Prison Break – Did you miss Mama, Linc? She won’t miss you!

Remember when Prison Break was a fun show? Escapist (get it?!) fiction at it’s best? Those days seem to be long gone if you look at what we have now. The series has gotten very complicated and much darker now that we’re getting deeper and deeper into the world of “The Company.” Last year’s revelation that the boys’ mother was still alive and involved with The Company, as well as the search for Scylla, was the driving thrust of this latest installment.

Taking a four-month hiatus in the middle of the arc may not have been the best idea. We are hip-deep in some incredibly convoluted relationships and connections, with strange and bizarre people working together and Michael and Lincoln at odds. I suspect this episode was absolutely impenetrable for potential new viewers. Of course, with less than three-and-a-half million viewers tallied, it looks like it’s only us completists left.

I’ve noticed in the last few seasons that it always takes  a few episodes into each season for that Prison Break momentum to kick in and grab your adrenaline bone (we do have one of those, right?) and refuse to let go. After four months away, this may as well be Season five, which means right about the time they’ll get me hooked and excited about what’s going on again it’ll be over.

Don’t get me wrong, the adrenaline rush was there from the beginning; after all, there are expectations to live up to. Even though it was totally expected, it was still cool seeing Michael and Sarah getting hijacked while trapped in the back of the eighteen-wheeler they were hitching the ride in. And it was nice to see Michael use some of that ingenuity to come up with a way to get out of this latest prison.

As for Lincoln’s confrontation with his mother Christina — she really snowed him good! Linc is a bundle of raw emotions, barely capable of rational thought or reaction. Mahone was absolutely right that he wasn’t in the right frame of mind to fly solo on that meeting, but as usual nobody forced the issue. I guess that’s because Linc could physically snap them all in half at the same time.

I find myself wondering if Christina can truly want something different for The Company’s future than the direction the General is taking things in. She’s clearly just as cold-hearted and brutal as he is, in fact more so. While the General sought to take care of his daughter, Christina has no problem putting her boys through hell and, as shown in that last scene, eliminate them if they prove impediments to her machinations.

So now we have Self, Mahone, Bagwell and Burrows on one team, while Tancredi and Scofield are on the outside with their own agenda. Doesn’t that seem like this is just Prison Break: All-Stars? They randomly took some of the most interesting characters of the past four seasons and threw six of them together into the storyline.

I know there’s a progression to how we’ve gotten here, but the show’s become notorious for just shoving whoever they like into the stories whether it makes good sense or not. Still, it’s been a fun ride and we’ve only got four more of these things to go … and that weird two-hour coda that may or may not air. I can tough out a few more hours and see how the boys get out of this cluster.

Clacked by Jason Hughes
on Apr 19, 2009 @ 14:00 EST5EDT