael to find the man for her, but the other two examples didn't bring that into play. Rather, Michael, Fi, and Sam just didn't seem to consider the possibility the threat could be a woman. She puts on the waterworks, or poses as an efficient personal assistant, and they wind up fooled.

Considering how dangerous Fiona can be, it's an odd blind spot for Michael to have. He really ought to know better. Sam did note that Fiona is the only woman Mikey had a relationship with (Sam not knowing about Mike's engagement to a thief named Sam), so perhaps Michael regards her behavior as typical for women. As she's on his side, it's not really threatening (Fi might punch him in the face, but she's highly unlikely to kill him). So he's accustomed to it, and doesn't react when he sees similar signs in other women. Yeah, that's a lousy explanation. I guess the spy and criminal trades could still be male-dominated and so it's playing the odds says the threat would be a guy.