Nit-Pickers Guide to Burn Notice (S3)

Ep 308: "Friends Like These"

Episode Synopsis: Michael tracks down a thief who stole Barry's client list. Meanwhile, Fiona and Michael find themselves at odds over Michael's quest to get back into the intelligence community.


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Welcome:
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Definition:
A nit-pick should be a specific aspect of the episode that you found to be in error or inconsistent with past episodes, known fact, or personal/public knowledge. If possible, please site cases, points of reference, or other episodes story points to help back up you argument or rebutal.

Conduct:
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Now let's have some fun and nitpick away!!

Well, we've given the show some grief about their driver's licenses, how about passports?

While looking for something else tonight, I took a closer look at the passport they had for Natalie. Although mostly correct, it was missing a passport number, and more alarmingly, had her listed as male. Ouch!

Nice catch, Karen! I'm not knowledgable about who or how these "props" get checked but I would think someone is supposed to make sure everything is kosher. Do you know how the movies/TV do error checking?

I'm sure props made it. Weird thing is that the image was blurry anyway, what with that passport page background. They could have put in a passport number that wasn't legible. Was hard to see a lot of the text, but the difference between an M and an F for Gender was obvious. They also showed her being born in California and the passport issued from the Los Angeles Passport Agency. I'm wondering if they just started from one of the crew's passports and went from there.

They have used the same Florida driver's license number in at least two episodes.

This made me start wondering about something. I'm assuming it's illegal to counterfeit passports, driver's licenses, etc, as it is illegal to counterfeit money. So, when making fake passports/licenses/etc for TV shows and movies, is it necessary to make them less-than-perfect to avoid breaking the law? Is it okay to counterfeit such government documents if it's just for fun, or for TV? Even if it's not illegal, they still wouldn't want to fake a perfect passport, and accidentally use some actual person's passport number. It's like with phone numbers... on TV, character's phone numbers always start with "555-" because some of those phone numbers are reserved for TV usage and aren't given out to real people. None of this explains what you saw on "Natalie's" passport, though. --m