When good TV goes bad: how Prison Break absconded from reality
The show was far-fetched from the beginning, but things got truly silly when it adopted a willy-nilly approach to the mortality of its central characters.
Prison Break was never a straightforward TV programme. Ostensibly, the main story was that of architect Michael Scofield, who gets the plans to Fox River State Penitentiary tattooed on his body so he can break his brother Lincoln out from the inside. But, rather than leave it at that, the show was intent on throwing as many complicated plotlines into the mix as it could. As the series progressed, it got tangled in a confusing mess of conspiracies, secret service double agents and a mysterious, probably evil movement called The Company, who framed Lincoln for murder and seemed intent on ruining Michael’s life.
Furthermore, it was a concept with a built-in problem: what happens to a show called Prison Break once they’ve broken out of the prison? It’s on to another prison, of course, which they have to break into … and then out of. And possibly into again. And so on, like a jail-based hokey cokey. Has nobody pointed out that the quickest way out of prison these days is to get a true-crime podcast made about you, not crawl through miles of sewers?
Want to escape from jail? Just get a mate with a pilot’s licence and leave!
However, its real shark-jumping moment came early in season three with the death of Michael’s love interest, Sara Tancredi. Sara’s decapitated head was sent to Lincoln in a box, Seven-style. Tears were shed, revenge was sworn … only for Sara to turn up, alive and with her head very much intact, one series later. She’d been in witness protection, y’see, and couldn’t tell Michael for his own safety (in reality, actor Sarah Wayne Callies left the show because of a contract dispute). The sheepish explanation for Sara’s magical return from the other side was that the head must have been a very complicated trick by The Company to force Michael into making a series of dangerous decisions, although nobody ever explained how a) The Company managed to make such a realistic head and b) how Lincoln managed to mistake it for that of his brother’s partner.
Shark fully cleared, the show spun off into a series of increasingly unbelievable plotlines: one where the escaped prisoners were recruited by Homeland Security to get information on an advanced renewable power cell; another where they attempted to escape a Panamanian prison by helicopter (it’s that easy, apparently – just get a mate with a pilot’s licence and leave!). But the show’s fondness for killing off main characters, then panicking and bringing them back from the dead, was definitely the most incredible part.
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Indeed, death meant little in Prison Break. The emotional “final” episode when the show originally ended back in 2009 saw Sara weep as she laid flowers on Michael’s grave. Plus, we had to watch a video he’d made, telling his family that he loved them and that, if they were watching it, he was no longer with them. Well, not quite: Michael bounced back to the land of the living for the show’s reboot and conclusion this year, managing to shake off the terminal brain cancer he’d suffered from in the previous series by, er, pretending to be dead for seven years during which he … broke into and out of prisons. He’s now working for a rogue CIA agent in Yemen. Confused? You shouldn’t be: once you’ve seen someone make it out of the slammer that many times, returning from the afterlife is no big deal.