Prison Break: Is It Over Yet?

I am officially over Fox's “Prison Break.” Oh sure, I’ll still watch it, but only so I can finish what I started. I hope that when Prison Break returns from its winter finale that the show will just wrap up the story and go off into the sunset.

The series has been a huge disappointment. Last season, when it spent all that time in Sona, they lost all the momentum the show had built up in previous seasons. It was like someone took the original writers hostage and brought in some high school amateurs. The story had no purpose and also had characters that no one cared about.

But this season, it’s still bad, but in a different way. It seems like the writers are just making things up as they go along, and not caring about continuity or even believability. Monday’s winter finale, titled “The Sunshine State” tried very hard to capture the initial suspense of the show, but failed miserably. The most glaring problem: Michael Scofield (the increasingly pudgy Wentworth Miller) just had brain surgery, but when he wakes up in a different location, there isn’t any evidence at all that he’s even had a mark on his head. Not one scar, not even one tiny mark in his hair. That was just as laughable as the time he decided to have his full body tattoos removed in one sitting, and had no scars or marks to show for it. I think the writers and producers of this show must think the viewers are idiots. Well, maybe they just think the viewers in their precious young demographic are idiots.

In this episode, it’s made clear that ‘The Company” wants to mold Michael for their own means. And Michael and Lincoln’s (Dominic Purcell) mother is still alive. And she’s got some involvement with acquiring Scylla, the data thingy that everyone seems to want. Meanwhile, Linc is charged with taking his rag-tag team of losers and psychopaths – Ex Agent Don Self (played horribly by Michael Rapaport), T-Bag (Robert Knepper), Gretchen (Jodi Lyn O’Keefe) and Mahone (William Fichtner, the only decent actor on the show) – to get Scylla back for The Company and win their freedom in the process. It also seems that Michael’s main squeeze, Sara (Sarah Wayne Callies) is being held in a hotel room with a very pointed, glassy windowed corner and a nice view, and she's being kept away from Michael, at least until he's be made ready by The Company.

But as Michael is being held hostage somewhere, and when “The General” orders Michael to be drugged and forced into submission so he can apparently be brainwashed into being a Company man, Sara is kidnapped by the General’s daughter Lisa (Stacy Haiduk), who tells her where Michael is being held. Lucky for her, Michael find a way to make an explosion occur just exactly at the time they are coming to drug him, and he escapes just at the time that Sara is driving her way up to get him. Michael almost gets caught, as he stupidly continues to run across the road while being chased by men driving a vehicle using same the road. If the area was as remote as they said it was, and it looked heavily wooded, it seemed like he could have easily found a place to hide just for a few minutes until the chasing vehicle had passed. But, I suppose that if they hadn't caught up with him, Sara would never have had the chance to ram their vehicle and save Michael from recapture.

Also becoming tiresome is the members of the team working against each other. If this didn’t happen so often it would actually be suspenseful, but it seems that people like Gretchen and Self and T-Bag have been so consistently untrustworthy that nothing they do surprises. Very misplaced in this episode was Gretchen suddenly coming on to Linc. Where did that come from and what purpose was it supposed to serve? I laughed during that awkward scene. Later, when Gretchen turns on the team and holds a gun on them, she has a strange change of heart that seems to be triggered when Self basically stands there and calls her names and puts her down. It was laughable that the hardhearted Gretchen would decide to shoot the bad guys just because Self called her names. It was also no surprise when she gets shot, they leave her there. Personally, I would have shot the bad guys and then Self, because he’s a poorly conceived and poorly acted character. Equally laughable was hearing T-Bag pleading to Linc not to kill Gretchen because she has a kid. Of course, they believe her when she indicates she’ll keep her mouth shut in prison. Why would they believe her this time?

Of course, there is no surprise when Linc gets a call on the bad guy’s phone (T-Bag took it off his body after Gretchen shot him) and when he hears no voice at the other end, he says to the caller "Your boys are dead and now I'm coming after you." Of course, what Linc doesn’t know is that’s his and Michael’s mom (played by Kathleen Quinlan)on the other end of that phone. She was supposed to be dead but is really alive, and she has Scylla in her possession. She tells the other person in the room, "That was my son, Lincoln." Well, no surprise here.

Personally, I just want the whole thing to be over. Every episode seems to be just a continuation of someone’s stream of consciousness writing. It seems like they are trying to make lemonade out of lemons at this point, but the end result is still something very sour and bitter to the taste. At this point, I am not sure that I care anymore what Scylla really is and why Michael and Lincoln’s mother is still alive and involved in the whole mess. But now, I feel that I have to finish it, only if to see if they are able to make sense of the time Michael spent in Sona that was orchestrated by the company. If they wanted to recruit him for The Company, why did they get him into Sona and let him struggle to get out? I am not sure how they can write themselves out of that one, but I will be watching only to see if they can. I can only hope that they find a way, in the next 6 episodes, to lock up this whole series…and throw away the key.


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