《火线警告》（Burn Notice）S07E13《Reckoning》

在大结局中，James不顾一切地要除掉Michael，将Michael逼到了人生的十字路口——他仍然和中情局矛盾重重，仍然无法原谅自己背叛了亲密的团队。他必须重新获得亲人朋友的信任，从而结束当初因他而起的一切，但这绝非易事。USA此前已通过官方新闻稿证实，主要角色中至少有一人将在本集中丧生。该剧的创作人Matt Nix表示，虽然这个大结局不一定会让所有观众满意，但他至少会让观众「惊讶好几次」。此外，多数该解答的问题都会得到解答，这将是一个「优秀的剧终集」。

《火线警告》首播于2007年，从此成为夏季剧集的一个标志，甚至是一种标准。在该剧出现之前，无论有线网还是广播网都没有令人满意的夏季剧集。该剧出现后改变了人们对夏季节目的认识，夏季从此不再是一片「荒芜之地」，更多的优秀夏季剧集也随之涌现。从这个意义上来说，该剧是值得我们纪念的。

再见了，Michael、Fiona、Madeline、Jesse和Sam Axe！

For many Burn Notice fans, it might be hard to put the show’s entire run into perspective after seven seasons and 111 episodes. Creator and executive producer Matt Nix, on the other hand, is all too familiar with just how long the long-running USA series has been around.

“My youngest son was born during the shooting of the pilot and he’s now old enough to read some of the scripts,” he tells TVGuide.com with a laugh. “It’s very weird.”

Sadly, it seems Nix’s offspring will have to find some new reading material. Burn Notice ends its run with an emotional and action-packed — would we have it any other way? — series finale airing Thursday at 9/8c on USA.

When we left Michael Westin (Jeffrey Donovan) at the end of the last episode, he was being forced to choose between his new allegiance to James’ terrorist organization and his (former?) true love, Fiona (Gabrielle Anwar) just as James’ plan against the CIA was kicking into action. “I had always had the idea that from very early in the show that, at some point, Michael would be confronting, essentially, the opportunity to become a version of the people that destroyed him, that burned him,” Nix says. “In thinking about how did Michael Westin get burned, I had always had the idea: Well, organizations don’t start thinking, ‘Let’s do evil things.’ That’s not why actual human beings found organizations. They have some aspiration to do good.”

For a good chunk of Season 7, Michael has been drinking James’ Kool-Aid and subsequently turned his back on those he loved, and the CIA. “In the last season, I didn’t want it to be about: Now Michael is going up against a really, really, really bad guy who is really, really, really clever. Will he defeat him? Uh, yeah, he probably will.” Nix says. “His adversary is someone he likes and believes. His allies are people he doesn’t like and doesn’t believe in so there isn’t really a clear adversary. So what Michael is dealing with are his own demons and how does he battle his own ambitions. How does he reconcile family and career and what he wants to do in the world and the people that he cares about?”

Although Nix’s plans for a more sympathetic Big Bad had been gestating for some time, many other parts of Burn Notice’s final episode, and final season, have deviated from Nix’s original playbook. Michael’s undercover work for the CIA, which later evolved into his work for James, has been part of a season-long arc that has steered far from the series’ procedural origins. “When you’re working on a show, there’s a sort of comfort in doing a version of the thing that you’ve always done,” Nix says. “There came a point for me where I realized I really can’t do that. If I’m just doing that then I’m just making money by making a television show and I’m not interested in that.”

Therefore in later seasons, the series moved away from Michael’s day job as a burned spy-turned-private investigator and more into Michael’s battles with recurring villains such as Anson (Jere Burns), his old training officer-turned-enemy Card (John C. McGinley) and James (John Pyper Ferguson). “Part of the additional serialization was just finding a way to challenge myself and do something new. Change it up and really make the show hard to write again. Suddenly, we’ve thrown out all the rules about how you write a Burn Notice,” Nix says. “For me and the actors and everybody, it’s been about finding new things to be excited about.”

Diving deeper into the show’s mythology and moving away from the case-of-the-week format has also helped the show keep up with the evolution of television thanks to more original programming on cable TV and streaming services like Netflix, as well as DVR and on-demand. “It’s like all of the flavors on television have gotten more intense, and I think the highly serialized storytelling is key,” he says. “Once upon a time, if you were some fan’s fifth favorite show, they were still watching you when you aired. Now if you’re a fan’s fifth favorite show, they’re watching you maybe a month after you’ve aired and that’s bad for ratings.”

Although Nix sympathizes with those longtime fans who miss the Burn Notice of yesteryear, he’s certainly not looking back. “There’s a part of me that misses the breezier, more self-contained storytelling from when it was a more procedural show, and there’s a part of me that’s very excited and engaged by doing this very cliffh-anger-y, very driven, very intense storytelling that we’ve been doing for the past year,” he says.

“I have to say I’m really proud of the season. I feel like we did something unusual and exciting in experimenting with the show and doing new things up until the end.”