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For all of the praise I heaped on Season One of Prison Break you’d think that season two would continue to deliver The Goodness (tm). Turns out, not so much.

I guess when you have a show called Prison Break, and the end of season one is actually breaking out of prison, you have to fill time with things other than the prison break… which is difficult in a show called Prison Break.

At the end of Season One, Wentworth Miller’s Michael Scoffield had convinced D.B. Cooper to tell him the location of his five million dollar stash and had either recruited or picked up seven other escapees. SPOILER ALERT: they escaped and made it to the airport. Unfortunately, the plane that was waiting for them took off without them. Season two, or as I’ve taken to calling it: “Everything that could remotely go wrong does go wrong and everyone who isn’t in prison is unimaginably stupid and don’t analyze this storyline too long or your head will literally melt off your body”, picks up right after this moment and follows the manhunt for the “Fox River Eight.”

There are two really bright spots in the otherwise predictable and annoying second season, so I’ll address them first. The addition of William Fichtner as FBI agent/profiler/manhunter Alexander Mahone was very well done casting. Fichtner plays the obsessive/compulsive Moriarty to Scoffield’s Holmes. Mahone is an expert on chasing down escaped convicts and uses Scoffield’s own obsessive need to plan against him. Mahone figures out that the entire escape plan is tattooed on Scoffield’s body and uses that to get ahead of him and track him down. As it turns out, Mahone is haunted by the demons of an escapee that he killed and The Company manipulates him using that and his family.

The second is the expansion of Paul Adelstein’s Paul Kellerman from “Random Goon In A Loosely Defined Conspiracy” to “More Well Defined Goon In A Loosely Defined Conspiracy.” In the first season, Kellerman was one of the Vice President’s government sponsored hitmen in the guise of a Secret Service agent. In the second season, Kellerman goes rogue after The Company tried to force him out of President Reynolds’s life. It’s hinted that the two of them either had a relationship or that she dangled the promise of a relationship in front of him to keep him in line. After The Company cuts his contact off, and he gets angry about it, they decide he’s a liability and try to have him eliminated. This turns him in to a badass traitor.

As for the rest of it… season two was kind of boring and predictably bad. The conspiracy, just a minor storyline in season one, comes to the forefront in season two and the show suffers. When you have a shaky conspiracy storyline as the hook that kicks off the action, that’s one thing. When you start to go in to that conspiracy, one that’s apparently so deep it reaches to all levels of government and is powerful enough to stage a suicide that covers up the MURDER OF THE GOVERNOR OF ILLINOIS — and this is after the previous season in which Vice President Reynolds POISONED THE PRESIDENT with no repercussions — ya need to make a sanity check. Seriously, we’re talking about the murder of two high profile government people in the span of like four weeks and no one’s asking questions?

The season also suffered from what I call Ben Stiller Movie Syndrome. If you’ve ever seen There’s Something About Mary or Meet The Parents, you’ll understand this. All of the Ben Stiller movies (where he’s not playing a wacky Zoolander character) are based on one running punchline: his character’s unlucky. It’s funny for maybe the first half-hour of the movie. By the mid-point, it becomes obvious that anything wacky that could go wrong goes wrong. By the end of the movie, it’s like: “we get it. He’s unlucky.” That’s season two of Prison Break. All of Scoffield’s carefully laid plans are generally foiled by mundane things. He leaves his car at a parking meter and it gets towed. Mahone figures out one of Scoffield’s tattoos because he happens to look down in his car’s rear-view mirror at exactly the right time. To an extent, I understand why this happens and, really, these are just minor nitpicks at the gaping, overall problems with Season Two.

One of them in particular, and the hardest one to deal with, is the enormous problem with the show’s time line. The first season covers approximately six weeks from Scoffield’s incarceration in late April to May 27th 2005. The second season, when you look at dates, only covers about three weeks of show time. This wouldn’t be a problem if not for some of the insane plot points. For instance, a couple days after the escape, Billick is fired from Fox River for allowing inmates to pay him for certain privileges. The next day, Geary (the guy who turned Billick in because Billick had him fired) and Billick decide to try to get in on the $100k/head Fox River Eight manhunt. They find Cooper’s five million dollars and Geary turns on Billick, knocking him over the head with a tire iron and escaping to a hotel with the money. While Billick is in the hospital, he leaves Geary a threatening voice mail with the general idea “if I ever find you, I’m going to kill you.” While Billick is in the hospital, T-Bag finds Geary, kills him, takes the money, and frames Billick. While Billick is getting discharged from the hospital, Geary’s body is brought in. Billick is then arrested for this murder that he apparently committed while getting stitches.

Now, from the time Billick got knocked out until the time he’s out of the emergency room is, what, eight to ten hours max? Is there any of that time he isn’t accounted for? And he’s convicted of the murder and sent to prison by the end of the next day? And none of the detectives see any problem with this? Like, I don’t know, the time of death was when Billick was sitting in a hospital? That, I don’t know, he wasn’t on any of the cameras that high end hotels tend to have but, surprise, one of the Fox River Eight was? Their evidence is a voice mail and the fact Geary was pointing at Billick’s name on a receipt? And that’s enough to get him incarcerated at Fox River by end of business the next day?

This leads to another problem with all of the season two. The gaping stupidity of everyone who is not either a member of the Fox River Eight or a person chasing them. The prime example of this is T-Bag’s ex-wife. She was the one who turned him in and had him sent to prison. He tracks her down. You’re telling me this woman, whose children were threatened and was told, by T-Bag, “don’t you think when I get outta here I won’t remember what your front porch looked like” is going to stick around her home while he’s still on the loose? Or, at the very least, she wouldn’t have some sort of protection or system set up with a friend that says “If I don’t call you every day at 8:05 pm, there’s a problem and call the cops?”

And this is before you even get in to the conspiracy storyline that still makes no sense 44 episodes in. However, they did add a spooky old white man to be the face of The Company. The spooky white man does not talk, but instead writes down his questions and answers on pieces of paper which he then, presumably, destroys. This way his conversations can never be recorded.

I found the 2nd season of Prison Break to be a huge disappointment. I also found it amusing that, by the end of the 2nd season, most of the primary lead cast had been put in a Panamanian prison. So, I guess they plan to go back to the basics in season three.

Recommended if you want to play “find the plot hole.” Otherwise avoid and watch season one again.