The SmarK Rant for Prison Break – Episodes 1 and 2

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The SmarK Rant for Prison Break – Episodes 1 and 2

With the hyped involvement of Rush Hour director Brett Ratner and a gritty look to it that’s lacking from most dramas these days, Prison Break seemed to be the big, can’t miss buzz show of the new season, so I decide to jump on board at the beginning and see if it would live up to the hype.

What we got was good, with shock moments to be sure, but there’s definitely room to grow here.

We begin with Mike Schofield (Wentworth Miller, a new face) doing an ill-advised armed robbery, deliberately getting caught, and then pleading no-contest to put him into jail. Fox River State Penitentiary, to be exact. We learn he has diabetes and get the standard shanking scene to establish that yes, this is a rough maximum security prison. We also meet the Black Dude Who Can Get You Anything, a convention so cliché that it was used recently in The Longest Yard, for pete’s sake. However, the central plot of the show comes into play when we meet Mike’s brother Lincoln (Dominic Purcell, a B-movie specialist), aka “Linc the Sink,” named as such because he comes at you with “everything but the…” Linc is due to be executed for killing the vice-president’s brother, and thus is under guard 24/7. Oh, and he swears innocence. Yeah, they always do.

Back on the streets, Linc’s son LJ tries dealing weed, and gets caught. Man, who gets busted for pot anymore? We’re also introduced to Mike’s cellmate Sucre, who is the necessary Latino stereotype with a girl that may be cheating on him.

Peter Stormare is introduced next, playing yet another wacko, although this time a mafia wacko named Abruzzi who controls the prison work program. Mike introduces himself by giving him an origami duck, which is more origami than you normally get in a prison drama.

We next meet Warden Pope (Stacy Keach as another hardass), aka “The Pope,” who reveals to us that Mike is in fact a structural engineer. You think he might make the connection and accuse him of trying a breakout, but in fact he just wants help building his scale model Taj Mahal.

Next bit of character info is that Mike’s lawyer Veronica (Robin Tunney, the bald chick in Empire Records) is Linc’s ex-girlfriend, and she thinks that Mike is up to something fishy. Well, they do call him Fish in prison.

I should point out that the narrative for this first episode is very jumpy, moving from 15 second scene to 15 second scene, and I hope that it clears up after the show gets going proper.

Next introduction is to a bishop who opposes the death penalty, and he’s visited by a pair of slimy Secret Service agents who want him to change his views so that Linc’s execution can proceed smoothly. He refuses, and you can guess what happens to him a little bit later. SOMEONE’S going to hell for that one.

Mike’s origami duck turns out to be a message to Abruzzi, matching one found with a picture of a missing gangster outside the prison. The message is clear — blackmail. Go, Mike! Mike meets “DB Cooper,” the requisite grizzled old-timer character, in a role that practically screams to have Morgan Freeman acting and narrating. Mike’s blackmail attempts earn him an enemy in Abruzzi and a beating from his goons, and then 3 months in “The Shoe,” the prison’s solitary confinement unit. However, with only two months left until his brother is executed, Mike decides to help out The Pope with his Taj Mahal after all.

LJ and Linc’s wife (ex-wife? It’s not made entirely clear) visit him so that he can give the kid the “scared straight” speech, but LJ counters with “You’re already dead to me!” Man, kids these days.

And then the diabetes thing we learned about earlier in the show is called back again, as Mike visits the doctor for insulin injections and she thinks that he might not be diabetic after all. So he buy an insulin blocker from the “local pharmacy,” who is of course another black guy. This ends up being more of a plot complication setup than any kind of racial stereotype, though, so I’ll let it slide. Things continue going Mike’s way, as his blackmail attempt on Abruzzi works and he gets a job with Linc. At this point, we learn that Mike’s firm built the prison, under the table and with no credit given to him…and he has the blueprint tattooed over his entire body. Oh, SHIT. Thus, the prison break begins.

Episode 2 sees Mike learning about the race wars and getting caught with a shank, which sends Sucre to the Shoe for some quality time alone. It also leaves him without communication with his girl for a while, and he spends much of the episode all broken up over that. However, the Evil Guard (another one ripped right out of Oz) is after Mike, and WANTED that shank charge to stick, man. So now it’s another enemy for Mike.

Linc and Mike share some discussion time about Mike’s break plans, but Linc thinks that he’s being too much of an intellectual and hasn’t taken the human element into consideration. I would have to disagree with that, because we immediately get a scene where Mike has memorized the location of a BOLT that he apparently needs for something. That kind of freaky preparation and genius trumps the human element, I think. While he goes to retrieve it, the human element interjects itself in the form of Teabag, a charming white supremacist serial killer who “owns” the bench it’s connected to. Apparently Teabag rapes and murders children, not necessarily in that order. And you thought Schillinger was a dick. He offers to make Mike his new bitch, because apparently he has another pocket lining to share, but some offers you just can’t sweeten up enough.

Eventually Mike frees his precious bolt from the benches, but loses it to Teabag and his charming cadre of sissy boys, thus giving him his first challenge of the season. And then things get worse as the guard finds his notes on the bolt and Abruzzi REALLY wants to know where his missing friend is. The gangsters on the outside squeeze Abruzzi into cooperating with Mike’s plans, so they can find the missing guy, but Abruzzi doesn’t play well with others.

Meanwhile, the white and black sides start arming for war like Stallone in the climax of a Rambo movie, and who doesn’t love a good race war? Well, Mike, who joins the white side to get his damn bolt back, but his pharmacist sees him making nicey-nice with the black-hating serial killer, and he’s kinda peeved. Bye bye, insulin blocking pills.

Back on the outside, Veronica looks into Linc’s case because he’s so darn insistent about his innocence, and she finds a tape of him popping a cap into SOMEONE, and that pretty much convinces her. Linc, however, insists that sure, he was high on crack, and sure, he had a gun and was GOING to kill someone, but the guy was dead when he got there. And he wonders why he’s on death row? He insists, however, that a lowlife named Crab Simmons can exonerate him, so she goes looking for him. His mom says he’s dead, but he’s NOT. Oh, sneaky. She later meets up with Crab’s girl, who spouts conspiracy theories like a JFK cameo or something, but then a video wall behind Veronica blinks and the symbolism is obvious.

Back at the prison, it’s RIOT TIME. Mike steals his bolt back in the hubbub, and Teabag’s bitch gets shanked, HARDCORE. That’s some Oz-quality shanking right there. Teabag of course blames Mike, giving him another enemy. But then serial killers are not noted for their rational thought patterns. Mike is understandably bummed, and expresses this by rubbing the bolt on the floor while the prison is in lockdown. Well, he’ll have plenty of time with his bolt now.

In the meantime, we meet a Mysterious Woman, whose face we cannot see, and she reveals that Veronica didn’t exactly graduate at the top of a prestigious law school, or even at the top of her school for that matter. She also has the Secret Service dicks under her thumb.

And then finally they pay off the damn bolt, as Mike files it down to an Allen key using just the floor, and we flash back to him memorizing the plans for the toilets, which require just that size of an Allen key to dislodge. Man, never let it be said that characters are written too dumb on this show.

And with Mike considered the shanker by Teabag, that makes him OK with the black side again, and he gets his insulin blocker to continue pulling off his diabetic scam. Why he wants to be in the infirmary so bad we’re left to wonder about, just like the supporting characters who wonder the same thing.

However, things take a turn for the ugly, as Abruzzi has had enough of waiting to find out where his friend is hidden, and no amount of bartering the escape can save Mike from a very painful toe-cutting with what looks like an unsanitary pair of bolt-cutters.

Note to self: Don’t f*ck with the mafia.

I liked the way that this show writes UP to the viewer’s level instead of down, allowing you to attempt to draw your own conclusions and figure out the puzzle before revealing it, instead of just laying out the whole plan and building the drama on whether Mike gets caught or not. I mean, of course he’s gonna break out, it’s called PRISON BREAK. The tension is about HOW he’s going to do this and who goes with him and stuff. Most of the characters inside the prison are right off the Oz reject pile, to be sure, but then there’s only so much you can do inside a prison character-wise because that’s who ends up in prison. I think the show could stand to be a bit more claustrophobic, like Oz was, instead of taking breaks outside the walls to advance the lawyer plot, but that’s minor.

SirLinksALot: Prison Break