#better halves

[electricsoul-rpg]

REN HAO (任豪) as Lu Chi

Better Halves 明媒善娶 (2025)

[worrynoodle]

I live for these moments

(Anna and Georgia's Instagrams)

[tiggymalvern]

Burn Noticed 5x11 Better Halves

The podcasters spend a few minutes at the start of the episode debating why Pearce and others at the CIA seem surprised by how good Michael is. This is Michael Westen, who worked for them for years and who the Russians think is the bogeyman, and Pearce is saying things like, ‘You impressed people with your last job, so now they’re trusting you with a bigger job.’

(I think there are a couple of things feeding into this. Very few people at the CIA actually knew Michael in person, or even had access to his mission files, because most of that stuff was Need To Know. Most of them know him only as his reputation, which includes the Burn Notice, and even though that’s largely been debunked, some mud still sticks. Plus, he’s spent the last five years running around Miami blowing things up and becoming the subject of a statewide manhunt, among other things. I think it’s less that they didn’t know Michael was good, and more that they saw him as a loose cannon – what he’s proving isn’t his skills, but that he can do the job without causing an international incident 🤪)

Fi and Michael are discussing their relationship again and how Fi wants to spend some quality time together that isn’t work and no, that doesn’t just mean fucking, Michael.

Chris: This episode finally gets it. This episode is finally willing to have Michael kind of suck in it.

Bri: It’s not an accident that this is the only one (this season) written by a woman.

Chris: We’re seeing the way Michael is behaving and how it affects her. You have a woman write this and suddenly all the Fi stuff makes sense.

Bri: And she doesn’t seem whiny and she doesn’t seem entitled, she’s a woman who just wants to spend time with her partner who is consistently giving her nothing, except for that good good dick. This scene is a cute scene, Jeffrey Donovan and Gabrielle Anwar have really genuine chemistry. I enjoy seeing them be kind of romantic together and we get a lot of that in this episode and I really enjoy it.

Chris: I do too. The thing about the line, the grimacy, ‘I thought we were connecting pretty well last night’ line is that episode knows it’s graimacy. We’re on Fi’s side on this.

Bri: And also Michael Westen is a lot of things, but crass is not one of them. He so rarely talks about sex at all that it seems like a virgin talking about losing it (🤣🤣🤣) This ladders up to my hypothesis that Michael Westen is at least grey-asexual. Sex is just not really the thing that he thinks about, but because Fiona has been the driving sexual tornado in their relationship, he assumes that if he reminds her how good she got fucked, it will be fine, because he imagines it’s more important for her than him.

Chris: I feel like that’s almost canon.

Bri: I don’t know if they know the word for it, but I also feel like it’s almost canon. (Pretty much, yeah 😁)

Fi then takes the entire discretionary fund instead of the half Michael initially offers her.

Bri: Lisa Joy, like Michael Horowitz, is one of those writers that doesn’t just make a throwaway joke, but adds it as a running joke throughout the episode. The discretionary fund dress even comes up again in the last scenes, it ties the whole thing together cohesively. 💯💯

Michael slaps the wedding ring into Fi’s hand.

Bri: He’s such a fucking dunce. Fiona is like begging him to play with her, do a bit with me you stupid fool, and he’s like, ‘No, we have to work.’ (This scene is so well done by both of them, and it makes me feel so bad for Fi.)

Michael and Fi become suspicious of two different couples.

Chris: I like that Fi was also right. This episode is good at finding solutions that allow Fi to be right while also not breaking Michael Westen. We talk a lot about how the show can’t make Michael Westen too bad, the show can never make Michael not be competent. This episode is really good at threading that needle, the demand that Michael Westen always be right while Fi is also right.

Bri: This really feels like a couples case, rather than a case where Michael has to have Fi tag along as his fake wife. That’s kind of what happened in the episode where Fi and Jesse are both bodyguards but Fi’s basically almost never on screen. (Fair. Eye for an Eye does become Jesse running the whole shebang very quickly.)

Chris: I love Charisma Carpenter.

Bri: I was a little disappointed that there was no turn. I was kind of hoping for it to turn from aggrieved wife to actually she’s the mastermind, because I think Charisma Carpenter would absolutely kill that. They don’t do that. It’s fine. She still does a great job.

Michael beats up the body guard in the sauna.

Chris: This is so homoerotic, this fight.

Bri: It’s super-homoerotic, but it’s also one of the more brutally choreographed fight scenes that I’ve seen on Burn Notice. There’s crunches and he puts his face on hot coals. It’s brutal.

Chris: It’s brutal, but these men are shirtless and oiled, and it’s a lot. It’s like the Eastern Promises fight where Viggo Mortenson beats the shit out of someone with his dick hanging out. (Means nothing to me, but it will to someone, I'm sure!)

Bri: This is when I started to really pay attention to the directing, and I think it was really well done.

Chris: The way that these male bodies were photographed felt almost voyeuristic.

Bri: In a way that the girls really don’t. The girls are in bikinis a lot, but it never feels gratuitous. This fight was gratuitous, the oily grappling session, I enjoyed it. 😁

The podcasters enjoy the Michael and Fi fighting together at the end scene, obviously.

Chris: It’s pretty hot.

Bri: Holy shit, it’s so hot. This is the scene where I was like, ‘Michael Smith, I’m really bummed you don’t direct any more episodes,' because this was beautiful. (It is a great piece of direction. Too stylised to be a realistic fight, when they have no cover and don't get shot, but it's very cinematic.)

Chris: It’s about how in sync they are, and yes, they’ve been off this whole episode, but in crunch time they’re like a unit. Again, very hot.

Jesse starts a massive security alert about smuggled nuclear material leaking radioactivity in order to get Tavian locked down until Michael can get there to talk to him.

Chris:  How has Jesse not been fired yet?

Bri: I don’t know, this is wild. This is wild behaviour. He’s lying and getting a fuck-ton of crazy responses from people. We really need to pin down what Jesse’s job is, but it seems to be like the McGuffin job of ‘I’ll just deus ex machina everything.’  (I too have wondered what Jesse’s day job actually is. It is deliberately left vague for maximum flexibility. I’m guessing on this occasion, after everything is cleared up next episode with Pearce and she has her answers to Max’s murder, the CIA will cover for Jesse over the massive expense of a local and federal emergency response so he doesn't get fired 🤣🤣🤣)

Fi heads off to get her orange dress tailored into a mini-dress after Michael tore it to help them escape.

Bri: She gets annoyed about it being destroyed, then she just accepts its new form and makes it work for her.  It’s sort of a lovely little metaphor for how this relationship is working out. A tiny little detail becomes this poignant arc. Great episode, Lisa Joy. (It is, but I do get irritated that it is always Fi having to make allowances and adjustments for Michael, and rarely to never the other way around. The compromise is a one way street...)

Bri: Sam and Jesse spend a lot of time together, and there seems to be no real dynamic between the two. They’re starting to build a buddy sort of dynamic, but that’s really just Sam’s relationship to Michael and I wish Jesse and Sam had a more distinct sort of vibe.

Chris: They default to the way two guys always kind of default when they’re together, which is like, ‘We have a job to do.’

Bri: ‘You wanna get a beer?’ It’s very casual, they could be anyone.

(It's true, in that Sam and Jesse scenes are always fun, they work well together and they both have a good sense of humour, but there's not much depth in there. They're always talking about the job or just ribbing on each other - there's not really a time when we get to see them be serious together about anything other than work, unlike with Sam and Michael who get dramatic and emotional scenes too.)

This gets to be a great episode of Burn Notice, though it’s close because Sam isn’t used well and Madeline isn’t even in it. It also gets to be a great episode of television. Of course it does, Lisa Joy wrote it!

Chris: This episode has its priorities straight.

Bri: And those priorities are straight. Super heterosexual priorities. (Well, that’s true, but it is Burn Notice 🤪)

Bri: This show has the potential to be both great as a television show, and great at what it wants to do for the type of show that it is. They are not mutually exclusive.

Chris: I don’t know how it’s so hard for them to not do this every week.

Bri: It’s because they have one woman in the writers’ room! And I’m not saying it because men are bad are writing, I want that to be clear, but it’s a lack of variety that really hurts them. When you have variety, you have more perspectives and more plots, and you get to have more interesting discussions and more interesting episodes. When you all just agree generally and are the same kind of people with the same kind of experiences, everything feels flatter. Not because your experiences are invalid, but because once you do that great once or twice, there’s not really anywhere else to go.

(I think it can go both ways. There are some shows that are great because they were the creative vision of one person who knew exactly what they wanted to do from start to finish and just went for it. But those are the minority, and Burn Notice would have benefitted from having some more diversity and more women writing for Fi, for sure.)

[admelioremvitam]

Better Halves 明媒善娶 from 🥝 iQIYI. Airing tomorrow, July 24, 2025. Starring Ren Hao and Snow Kong. New trailer.

[jesterlady]

Michael and Fiona in 5x11 Better Halves

I couldn't leave this season behind without documenting the awesomeness that is Michael and Fi in this episode. It contains everything that makes them amazing: bickering, banter, sass, massive miscommunication, competence, chemistry, partnership, synchronicity, skill, romance, sweetness, and one of the best battle couple scenes of all time. I cannot love this episode enough.

[k347]

I look at you and see the rest of my life right infront of my eyes...

[bergymarchy]

2.10.19. hi pasta 👋

[washingtoncapricorns]

The capitals better halves throw the best baby showers y’all can friggin fight me! Go peep Jenner Jensens insta story or Nicola’s story and you can go agree with me!