“There’s a flash forward of five minutes, if that. You could pretty much hold your breath in the time between when the last season ended and when it picks up,” Matt Nix told me this week after we wrapped up the
very first Spoiler Room Live Chat. Little did he know, that’s exactly what fans have been doing since last season ended — holding their breath. But the payoff for our wait will be huge. Not only will Fiona spend some time in prison this season after turning herself into authorities, but, Nix says ominously, “She’s in there for a while and it’s a big deal.”
“In the early years in the show, for a lot of reasons — some of them having to do with how the show was structured, some of them having to deal with the fact that it was early [in the show’s run] — most things that happened in the finales had to sort themselves out in one episode so we could more or less get back to how the show worked. In season 6, we realized we didn’t have to do that anymore — and we didn’t want to,” Nix says. “We wanted to do an event that would have a real impact and serious, longer term repercussions.”
In a sense, he says, for at least the first part of the season, Fiona is the gang’s client — with the mission being to get her out of her sticky situation. “So far this year — we’re six episodes in — we haven’t done any ‘I’m a client. I need help’ kind of episodes. Not one, which used to be every episode,” he says. “They might help someone or do something along the way but it’s in service of a larger goal.”
Burn Notice returns June 14.