Recap: Prison Break: T-Bag and Sympathy

Hi Prison Breakers. I’m very sorry that I didn’t have time to recap last week’s show, especially since it turned out to be a doozy. Here’s a brief rundown before I move on to this week’s episode in detail: Last week on Prison Break, Sucre held up his fellow Fox Riverites and escaped with the $5 million, but then we found out that it was all an act; he and Michael were in cahoots to con C-Note and T-Bag out of their share of the booty. The joke was on Michael, though, because T-Bag pulled the old backpack switcheroo and escaped with the cash, while poor little Mikey and Sucre were left with a pile of useless National Anthropology magazines. T-Bag bought an old pickup truck and drove off to find a woman from his past – he seemed to have revenge on the brain. C-Note disappeared. Michael and Sucre went on the run together, and there was major drama when Sucre got trapped under a giant log in a river, and Michael had to pull some serious MacGyver tactics at great personal risk in order to save his buddy’s life.

Meanwhile, the Evil Secret Service has one or two of the paper cranes, and they are working along a parallel track to try to decipher Mikey’s message to Sara. Also, Mahone got called in by Internal Affairs because they kind of noticed that when he killed Tweener in the previous episode, it was the cold-blooded murder of an unarmed man. Mahone fed them a line about self-defense, but they didn’t really go for it, and now he has to toe the line. Except that he can’t, because in the biggest revelation of the episode – dun-dun-DUN! – we found out that Mahone is working with the Evil Secret Service. Well, not so much working with them as working for them: They have something on him, and Evil Agent Lance met with Mahone and reminded him of his orders: KILL THEM ALL. Yes, Mahone is under orders to kill all eight escapees. So now we know why he killed Tweener, and Abruzzi’s death was no accident, either. Mahone told Evil Agent Lance that he’s happy to kill Michael and Linc, but he doesn’t understand why he has to kill the rest of them. Er, wait just a second. You want to kill Michael, who is completely nonviolent, but you have moral qualms about killing T-Bag? Whatever. Anywho, Agent Lance tells Mahone not to ask questions.Linc met up with L.J. in Arizona, by means of a ruse that involved paying some dude fifty bucks to beat the crap out of his son so that Linc could scoop him up from the hospital. There was big excitement at Dr. Sara’s apartment when an evil agent (not Lance) tried to kill her, but she sprayed him in the face with Raid and got away. Then she called some friend of her father’s and told him exactly where she was, and he sent a car with some guys who promptly rolled down their window and gunned down a woman who looked kinda like Sara from the back. Sara is such a moron that she called her father’s friend back to report this, but in the middle of the call, she finally realized that he was in on the conspiracy, so she hung up. Then she started trying to decode all of the origami cranes she’s gotten in the mail from Michael, and she figured out that he’s trying to set up a meeting with her, but she left one of the cranes back at her apartment, so she couldn’t suss out the entire message.

Not Sara Tancredi.

In other, less fascinating news, Bellick and Geary are looking for T-Bag; Sucre found out that Marisol didn’t go through with her wedding, so he split off from Michael to go and look for her; law enforcement is pressuring C-Note’s wife to give him up; and there was no sign of Haywire. I guess he and that border collie are still on a raft to Holland. Yawn. Pretty full episode, though. Now on to this week.

We open with Michael sneaking around at the so-called Blanding Botanical Gardens. Huh – already I suspect this episode is going to be less action-packed than last week’s. I mean, when I think of botanical gardens, I think of NPR and wedding receptions, not guns and murder. Things get even more G-rated when Michael decides to impersonate a botanical garden volunteer. I think the next time he gets the urge to do a little impromptu community service, he should impersonate a candy striper instead. Michael stares at a tattoo on his arm and we see that it matches up with a particular plant in the garden. Ah, the tattoo. How I missed you last week. Not really – actually, I was hoping we were phasing the tattoo out. Guess not.

As Michael gazes at the plant, which is kind of spiny-looking, he notices that a nearby photographer is smoking cigarettes. As we all know from The X-Files, people who smoke cigarettes are always evil, so Michael runs away. Okay, actually I think he ran because he noticed a whole pile of butts on the ground, meaning that the guy had been standing in one place for a long time, meaning he’s an undercover agent and not an innocent plant photographer. Like, nice job filling up the botanical garden with your cigarette butts, Mr. FBI Man. The fauxtographer and another agent give chase, but fortunately, Michael has the power to become invisible at will, so he evades his pursuers multiple times before vanishing over a fence. Seriously, how many times has he done this? It’s like he has a Harry Potter invisibility cloak.

The air is teeming with cancer germs! RUN!

Lincoln and L.J. are riding down the highway. Linc gives L.J. a fatherly talk about how great danger lies ahead, young grasshopper. L.J. says that it will all be fine when they meet up with Michael in Panama, but Linc tells him that they are by no means guaranteed to make it there. He tells L.J. that legally, he’s free and clear, so he doesn’t have to come along on this harebrained escape mission if he doesn’t want to. L.J. gets a little huffy, thinking that Linc is trying to ditch him, and I must say I don’t blame him. If I remember right, L.J. is supposed to be fifteen, and his mother and stepfather were just brutally murdered by the Evil Secret Service, which is presumably still after L.J. as a witness. As far as I know, Lincoln and Michael are his only living relatives. Just what exactly is he supposed to do if he doesn’t come on this trip with them? Obviously, he opts to tag along, and Linc is happy.

Michael is sitting in a diner watching the news, and he finds out about Tweener getting killed. Mahone is being interviewed and he claims that it was a tragic mishap and all that. Then a reporter asks Mahone if it’s true that he fished Michael’s hard drive out of the river and has been using it to track Michael’s escape plan, including this morning’s little stroll through the botanical gardens. Mahone refuses to comment, but Michael is absolutely gobsmacked at the realization that his entire tattoo-based itinerary is in Mahone’s grubby little paws. (By the way, I have no idea how the reporter knew about the hard drive. And I am mystified that Michael hadn’t already figured out how Mahone was staying one step ahead of him. Not too sharp, Scofield.)

At Manhunt Central, a couple of agents are poring over the evidence they found at the botanical gardens – namely, a giant box of vials of nitroglycerin. Huh? Apparently, this is the same kind of nitroglycerin that heart patients take, but the amount in this box could blow up a building. So Michael had somehow planted it there and was going to pick it up? Okay…. Mahone comes in and he is in an absolute rage that someone on his team leaked to the press about the hard drive. He is kicking furniture and freaking everybody out. Quick, Mahone, take some blue pills! He doesn’t, at least not that we see. Instead, he closes himself up in his office, and I notice that his name is screened onto the glass door. Isn’t that kind of weird? Isn’t this whole thing a temporary operation?

Oh, why do I even think about these things.

Back to Utah, where Michael is now at the library googling Mahone. Of course, it isn’t really Google; let’s call it, uh, Schmoogle. Schmoogle immediately brings up an article about Mahone’s past failure to catch Oscar Shales, who (Michael learns) was a serial killer. Then, in about 0.2 seconds, it brings up both Mahone’s name and address and that of his ex-wife, Pam, in Colorado. In fact, Schmoogle is so helpful as to specifically label said ex-wife as “DIVORCED.” How come the Internet doesn’t work this way for me? After the credits, we see Michael clothes-shopping at a Dollar General-type store. He is all breathy and mysterious with the saleslady, which I think is not smart fugitive behavior.

Cut to Mahone at Manhunt Central. He barks that he wants the codes from the origami cranes posted on his office walls. (Both Sara and the FBI have figured out that the phone numbers written on the cranes actually represent letters, as you would type them into a phone keypad. Of course, this means that there are several possible letters for each number, and thousands of possibilities for each full phone number Michael sent.) Mahone then says that today’s the day that Franklin (C-Note) is meeting his wife at the Rainbow Room, and also the day that Franklin is going down. We see that the two dead fugitives have had big red X’s over their pictures on the wall. Now, that is inappropriate. Mahone is totally chipper and in the mood to go off and wax C-Note. Mahone is just a teeny bit bipolar, y’all.

Your pretend tax dollars at work.

C-Note meets up with some old buddies of his in a parking garage. They are totally surprised to see him, and they warn him that the feds have been lurking around his wife. He says he knows. The guys (most of whom appear young enough to be C-Note’s children, by the way) warn him that he should probably get out of town without his family. He reminds them that they all owe him one because he didn’t rat them out when he got sent to Fox River, and they agree to help him pick up his wife and kid before he splits. Throughout this scene, everyone speaks stilted Hollywood Ghetto. C-Note even says “Shytown.” It’s awesome.

The FBI agent lady is harassing C-Note’s wife outside her house. We learn that the wife’s name is Casey and the daughter’s name is DeeDee. I have no idea why, but FBI Chick tells Casey that they tapped her phone and they know all about her plan to meet C-Note at the Rainbow Room. The FBI also knows that this does not refer to the Rainbow Room in New York, since Casey hasn’t bought any plane tickets. Wait. First of all, why tell her all this? Why not just shadow her all day until she meets up with her husband? And second, how do they know she isn’t going to buy the plane tickets later? Anyway, FBI Chick is a huge bitch and threatens to call Child Protective Services if Casey doesn’t cooperate.

Bellick and Geary receive some kind of phone tip that I assume relates to T-Bag’s whereabouts. At one point during the call, Bellick asks, “Fifty-two times?” My first thought is that this is probably the number of times that T-Bag stabbed someone. It later turns out that I am wrong. This show does tend to darken one’s view of the human race.

L.J. is bringing Linc some takeout as Linc sits in the car. Some cute girls flirt with L.J., and then one of them comes out to the car to give him his change. As she walks away, Linc sits there in the driver’s seat hoping out loud that she won’t turn around and recognize him. For some reason, he doesn’t just drive away before she has a chance to do that. Instead, he drives away AFTER she turns around and recognizes him. By the way, the girl has a really big ass, and I approve of that.

Hooray for big asses on television!

Linc and L.J. are now at high risk of getting caught, and L.J. is all guilty and defensive about it, I guess because he accidentally left his change inside the restaurant. L.J. throws out various ideas for new escape plans and Linc shoots them all down. Linc is fairly noncommittal and really doesn’t lay a guilt trip on L.J., but L.J. throws a total hissy-fit anyway and threatens to just get out of the car and leave. He also makes a really snotty comment about how he’s not a professional con man like his father. L.J. is a real brat. Linc apologizes to him even though he has absolutely no reason to.

Now Michael is in Colorado ringing a doorbell. He’s wearing a blue suit and his sexy glasses. Agent Mahone’s attractive ex-wife answers the door, and Michael impersonates an FBI agent; he has a fake badge and everything. He tells Pam that he needs to talk to her about her husband. She lets him in, like, nice FBI wife, dumbass. Here we have random strangers recognizing the Fox River Eight from the newspaper all over the country, and Michael puts on a pair of novelty glasses and suddenly he’s unrecognizable to the ex-wife of the chief agent on the case.

Michael says that he’s doing a background check on Alex (Mahone) because he’s being considered for a promotion. Pam says she doesn’t feel like talking about Alex, what with them being divorced and all. Michael cleverly pretends to feel her pain, claiming that his own ex-wife is also an agent and he understands how the FBI can wreck your family. And just like that, Pam falls for the Mikey Scofield charm and admits that she is afraid of Mahone.

Hook, line, and sinker.

Sara is holed up in a cheap motel outside Chicago. She is using the driver’s license of the woman who got murdered in her stead last week, although they don’t really look that much alike in the face. Sara is eating fast food and working on Michael’s origami-crane puzzle. So far she has deciphered the word “rendezvous” and the phrase “sundown hot.” She happens to put her piece of paper down on top of her burger wrapper, which has the word “Marvel” on it, and suddenly “sundown hot” becomes “Sundown Hotel.” That doesn’t seem like such a gigantic mental leap, actually, but what do I know. I’m not a doctor like Sara. She calls some kind of super-magical information phone number – let’s call it PhoneSchmoogle – and the operator tells her that there are three Sundown Hotels in the country, and he instantly gives her the towns for all three. This is not how it generally goes down when I call information. Sara deduces that of the three options she’s being offered, Michael is most likely to be in Gila, New Mexico, I guess because it’s, well, next to Mexico. Hence the name.

T-Bag is in Kansas. Hi, T-Bag! He puts the huge backpack full of money into a bus-station locker. For those who care about such things, the locker number is 804, and suddenly I feel like I’m watching Lost. As T-Bag is leaving the bus station, he stops to buy some sunflowers (have any of y’all ever seen a sunflower vendor in the lobby of a bus station? Maybe it’s a Kansas thing), and he also steals a pair of scissors. He has a little flashback of kissing the woman whom he is now presumably on his way to kill to pieces.

Shout-out?

C-Note’s friends want to kidnap his wife and kid in a hail of bullets. Okay, that’s not exactly true. What they want is to bring a whole shitload of guns along with them on the extraction mission. However, C-Note wants to do the whole thing unarmed. One of his little pals makes the extremely salient point that there will be law-enforcement officers there, and they will have guns, so he’s not going over there without guns of his own. I think this conflict is a little hard to believe. What, is C-Note a Quaker now? He’s a former soldier and robber; this sudden streak of pacifism is a tough sell. D’you think maybe this character is being sanctified as a prelude to his bloody demise? C-Note implausibly wins the argument about the guns.

Evil Agent Lance finds out that “Kelli Foster,” a.k.a. Dr. Sara, has booked a flight to New Mexico. Now, I get how the Evil Secret Service might have deduced that Sara took on the identity of the woman who was murdered in her place, but I don’t understand how they found out that woman’s name so quickly, what with her ID being gone from the crime scene. Anyway, Evil Agent Lance decides to track Sara himself rather than notifying his boss, Agent Kim. As we know, this is because Agent Kim wants to kill Sara, whereas Lance secretly looooooooves Sara.

At Command Central, the tip comes in from the waitress who spotted Linc and L.J. in Arizona. Mahone is still running around acting manic. Then he gets a call from Evil Agent Lance, who tells him about Sara’s flight to New Mexico. So am I wrong about Lance? Does he not have Sara’s back after all? I guess she isn’t technically on Mahone’s list of people to kill. Mahone is stoked to learn that Michael is headed for New Mexico. He starts obsessively circling any string of letters on the wall that contains the sequence “NM,” and he tells one of his flunkies to do the same.

Pam tells Michael that Alex used to be romantic, but then one day, he turned totally psycho and distanced himself from her and their son. She says he started to spend all his time gardening, with huge bags of fertilizer and lye and a new layer of sod. It is completely obvious from her description that Mahone was burying a dead body in the back yard – presumably Oscar Shales. However, Pam hasn’t clued into this scenario at all. She leaves Michael alone in her dining room and he steals her cell phone.

The FBI Bitch has strong-armed Casey into cooperating, or so it appears. Casey goes to wait for C-Note at the carousel, which is where they were when they took the picture that’s on the wall in their daughter’s room (the “Rainbow Room”). Again, couldn’t the FBI have accomplished this by simply following Casey? Why did they need her cooperation? As Casey stands by the carousel, one of C-Note’s friends comes up and tells her that a car is about to drive by and pick her up. She tells him that she can’t go because she’ll lose her daughter, but he promises her that she won’t. Meanwhile, FBI Bitch spots this conversation from her nearby van. Casey is torn, but ultimately she decides to trust C-Note’s friend and make a run for the getaway car.

Looks like the FBI Bitch didn’t get her way.

There is a car chase, which ends when the FBI car is cut off by a Mack truck. The Mack truck is being driven by one of C-Note’s other buddies, who is pretty hilarious as he pretends to be an innocent trucker who doesn’t speak English. Casey and her driver get on the phone with C-Note, and Casey freaks out when she learns that DeeDee hasn’t been secured yet. C-Note tells his wife to relax, because his friend Trey is picking DeeDee up from school right now. Do you think Trey is on the school’s list of approved people who can pick this kid up? Meanwhile, FBI Bitch is also on a mission to bust DeeDee out of school. Trey calls C-Note and tells him that the school is stalling him by saying that DeeDee can’t leave until she finishes a test.

Michael asks Pam about Oscar Shales. She admits that Mahone was obsessed with Shales for a year, but he didn’t start to act loony-tunes until after the trail went cold. Michael now has the whole thing figured out and he thanks Pam for her time. Her antennae go up, because he hasn’t asked about most of the things that are standard in these background checks. Michael tries to cover, and he commits a major screw-up when he gets some of the FBI bureaucratic lingo wrong. He leaves, but she’s almost certainly onto him.

C-Note is parked across the street from the school and he sees some FBI agents heading inside. He busts into the school himself, runs into the classroom, and grabs his daughter. Trey has gone ahead of him to start the car; C-Note runs out with DeeDee, and they get away. That was way too easy.

T-Bag is approaching his lady-friend’s house with his lovely bouquet of sunflowers. We see some more flashbacks. It appears that this woman was dating T-Bag and then found out he was a pedophile. She was horrified that she had let him be around her kids, and I’m guessing she turned him in. She later visited him in jail and spit in his face, and he ominously told her that he won’t forget what her front steps look like. And now, here he is! Surprise! But, oopsy, the house is for sale. The door is conveniently open, so he goes inside and sees that no one has been there in a while – there’s almost no furniture, and there’s a big pile of mail. He looks dejected. Aw – no murder for The Bag today. He sits down in a stray chair and gazes off into space. It reminds me of one of those professional skating routines where Brian Boitano or whoever skates around a lone chair on the ice.

What Would Brian Boitano Do?

Linc and L.J. are now on foot, hiking through a field. Linc is trying to have a birds-and-bees discussion with his son. L.J. basically admits that he screwed his French tutor when he was 13 and she was 17. Of course, this makes Linc think that his son is a bad-ass. This sort of thing always makes me mad, because if L.J. were a girl, his father would throttle him for that.

T-Bag is having more flashbacks. We see him teaching his girlfriend’s daughter her times tables right here in this very house. This gives him an excuse to skeezily touch the little girl’s hands. For some reason, T-Bag gets genuinely emotional as he remembers this; apparently, he had some sort of real affection for at least one of the people in this family, or else he has some remorse for whatever he did. I really hope this show is not trying to humanize T-Bag. Sorry, y’all, it’s just too late. The vet torture scene was the point of no return as far as character redemption goes. T-Bag starts to smash his sunflowers in rage. That’s pretty girly, as rages go. Just then, he gets whacked across the head with a big metal For Sale sign; he crumples to the floor unconscious. It’s Bellick.

Mahone is in his office puzzling over Michael’s code. Finally he discovers that one of the possible strings reads ELGILANM63. So “Gila, NM” is embedded in there; that’s the name of the town where Sara is headed. If Michael actually thought that Sara was going to crack this code on her own, he has a lot more confidence in her than I do. Then again, so far she’s managed to crack it without even having access to this particular clue, so I guess he made it too easy. Mahone decides that the “63″ in the code refers to June 3, which is tomorrow. Then his phone rings. He thinks it’s Pam, but it’s really Michael on Pam’s stolen phone. Mahone looks just a teeny bit freaked.

After the commercial, Michael assures Mahone that his ex-wife and son are fine. Then he drops the big bombshell about how he’s deduced that Mahone buried Oscar Shales in his backyard. Yeah, yeah, there’s the timing, and the fact that big bags of a certain type of lye serve to decompose bodies. I can only assume that Pam’s failure to think of any of this herself is attributable to a brain injury. Mahone denies everything, but we see a flashback that reminds us of how Mahone likes to stand in his backyard and stare down at the birdbath. Michael says that there will be DNA in the soil. Is that true? Anyway, Michael offers Mahone a deal: Let Michael, Linc, and L.J. escape, and Michael will keep his mouth shut. Mahone doesn’t bite; he tells Michael that he’ll see him sooner than he thinks.

T-Bag wakes up to Geary and Bellick snarking it up at his expense. Bellick fills him in that the woman who lived there packed up and fled as soon as she heard that T-Bag had escaped from Fox River. This makes her the single most intelligent person ever to be mentioned on this show. Bellick yanks T-Bag’s chain about how this is the house where he played “Pervert Knows Best.” T-Bag gets in his own digs about how Bellick still lives with his mother. But Bellick wins the sweepstakes of hurt feelings when he reveals that T-Bag sent fifty-two letters to this address from Fox River, and they all came back marked “Return to Sender.” So T-Bag is a gay inbred white-supremacist pedophile rapist murderer, but he’s in love with a nice middle-aged mother of two. Yeah, I’m starting to warm up to him now, not. Geary mentions T-Bag’s freshly sewn-on hand, and thank goodness for a little continuity on that point. Finally we get to the whole point of this exchange, which is that Bellick and Geary suspect that T-Bag has Westmoreland’s $5 million, and they want it. Duh. T-Bag insults Bellick’s mother and Bellick does something to T-Bag’s hand, making him scream in pain.

In a parking lot somewhere, Casey is reunited with her husband and daughter. She appears to be happy to see both of them, despite the fact that C-Note lied to her and told her he was in Iraq the entire time he was actually in prison. She kisses him and then asks him what happens next. He looks like he has no freaking clue.

Oh wait, was I supposed to plan this next part too?

Linc and L.J. are buying train tickets. Some dude recognizes them and calls the cops. It occurs to me that Linc would be well-served by wearing a hat occasionally; he’s a white guy with a shaved head, and this is the second time today that someone has ID’d him after looking at him for half a second.

And – ew. Mahone is frenetically digging up his backyard in broad daylight. He is standing in a hole about neck-deep when he finally digs up an arm bone. Looks like that lye didn’t dissolve much of anything. This would all seem a lot cooler if we didn’t have such a similar plot happening on Desperate Housewives. Also, what is the point of moving the body if Michael is correct that the DNA will have permeated the soil?

Linc and L.J. run from the cops. L.J. runs into traffic and gets hit by a car. Too bad, so sad. They both get arrested. L.J. is not dead – yet. But a girl can hope. See you next time!