Prison Break Season Finale-A Captivated Audience

The season finale of Prison Break sure as hell lived up to the hype, and then some. Maybe, in fact, a little too much. Talk about intense, I bet I approached close to a half pack of cigarrettes during just that hour, which should actually have been extended to two.

And one of my predictions actually came true. The evil female Vice-President engineered the assassination of the president, therefore becoming the “46^th President of The Untied States”.

What happenned to Theodore “T-Bag” Bagwell was gripping as well. Having handcuffed himself to Michael, in order to insue he wasn’t betrayed by John Abruzzi (Peter Stormare), the Maffia boss, (who he knew wanted revenge for the cutting of this throat by T-Bag in an earlier episode) ended up overplaying his hand, and loosing it, to the ax wielding John. T-Bag was left by the others howling pitifully in a barn, his severed left hand beside his face, as he howled in pain and shock.

Such is the acting skills of Robert Knepper that you couldn’t help but feeling sympathy for the character. I had to remind myself that this man was supposed to be in prison for the rest of his life for a series of rape/murders of teenage victims,and during the course of the show had murdered a guard during a prison riot that he instigated, after the guard discovered, along with T-Bag, the tunnel Michael had uncovered as a part of his planned escpae route. He had originally flung the guard into Michaels cell with the intention of raping him. And, so brutal had been his treatment of his former cell-mate that the poor guy ended up hanging himself with his own bed-sheets.

But this isn’t a show about nice people. Even Michael Scoffield (Wentworth Miller), the main character, can be cold and calculating. Once he kept his word to “Tweener”, that he would repay the debt owed him by allowing him to escape, he told him he was then on his own. (Because Tweener, under severe duress, had betrayed the plan to the Chief Prison guard, the cat murdering thug Brad Bellick).

Ironically, Tweener seems to have been the only one to make a clean getaway by crawling inside a horse trailor stopped at a road construction site. Of course, there is Haywire, the insane inmate who muscled in on the escape at the last minute, appearing in the tunnel (having earlier figured out what Michaels tattoos were actually for-diagrams of the prison he had earlier helped design) and threatening to set off an alarm he had hooked up. When he refused to ditch his white suit upon their escape, because he wore nothing under them, they tricked him into going to look for a key in a barn, whereupon John produced the key from under the matt of the car that had been left for them. They then abandoned him. The last he was seen, Haywire,who had stolen a bicycle from a young girl, was going merrilly down the road, pedalling with his arms held high in the air, in his white prison issued clothes and a bicycle helmet.

Unfortunately, the gang didn’t make it to the spot where Johns Mafia associates had a plane waiting to take only three of the prisoners, unbeknownst to the others. This was due in part to the aforementioned handcuffing of T-Bag to Michael, which held up their progress considerably. By the time the remaining five-Michael, Lincoln (Dominic Purcell), John, Sucre, and C-Note-made it to the plane, they were just in time to see it going off, as they waved helplessly for it to come back, Bellick and his guards right behind them. Thus, there was only one other option.

“What are we gong to do?”, one of the escapees asked Michael.

“We’re going to run”, he answered.

And so they did, as the five of them ran with the guards in hot pursuit, a disconcerting distance behind, lights flashing and dogs howling. Meanwhile, T-Bag, clutching his severed hand, with the stump of his left arm covered to stop the flow of blood, was also seen runing in a different area.

Next season promises to be just as gripping. The cons will spend the entire season avoiding capture, while Lincolns lawyer and ex-girlfriend, Veronica Donovan, tries to prove the Vice-President set Lincoln up to take the fall for the murder of her brother-who in the end she discovered was, indeed, still alive, and holed up in a small town in Montana.

Meanwhile, she knows yet another secret of which Michael and Lincoln are yet unaware. John has betrayed them, intending to extract from her, or from them, one way or another, the whereabouts of the informer Fibbonacci, who was responsible for his own prison sentence.

Although it’s too early yet to make predictions, I am hopeful that T-Bag will make good his escape, as he is too good a character to not be a factor. It could be that he is initially captured by Bellick, who then forms a bond with him based on the information that the old con (who died as a result of a fight with Bellick when the latter discovered, thanks to Tweener, the espcape tunnel under the floor of the guard shack the prison work gang were repairing, yet who managed to temporarily incapacitate and bound and gag Bellick inside the tunnel ) had told of five million dollars that he, in his other identity as famed skyjacker D.B. Cooper, had hidden under a silo.

Otherwise, the word is already out that next season will be the last for the show, at the end of which three of the cons will die, two in the next to the last episode, one in the last. Probably in at least one case this will be due to the hunt for the hidden five million, which will doubtless be split up between the remaining five. It would be too easy to think it is obvious which cons will die and which will live. With this show, nothing is certain, one of the best aspects of it.

I just wish more shows could be as good as this one. On the other hand, maybe it’s just as well, my heart can only take so many adrenaline rushes in one weeks time.