Burn Notice

(in the middle of a firefight) Max: Is this seriously the way you do things? Michael: When I have to. Max: How are you still alive? Michael: That's a good question. (fires three shots) I eat a lot of yoghurt.

Madeline: So what do you do now? Michael: Now? Things go back to normal, I guess. Madeline: Normal. (laughs) What exactly is normal? Michael: I have no idea.

Michael: I had a chance to finally get some answers, make sense of the last four years. And that chance ended up in a body bag. Madeline: You know, all those years I lived with your father, I used to think through millions of ways that I could confront him, everything that I wanted to say. And all of a sudden, he drops dead. That's it. You know...people talk about closure, but I don't buy it. When somebody blasts a hole in your life...It tends to stay open. Michael: It does, doesn't it?

Michael: (voice-over) The challenge of a good large-scale field operation is to keep all parts coordinated while keeping them as separate as possible. Field units are separate from transportation units... with the command unit separate from both. When things go right, they all work together as one big team. The problem with remote command centers is what happens when things go wrong. Anyone stuck in the command center is too far away to do anything about it.

Michael: (voice-over) A courier picked up off the suburban street leads to a spy hiding out as a diplomat in a foreign embassy leads to a hardened group of armed assassins in another place entirely. Sometimes it's a surgical operation done with discrete teams that no one ever hears about. Other times, it's all-out war. But one thing is always the same, with each piece of the puzzle, you find you understand your enemy more clearly. You penetrate the secrecy that shields the people behind the scenes...working your way to the top of the network to the people pulling the strings. You keep fighting, trying to put that last piece of the puzzle in place, trying to find that last person who will give you the answers you're looking for.

Michael: (voice-over) In the world of intelligence, taking down an entire covert network is the ultimate challenge. It's not something you can do alone. You need the resources of an entire intelligence agency behind you. You need solid intelligence that can point you in the right direction. But that's just a starting point. You're not after an individual person, you're after dozens of people, all of them hiding, all of them with resources and skills, all of them fighting you by any means necessary. It's a gigantic jigsaw puzzle of information that requires months of research and analysis where one target leads to the next.

Michael: (voice-over) The biggest obstacle you can face in an interrogation is yourself. When your own feelings, your own anger, your own desire for revenge are all that stand between you and the information you want. The stronger your feelings are, the hotter your hate burns, the more important it is to set it aside.

Michael: (voice-over) One of the things you give up in intelligence is control over your own schedule. It's a little like being a doctor on call, only your emergencies tend to be thousands of miles away.

Fiona: When you got burned... It wasn't just you. These last four years have been hard on all of us. Michael: I know. I know, and I'm really sorry about that. But we are so close to wrapping this up. And then I can move on. Fiona: I hope you find what you're looking for, Michael. I really do. Then we can all move on.