TDL-evision: Prison Break - Season 3
To recap for those reading along at home, in Season 1 was a 22-episode heist movie about 8 guys escaping prison. Season 2 gave us the US Marshal’s manhunt of the Fox River Eight across the United States. As I guess more people are like me and enjoyed the 22-episode heist move, the end of Season 2 saw Billick, Scoffield, T-Bag, and Mahone thrown in to a Panamanian prison with the assumption that they would, you know, escape.
The season was halved last year because of the writer’s strike, so instead of getting a 22-episode heist movie I instead got a 13-episode heist movie. It worked for me, I guess, but it was much like any other sequel. Not quite up to the bar set by the first movie but with moments all it’s own. It’s at about this point in the series that I realized how much the plot line is exactly similar to 24. They do something… and something goes wrong, which makes them do something else, which also goes wrong, which makes them do something else, which inexplicably goes wrong by some kind of wrath of God bad luck. This is not to be confused with 24’s plot of finding a witness, who gets shot but who gives a clue to another witness who gets shot. However, they do both share the wrestling ideal that everyone’s looking to turn on everyone else.
In the sequel, Scoffield is dropped in to a Panamanian prison and discovers that there’s a guy in there who he has to help break out. This guy, Whistler, is in Sona Prison for some undefined reason. Sona is much tougher than Fox River. It is simply prisoners kept inside a set of walls, surrounded by no-man’s land, surrounded by an electrified fence. There are no guards inside the walls. After a particularly bad riot the guards decided to leave the prisoners to themselves, only entering to do an occasional head-count. The prisoners have set up a dictatorship underneath the 4-life-sentenced Lechero, played by Robert Wisdom.
This is about the point at which this all-powerful, mysterious Company starts to get a little old. For three seasons now, they’ve created this far-reaching conglomerate. This Company, it’s revealed, managed to set-up Scoffield to have him placed in this prison so he could come up with a plan to break out Whistler. Meanwhile, let’s keep in mind that this Company, as it was revealed previously, is powerful enough to assassinate the president, fake the death of the Vice President’s brother for some inexplicable reason, have the Vice President placed in office, and fast-track some guy’s death sentence… but doesn’t have the resources to break a guy out of a Panamanian prison? Somehow, it’s easier or better to have Scoffield placed in the same prison, travel to the states to kidnap LJ (Lincoln’s son) and Sarah (Scoffield’s girlfriend), BRING them to Panama as hostages, and demand Scoffield break them out? This company is willing to kill anyone and everyone that gets in their way, yet they’re not willing to run a smash and grab at the prison and kill all the guards out of a helicopter? Really? Like… what’s the limit of what this company can do? They can assassinate the president but they can’t break a guy out of prison? It’s very confusing.
Oddly, I think the half-season arc actually HELPED this season. Maybe it’s because I don’t have much time off between watching these shows and I start to find the clinical bad luck somewhat annoying but you’d think just the law of averages would make the occasional thing go right, wouldn’t you?
Regardless, I enjoy the show. It just requires one of the highest “suspensions of disbelief” levels this side of 24 and Raw. And, for the first time, I can start watching it weekly. I don’t yet know what the storyline of season four is going to be. I hope it’s something beyond “Panamanian Manhunt”. I also hope they, like 24, realized that their plot has become kind of predictable and shake something up this season.