There has to be more than one prison to break out of, doesn’t there? It’s genre television at its most blatantly obvious, with all the formal and narrative strictures that necessitates. I guess there’s a certain inevitability embedded in the show’s title that a critical viewer must just accept. But now here I am, watching and reviewing Season Three, loving every overheated, ludicrous moment of it, and wondering why I ever gave it up. Prison Break, a show I enjoyed immensely for a good season and a half, was finally broken. I also vowed never to watch the show again.
So when just about every name character left alive did in fact end up, through a series of machinations and coincidences too ridiculous to recount, in a squalid, lethal, maximum security Panamanian prison, I was not at all surprised. It would be a cheap and lazy solution, sure, but also the most logical move, given the show’s title – but still cheap.
As off-the-rails and stupidly brash as the show had been for two seasons, I didn’t think it would have the gall to go through all the trouble of busting Scofield et al out, just to throw them back in. When I half-jokingly wondered aloud, while watching the second season of Prison Break, whether Michael Scofield and Company would just end up back in a different prison after a season on the run, I didn’t know that the show’s writers a) were listening to me and b) actually taking me seriously.
