Bienvenido a Miami de nuevo! Picking up only days after we left off before the winter break, we find Fiona recuperating in bed from her flesh wound, thanks to Nurse Michael. Sam has been asking around about the death of Michael's CIA contact (who took a header off a roof), and while Michael's not a suspect, his plan to get "back in" is definitely dead. So Michael agrees to take on a job Fiona took before she decided to leave for Ireland (which is no longer an option). The job involves an insurance scammer forcing a widow to file a wrongful death suit against the city for her husband's death and turn over the settlement to him. Michael takes on the persona of a tanktop-wearing wheelman to get in good with the insurance scammer (a.k.a. Mr. Sordid Past from the current 24) and his boss/father (Mike Novick from the 24 of yore), and helps them collect money from bikers and even come up with new and creative insurance scams. But when a bug planted by the newly ambulatory Fi reveals that they're gonna run one of Michael's scams themselves, Michael and Sam have to do a little demolition derby to stop some poor sucker from getting nudged in front of a train.
Meanwhile, Sam was unable to charm an old widow at the city records office to get info on a shady doctor who gives a lot of shady diagnoses, so Michael's mom is asked to give it a shot. After all, they have a lot in common: they're the same age, shop at the same stores, smoke the same cigarettes and appeared on the same '80s cop drama. (Sharon Gless and Tyne Daly, together again!) Unfortunately, the two become BFFs, so when Michael needs Madeline to blackmail her new friend into turning over the medical records, Madeline gets really pissed off, since it'll end their friendship and get her friend fired. To her credit, she then does her best impersonation of a stone-cold blackmailer and gets the files, but she won’t talk to Michael for a while. By demolition derbying the scammer into a city vehicle and dumping the files in his car, Michael gets the scammer and his dad arrested, thereby ending all of their scams. And to make things up to his mom, Michael breaks into the city records building to cover up her ex-friend's file theft.
Meanwhile, Sam's perused the call log on Stricklen's cell phone to get a lead on the cleaner who killed Michael's CIA contact. But when Michael goes to check out the guy's hotel, the cleaner is not only not there, he was expecting Michael, and he's rigged his hotel room to catch fire when Michael got there. Tracking the assassin's cell phone with Sam, they find it at an abandoned amphitheater, where he calls Michael to be menacingly British before placing a few sniper rounds into the seating. (He hasn't decided whether or not to kill Michael.) But after Sam figures out from various clues that the assassin is a fabled killer named Gilroy -- and that he knows where Michael lives -- Gilroy calls up Michael and tells him he wants to meet.
-- Zach Oat
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For this half-season premiere, I thought I'd travel to Florida. Now, I'm not in Miami, but up on the Gulf Coast, where there are a lot more walkers than sports cars and any hot young things in town are only here to visit their grandparents. Kind of a different vibe, but at least it's warm. And hey, remember what happened at the end of last season? If not, this episode has one of its rare sets of previouslies. Which I will not recap, because that's what the previous recaps are for.
The opening sets the mood with some obligatory Miami porn, over-edited as always with salsa music as the backdrop. What puts me in a much better mood is that this segues into Fiona in her bed. In pain. Michael's putting some fresh stitches in the bullet hole in her arm, which you'd think would have healed in the five months since we last saw them. But some expository dialogue lets us know it's only been a couple of weeks for them, even though she's still managed to pop the stitches twice. Michael tells her to hold still lest she do some serious damage, and of course she threatens any damage will be done to him. He finishes up and invites her to go ahead, then easily blocks the punch she throws up at him. She says he's lucky the sedatives are kicking in, and as she starts to drift off, Michael VOs about the advantages of doing your own field medicine: "No conversations with the police, the food's better, and the relationship between patient and caregiver is very close." Then Fi throws another punch, which, since his guard was down this time, connects. "Gotcha," she says smugly. Dude, what is up with her, anyway? Stitch up your own arm, asshole. "That last one can be a disadvantage as well," Michael's VO adds. Yes, especially when it's Fi.
Michael emerges from the sickroom (or sicko-room, as the case may be) to see Sam waiting for him at Fi's kitchen table. Sam admits that he "actually felt a little bad" when he thought she was leaving town. Funny, I feel worse now that I know she can never return to Ireland. Sam's been working on some research while Michael was working on Fi, and has learned that Diego Garza's death is being investigated by various intelligence agencies. The good news, at least, is that there were enough witnesses who saw Michael at the scene to rule him out as a suspect. The bad news? "Operation Unburn Michael Westen is officially off," Sam says. His current project is looking through the phone Michael took from Strickler, hoping to find out who killed Diego. The best lead among all the chaff is a hotel in South Beach. Sam offers to come along as backup, but Michael would rather Sam hang back and take care of Fi. Yeah, so would I. Oh, wait, he doesn't mean "take care of" her in that way. Never mind.
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