The SmarK Rant for Prison Break – Episode Eight
“The Old Head”
No overriding tattoo theme this week, but I truly think this was the defining episode of the series and the one that will turn it into the next big thing on TV.
“9, 1, 1, Send. Think you can hit four buttons before I hit one?”
Mike starts us out with some wacko geographical metaphors about the prison, trying to keep things simple for the ragtag group of miscreants who make up his team — the cell block is New York, the wall is California, and their on-ramp into the tunnels is St. Louis. T-Bag, not yet officially part of the team, keeps trying to sweet-talk his way onto the team, mainly by threatening to rat them all out, but Mike of course has a plan to get rid of him.
Pope and Bellick are on the warpath, meanwhile, looking for whoever shanked Officer Bob when last we were in the prison. And wouldn’t you know, someone is still trying to kill Veronica, this time via a bomb that was planted in her apartment doorway and probably should have been more than enough to take her and Nick out along with the poor extra who got wiped out instead. This is why I never help people with their groceries. The risk is just too great.
T-Bag continues being an awesome heel, bartering his continued silence in exchange for a PI pass. Linc and Livejournal have a heart-to-heart talk in another storyline that seems like it’s just redundant information, but soon becomes AWESOME.
And then, the first chink in the intellectual armor of Mike’s super-brain, as we discover that St. Louis (ie, the old storage house listing on Mike’s internal map) has now become the guards’ break-room. This is of course an impossible obstacle to overcome, but that’s par for the course for Mike, who can figure out anything with a well-placed medium-distance gaze. But fate saves him the trouble, as it turns out that DB Cooper is in with the guards after 30 years of good behavior, and gets to go into the break room to serve lunch. And then, just to SILENCE the naysayers who have been giving me grief over it, Mike personally steps up to the plate (just for me, I’m sure) and has a conversation with “Westmoreland” where he lays out, step by step, exactly why Charles Westmoreland is in fact DB Cooper. SO THERE. Charles protests that he was locked up in Folsom during the Cooper heist and thus couldn’t be him, but the laws of time and space are child’s play for Mike Scofield, so I’m sure he’ll have that one figured out soon enough, if not already. Anyway, DB declines the invite to join the team, because he’s too busy worrying about pussy(cat). And if Mike can find him some pussy(cat), that might be a different story.
Nick and Veronica, looking remarkably spry for two people who were standing 3 feet away from what looked like enough C4 to level a building, take it on the run, baby, cuz that’s the way they want it, baby.
Now, for Mike, finding DB’s lost cat is child’s play compared to engineering a prison break, so he pulls that one off without breaking a sweat, and now he’s got DB on their side. And for once it’s SUCRE who has the big idea — put rubber cement in the bottom of a coffee pot, and ignite a fire that the PI team will then have to clean up for weeks afterwards. Mike stops to have a passive-aggressive confrontation with the hot doctor, as she tiptoes around his lies about working in the pipes last week and he withers her with a medium-distance gaze.
And then things go from awesome to awesomer, as Livejournal gets home from prison just as we find out that the reporter “interviewing” Lincoln is in fact a MESSENGER OF DEATH. To learn that the government actually IS out to get you, while you’re locked up on death row no less, has go to be a bad feeling. And on cue, Evil Secret Service arrives at LJ’s home and murders his parents in spectacularly evil and cold fashion. Kellerman, scum of the earth, gets the line of the show as LJ attempts to call 911 on his cell phone, but even THAT would get paid off later. The kid escapes, but they doctor the scene to hang the murders on him, just in case. Sure, it’s suddenly looking like Kim Bauer 2.0, but I’m having a blast anyway. And these f*ckers are EVIL.
So Bellick goes to DB, hat in hand, trying to be his friend, but apparently snitching on the real killer of Officer Bob would be a bad thing for him to do. However, just a CO being in the cell puts forth the image of snitching, so T-Bag decides to get rid of any potential snitcher and Bellick for good measure. His hired killer won’t do a guard, and that delay allows Bellick to have Cooper’s CAT KILLED. Oh man, this is warped and becoming more Oz-like all the time. And now the asshole in Cooper has been awakened again, and before you can say “planted cigarattes”, the guard room is up in flames. And then to top off the irony, T-Bag frames his would-be killer and pins the murder of the other guard on him instead. Oh, snap.
Nick and Veronica hide out in the cabin, confident of their safety, so Nick should be dead any day now. And so T-Bag ends up on PI duty and the guards helpfully provide a wheelbarrow full of sledehammers to break a big hole in the floor with. But before we go, it turns out that LJ had a CAMERA in his phone, and took a nice picture of Kellerman killing his stepfather, which leads us to the final shock of the show, as we learn that the mystery woman is not Martha Stewart, but rather the Vice-President herself.
