Recap: Prison Break: More Plausible Developments!

Oh Prison Break, you cruel beast. You’re like a cruel drug. I know you’re bad for me, and I know I shouldn’t embrace you with all your flaws — your plot holes, your silliness, your overwrought drama — but dammit if I can’t help but come back to you time after time to see how our favorite characters will climb out of their impossibly awful dilemmas. It’s been like this since season one, but back then, there was that whole “prison” thing that kept things from going too haywire (pun intended!). But now that you’re loose in the open world, you’ve gone nuts. I know I should leave you, but I can’t, Prison Break! I can’t! So as long as we’re stuck together like two fugitives in a chain gang, do me a favor: at least try to get it together. Maybe not now, but in the Spring, when you’re back from your little hiatus. As fun as it is to watch all your campiness, at some point it’s gonna get old, and I don’t ever want lose you, Prison Break. Never.Yes, as you could probably tell from my open letter to Prison Break, this week’s episode took things from silly to full-on ludicrous. I’m not saying it wasn’t fun, but man oh man, sometimes it feels like this show is plotted out in between the commercial breaks. Nevertheless, when we last caught up with our naughty escaped cons, poor T-Bag was strapped to a radiator with the cops closing in on him. Well, this week, he was still there, and just as we expected, he was contemplating tearing off the hand he had so carefully repaired, thanks to that highly skilled veterinarian who just happened to be adept at, you know, reconstructive human surgery.

Well, the cops eventually busted down the door to the house T-Bag was holed up in, but was he there? Yes and no. His hand was behind the radiator (ooh, that’ll smell all sorts of delicious come winter time!), but T-Bag was long gone. Of course, you’d think the cops would have no problem chasing down a man who just left the area ten seconds prior, but nah. They didn’t want to exert themselves. Besides, just because T-Bag’s fresh, bloody stump was most definitely leaving the most potent trail the K-9 unit had ever encountered, there was no need to bother the dogs on such a lovely summer day.

Meanwhile, over in some hardware store in New Mexico, Michael was busy buying GPS and what looked like various test-tubes filled with, I don’t know, something. Yes, it appeared as though he was going fishing, but since we know this show better than that, we knew this material was probably the basis of creating some sort of Maguyver flying device that would transport him to Panama. Unfortunately for Michael, the cost of all these items was a tad too expensive for his fugitive tastes, and so he did what any man on the run would do: he took the items and bolted. The old man behind the counter tried to stop him, but he was no match for Scoffield. Michael pushed the old fogey back, causing him to fall back into a giant pile of soda coolers. Destruction like none other!

“Just take it! Please don’t hurt me,” the old guy pleaded, suddenly losing his vigilante streak. Yes, the old adage is true: Igloo coolers will always break a man. I’m sure the fella later woke up in the middle of the night screaming, “THE COOLERS! THE COOLERS! FALLING ALL AROUND ME!! THE COOLERS!!!”

The horror! The horror!

Well, Michael ran out of the store and hid behind a building where suddenly he was attacked with oh so many vivid, awful, horrendous memories. Oh, how this long, terrible journey has tortured him so! He’s witnessed so many horrendous things, hurt so many innocent people! He’s become a monster! How many more unwitting bystanders must fall victim to his soda cooler wrath??

With a pained look on his face that seemed to say “ACTING!”, Scoffield suddenly looked up, and who was there to save him? You guessed it: JESUS! That’s right, Michael spotted a church nearby and decided now would be as good a time as any to confess all his Igloo-related sins. Pushing an old guy into a stack of coolers: that can haunt you. That can haunt you real bad.

Guilt!

Redemption!

Sorrow!

PASSION!

While Michael attempted to mollify his guilty conscience, paterfamilias Aldo explained to Lincoln some of the deep, dark secrets of The Company. Apparently, on a dark and stormy night at the NSA, an analyst who sympathized with Aldo’s cause got clearance into the Echelon Program. One thing led to another and the guy managed to get his hands on a phone call between the President (Patty Wettig) and her brother, Terrence Steadman… AFTER HE DIED! Well, we don’t know what happened to this analyst (dead-eroo, I imagine), but he did manage to mail the evidence to John Heard (a.k.a. Sara Tancredi’s now deceased dad). As a result, Aldo now had reason to believe that Sara Tancredi had the key evidence! This was all cool and everything, but if Aldo and his posse are so cool, how come they couldn’t find the same evidence that led Veronica to Montana last season? (R.I.P. Veronica. The producers did you wrong, I say!) I mean, there’s no bigger smoking gun than finding Terrence live and in the flesh.

Furthermore, what sort of idiot NSA analyst merely sends the information to John Heard and does nothing else? I mean, this isn’t 1992 when John Grisham called the shots. We’re in 2006. If you’ve got important info, there’s a little thing I like to call The Internets that’s quite effective at disseminating information to, you know, THE WORLD.

Nevertheless, as most of you probably remember from last week, it turns out that one of Aldo’s guards was a mole from The Company. Well, as Pops babbled on about the NSA and whatnot, this asshole assassin quickly murdered one guard with his silencer, and as he approached the inner sanctum of the house where all the targets had assembled, he trained his gun on yet another guard. This time, the guard managed to pull out his gun (but kind of forgot to yell and alert everyone that shit was going down). It didn’t matter. The bad guy quickly killed him with his silencer, and as the dayplayer fell, we watched the bullet shell drop in super slow motion. The sort of slow motion you only see with John Woo and his hacky imitators. Now, I have to warn you. This next part constitutes what might be the most idiotic and ridiculous moment ever in Prison Break history.

Well, once that shell hit the floor with a minute “clink!”, Spider-Lincoln’s ears suddenly perked up. Never mind that the shell apparently was louder than an entire man falling to the ground, and never mind that he knew it was a shell and not just some coin, Lincoln quickly gathered everyone up and made a run for it. The gunman tried to stop him, but Link quickly took him down, and eventually, the two wound up tussling about with a random cleaver occasionally swinging around. It would have been nice if one of the ten people in the room had stepped forward and helped out, but that wouldn’t have been as fun.

A full grown man falls over with a thud. No one notices.

A shell hits the ground, and…

“Grrrrr… what’s that sound?”

“Was that a 6.5mm 123 gr. HPBT MatchKing bullet shell hitting the floor? EVERYONE GET DOWN!!!”

Finally, Lincoln managed to stab this jerk with a knife, and while that did most of the job, it still didn’t prevent the guy from making one last attempt at murder. Of course, there was suddenly a gun shot, and the assailant dropped to the floor, dead at least. And who pray tell was the marksman? Why, none other than that testy blond woman who Lincoln had so cruelly doubted. Turns out she’s a good guy after all! Hooray!

After the opening credits, we caught up with Sara Tancredi, who was now tied up in a motel room with Agent Kellerman. Unfortunately, as hard as everyone tries, Kellerman just still isn’t menacing. I say it’s time to kill off the character and introduce another baddie. It’s been a season and a half. This guy just sucks.

Anyway, once Sara was sufficiently bound and gagged, Kellerman sat down with her and said, “As you can see, hi, my name is not Lance, and I’m not an addict.” ZING! Good one, Paul!!! Once the comedy routine was over, Kellerman got down to business. HE wanted to know if Sara had received anything from her dad. She said no repeatedly, which meant it was time for one thing and one thing only: torture!

Before we could see how that would play out, we then headed over to that church where Michael was having a very Character Building moment. He was in the confessional, babbling on about having never confessed and blah blah blah. It’s all one big, boring haze to me. Clearly he felt awful about violating the little known eleventh commandment: Thou Shalt Not Throw Thy Neighbor Into A Stack of Coolers. (I learned about it on the less successful series, Tabernacle Break).

Listen, Academy. Just hand the over the Emmy now…

Anyway, since this scene was clearly the producers’ hamfisted way of injecting some “depth” and “heart” into the series, we then had to sit through various Scoffield childhood traumas. “When I was a kid,” Michael said, “I watched a man bleed out and die. And I was glad because he deserved it… Suddenly, there was this dark space inside of me, and I knew it was wrong, but here I am.” I can’t be positive, but it sounds like Michael’s turning into Bruce Wayne. It really is the next logical step for this show.

Well, this very emotional and provocative scene climaxed with Michael shedding a Tear of Emmy Consideration, and then finally, we moved on. Over in Colorado, the dead guy’s cell phone rang, and of course Lincoln answered it. “Is it done?” asked our old friend, Mr. Pesky Asian Man. Now, if Lincoln were Jack Bauer, he would have just said “Yeah” and tried to glean as much info as possible. However, since Lincoln is not Jack Bauer but instead an oafish idiot who likes to only button the lower third of his shirts, he got all brutish and tried to talk smack to this guy. This led to general smarminess from the Asian guy (I think his name is Kim, but I can’t be sure — okay, IMDb says it’s Bill Kim), causing Lincoln to seethe that he was going to kill him.

“You don’t even know who I am,” Kim replied. Oh yeah. Oops. Okay, you win this round, KIM. But Lincoln will have his revenge… as soon as he figures out who the hell is who and all that stuff.

We then cut to Michael who had just hitchhiked to the famed New Mexico coastline. Look, just because a state is landlocked doesn’t mean that it can’t be on the ocean! I’ll just assume that maybe the locale changed to Texas and that I missed something along the way. [ed. note -- upon further review, it's too ambiguous to tell whether it's ocean in the distance or verdant pastures. I'm just going to stick with ocean for now, just for the hell of it]

Well, while Scoffield went off to pursue some sort of shady endeavor, we then headed back to that industrial facility where Mahone was still stuck in a cage, waiting for rescue. Luckily for him, none other than Bill Kim was there to set him free. I just assumed this would be the last of Mahone, especially after Kim babbled on about how much he hated being in the field, but he was amazingly spared. Kim told him that Scoffield kept talking about some sort of “Bolshoi Booze” thing and that had to do with his escape to Panama. If Mahone wanted to save his life — let alone his kid’s — he would get to the bottom of this Bolshoi Booze mystery and stop Scoffield et. al. before they snuck out to Panama.

Meanwhile, up in Colorado, there was wonderful news on the horizon. Lincoln was finally parting ways with LJ. I thought the day would never come, but at last, it looked like we’d be rid of this idiot kid once and for all — at least until the next time the producers decide to cart him out as Lincoln bait. Anyway, father and son said goodbye in an emotional (read: boring) scene, and then Aldo and Lincoln headed off to meet Michael wherever he was.

Speaking of Michael, he was sweating up a storm in that Southwest sun. While he used his GPS to reach some location, we then found Mahone sitting in his car (that apparently was working again, despite Sara’s wire-pulling stunts last week). The crafty agent was busy staring at photos of Michael’s Bolshoi Booze tattoo, but dammit if he wasn’t totally confounded. Hmmm… sounds like it’s time for a random distraction to totally clue him in! Sure enough, Mahone got out of the car to leave a message on his wife’s voicemail, and when he returned to the vehicle, he saw Michael’s tat upside down for the first time. Then it all became obvious. The letters were actually NUMBERS! “Bolshoi Booze” was actually 320081045708!!! Ah ha! Now it all made sense!! Kind of. Not at all.

Okay, see, those numbers were actually GPS coordinates, and even though that wasn’t readily apparent, Mahone’s a super genius (when necessary), and he immediately knew what was what. Time to go kick butt!!!

I wish my eyes did that!

After the commercial, we found Michael co-mingling with some Latino ruffians. Turns out they were going to provide him a plane as long as he handed over some medical nitroglycerin. Well, Scoffield handed over some test tubes, but we had a feeling they weren’t filled with nitroglycerin. Looks like he’s gonna wind up in another dilly of a pickle!

Speaking of unfortunate situations, the torture was going along just delightfully over at Kellerman’s motel of pain. The bad agent tried to coax information out of Sara, but she continued to play dumb, which meant she got her face stuffed in a tub full o’ water. Man, she was down there for a full ten seconds. Maybe fifteen! That’s just INHUMANE!!! No one can hold their breath that long!

Meanwhile, as Mahone headed down to Scoffield’s location, those asshole drug dealers were starting to suspect that something wasn’t right. They weren’t so sure he had given them real nitroglycerin, thanks to the ghetto plastic caps on all the test tubes. As a result, they were gonna do a test, and if they found out Michael had screwed them over, they were gonna get mad. Real mad. You know what I’m saying, pendejo?

Hey, remember T-Bag? Well, he was now lurking in some dark, dank basement or garage or whatever. He pulled out a little device from his pocket, and even though he had told his former captors (Brad and Roy) that it was merely for his blood pressure, we had a feeling T-Bag wasn’t being completely truthful. Before we could find out exactly he had up his sleeve, we then headed over to a hospital where Bellick was busy telling a cop that a black man had beaten him up. The detective didn’t quite believe him, and as she rolled her eyes at the burly jerk, we then headed over to some random luxury hotel room where none other than Roy was busy living it up millionaire style. He had a white robe on, a glass of champagne, and even a few prostitutes at the door. It was like the white version of Flavor of Love.

Hey, it’s Buckwild, New York, and Pumkin!

Meanwhile, over in the desert, things were going sour for Scoffield real quickly. The afternoon chemistry experiment proved that he had delivered these goons nothing but worthless agua, and that could mean one thing: a bullet to the head. The head Latino raised a gun to Michael’s temple and… and… commercial!!!

By the way, I love how the commercial bumper is still a fast forward through the bowels of Fox River Penitentiary — as if they’ve been anywhere near there for the past two months. C’mon, Fox. Time for an update.

When we returned from commercial, Michael was still in the same state of peril, and just when we thought he was totally dunzo, along came Sucre (??) with a gun. I don’t know how he got there, especially since last time we saw Sucre, his car was dead and done on the side of the road, but I guess his sudden arrival was just some of that ol’ Prison Break magic at work. Anyway, Sucre quickly took care of the situation, shooting the leader in the arm or side or wherever. We then headed back to that motel bathroom where Sara was getting ready for Round Two of torture. We knew it was gonna get real bad as Paul plugged in an iron nearby. I thought he was about to press her jeans with her still in them, but no, he had bigger plans. Kellerman once again shoved Sara’s face back in the tub, but this time, he also dipped the tip of the iron in the water for that added electrical kick. Needless to say, it looked quite an unpleasant experience for our brave Tancredi.

While Sara enjoyed the finer nuances of electrical currents, we then returned to Roy’s hotel room where a prostitute balked, “A Cleveland what?” Wow — I think that was the first intentionally funny moments of the season! Nevertheless, as amusing as the line was, I couldn’t believe that a prostitute didn’t know what a Cleveland Steamer was. I mean, c’mon. Well, Roy ventured into his closet to pluck some cash from his bag when suddenly he noticed something awful! Somebody had left an Applebees buzzer in his money stash! Oh wait, it was just a tracking device. Wait, a tracking device?!?!? So that’s what T-Bag had been playing around with. Suddenly an ominous knock bellowed through the suite, and for whatever reason, Roy decided to actually open the door. Sure enough, there was T-Bag, ready to reclaim his bounty. Why Roy even opened the door was beyond me. There were more pressing questions: how did T-Bag reach Roy so quickly? Were we supposed to believe that after Roy hopped on that bus with all that money, he only went like two stops? He didn’t travel all the way across country — despite having stolen millions of dollars and despite the fact that Bellick was gonna be chasing after him? If I were him, I’d be halfway to Thailand by now.

Well, Roy kicked the girls out of the suite, and once they were gone, an angry, evil-looking T-Bag slowly advanced on his prey. You’d think a tiny man with only one hand and a huge amount of blood loss would be no foe for Roy and his kitchen mallet of pain, but rather than trying to make a run for it, Roy attempted to reason with T-Bag as he proposed various different ways to divvy up the money. We cut away before seeing what their final resolution was, but I couldn’t imagine that this would end well for Roy. I mean, what if T-Bag had another screwdriver? Or worse, a pipe cleaner!

Back in the desert, Sucre and Michael had tied up their Latino tormentors and were ready to bolt (they had learned the address of where the plane would be), but one of the goons pleaded that their leader — a.k.a. their brother — was going to die if the the guys left. Who cares, right? Just get out of there! Unfortunately, dark memories of Igloo atrocities were still fresh in Michael’s mind. He simply could not leave someone to die, even if he was a total douche. Damn that crisis of conscience! Michael decided to stay and help the guys. Sigh.

We then headed back to Kellerman’s motel room where the torture storyline continued to spin in its wheels. Suddenly, Kim called up on his cell phone and told Paul to simply kill Tancredi and be done with it. Yes, it looked like it was finally curtains for Sara. Surely she couldn’t get out of this! Not unless Paul, sick and tired of being bossed around by Kim, decided to do the right thing and set Sara free! Might such an implausible event be on the horizon?

After the commercial break, we then found T-Bag chilling out in Roy’s hotel room, listening to none other than Def Leppard’s seminal hit, “Bringing On The Heartache.” We didn’t know where Roy was, but let’s put it this way, Def Leppard plus a psychopath serial killer usually means somebody’s got sliced real purdy-like.

Meanwhile, much to Sucre’s chagrin, Michael decided to let the bad guys go so they could get the medical attention they needed, and as a reward for their kindness, the leader told him some new, vital info about the plane: it was only going to stop for five minutes. If they missed it, they were out of luck. Hmmm… I wonder what’ll happen? My guess: only Sucre gets on board, he flies off to Ixtapa, and he reunites with Mary-freakin’-cruz.

Back in Anytown, Kansas, Bellick emerged from the hospital, and just as he happened to walk out, a dead body happened to roll in, and someone happened to mention that the corpse just happened to be Roy Geary. Wha-wha-wha-whaaaa?? Roy Geary! What a coincidence! (By the way, if Roy and Bellick wound up at the same hospital, it just proves that idiot Roy literally only took that Greyhound bus one block). Anyway, Bellick said that he knew the victim, and when he pulled back the sheets, we saw that poor Roy was now a very bloody, very dead mess. T-Bag got him good! Who would have thought such a frail, weak, handicapped man could be so deadly? And don’t you dare say “No one!”

Unfortunately for Bellick, the same detective who had questioned him about his beating was now on the Roy Geary case… and she had a few more questions to ask! I guess we’ll see them next episode because that was the end of this storyline for now.

In yet another For Your Consideration moment, we then found Mahone sitting in his car right near Michael’s Bolshoi Booze rendezvous point. His ex-wife called him back, which led to a long, blathering scene where Mahone spoke elusively and distantly — almost like a man going to the gallows. This led to a lot of “Alex? What are you talking about?” from his idiot ex-wife until he finally hung up on her and headed in the direction of Scoffield. Oh, Mahone. He’d reached the lowest of lows. What redemption lay in his future?

We then cut to Michael and Sucre, who waited outside a shack for… something. A few seconds later, Lincoln and Aldo suddenly showed up, having miraculously driven all the way from Colorado to this nebulous New Mexico/Texas location. They were all ready to hop on the plane and fly to Panama. Too bad they didn’t know Mahone was coming over the crest. My predictions for next week’s episode: Mahone crashes the party, kills Aldo, and ruins EVERYTHING.

But in the meantime, we still had more show left. We headed back to the motel room where Paul was ready to finish Sara once and for all. He implored her to confess, but she said she wouldn’t tell him anything even if she did know something, which she didn’t (even though she did). Besides, her alternatives were for her to say nothing and die or say everything and die. Huh. She kind of got you there, Kellerman.

Well, there’s nothing that a bellowing scream couldn’t take care of: “NOW YOU’RE GOING TO DIE!!!!” he yelled, clearly not caring that everyone in the motel could probably hear him. Had this been Michael whispering about an escape plan, you know that a little old lady next door would hear everything without her ear even being up against the wall and call the cops. But if it’s a bad guy beating up on Sara, of course no one’s around to hear.

Ultimately, Paul simply dropped Sara into the tub where we were to assume he had left her to drown. He didn’t actually force her head under the water though, which left me wondering why Sara didn’t merely lift herself up. You don’t need amazing abs to be able to pull yourself out of a tub. Nevertheless, the show abruptly ended, and now we’re left to wonder what will happen to poor Dr. Tancredi and the rest of the Prison Break gang. One more week until the Fall Finale…

What did you think about tonight’s show? Has the show ever been as brutal as its harsh depiction of a man falling into a pile of Igloo coolers?