No, not the stuff she had to do in "Out of the Fire," but her strong-arming of John Doman's Congressman Crowley in "Last Stand" was good stuff. And hell's bells, they even found something useful for Madeline to do here. Of course, the worst thing they could do now is have Michael head back to Miami and just continue doing what he's always done, but the show is the show and right now I can pretend that the series is going to take off into new, uncharted and dynamic directions. Which makes the end, with a cameo from Dylan Baker, all the more intriguing. Not after all he's been through and the new friends he's made. And even though Fiona's "what do I even mean to you?" nagging can grate on me, at least, this time around, it brought up the fact that Michael shouldn't want to return to his old life. "I was always better with explosives than I was with you," Fiona confesses as the two of them prepared to meet their end. It did more for their story than all the "talks" that we've had to sit through. Her realization that she was fated to be with him, even in death, actually made me tear up a bit. I wasn't fully loving the somewhat shoe-horned Michael/Fiona relationship stuff until the end when she ran away from Jesse, willing to die with Michael in the shed. Okay, mostly I thought it would be Jesse, but it was still an intense episode. "Last Stand" got so intense at times that it actually had me wondering if a main character would die. Not since Season 1's "Loose Ends" had Michael really gotten his hands dirty with some expert fisticuffs. The action and stunt-work in this explosive finale was incredible and I loved Michael's fight with the mercenary of the roof. Vaughn ( Robert Wisdom) was never as charismatic as Brennan or Larry, but with him comes the full weight and wrath of the "organization," which up until "Last Stand" never really felt all that intimidating. And yes, I suppose if I had to choose one of these villains to live so that they could return one day, it would be Larry. It's hard to believe that Michael was ever as dark and lethal as Larry claims, but their relationship still really popped here and the scene where Larry pulled a "classic Larry" and blew up the corrupt IMF dude was rad. I never really bought into the whole "Larry and Michael have a long and storied past" bit – until this episode. In fact, Sam came to the rescue big time at the end of both of the episodes. I loved the scene at the end where Sam had that sniper rifle bead drawn right on Larry's chest. And yes, I'm sorry to see Brennan go but you kind of knew one of them had to. And we got to see both Jay Karnes' Brennan and Tim Matheson's Larry together in one story! Of all the bad guys from Michael's rogue's gallery, they were the two absolute best and it was magical to see them both sucked into Michael's NOC-list storyline. Also they were both, just about, equally good and they both directly dealt with the main arc story. Of course, I could review "Out of the Fire" and "Last Stand" as two separate episodes, but I'm lazy. Oh, and there was that pesky nonsense of us liking the "newer, more caring and emotional" Michael so much that it made us hard to invest in his quest to get his old job back the job that had turned him into a cold, distant douchebag. The villains themselves seemed a bit inter-changeable and the evil black-ops "organization" itself was almost too nebulous to take seriously as a threat. I understand the hoops that people have to jump through in our own government to elicit any kind of change, but we the viewer actually got caught up in the never-ending bureaucracy of this show's own spy-world, where our characters, often times, just wound up chasing their own tales. Tricia Helfer's Carla didn't impress me (although Tricia herself does) and it just seemed like the show was afraid to upset the status-quo too much. Michael just wound up meeting mini-boss after mini-boss, and the show seemed like it was stuck in a holding pattern. Sure, the over-arching story was in place, but it barely, rarely budged. After the Season 1 finale though, with Michael driving up into the back of that 16-wheeler, the show slowed down and found its niche as a somewhat repetitive procedural.
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