What I'm Watching: Prison Break (Season Finale)

Prison Break: Season 3, Episode 13 “The Art of the Deal” (D-)

This season ender should be looked at in comparison to the finales of the previous two seasons, one of which was unbelievably amazing and the other which was dismally atrocious. At the close of season one, Michael, Lincoln, Sucre, and Abruzzi, fresh out of prison, saw their plane take off without them and darted off towards the woods to run for their lives. Season two ended with Michael, T-Bag, Bellick, and Mahone inexplicably ending up back in prison, this time in Panama, when Michael easily should have gotten away and the series should have ended. The first season of this show was impressive but constrained by the embellishments the plot tried to pass off as believable, while the second was remarkable for sustaining itself with them on the outside, but became tiresome and repetitive about halfway through. This is the definitive show which deserves thirteen episodes a season, and finally in its third year it accidentally gets an appropriate order. Dragging this escape out would have been dreadful. After it took them an entire twenty-one episodes to get out of Fox River, their escape from Sona was actually quite disappointing, though way overdue. This finale is quite a letdown as well, offering few solutions and keeping a number of semi-sympathetic characters in prison (Sucre, Bellick, and T-Bag). Whistler was actually bad all along, but he has to be the least menacing and most apologetic villain ever to grace television screens. Mahone is always looking out for his own good, but joining up with the Company cannot be a good choice. Michael deciding that after all this, he is going to go on a Kill Bill-like revenge trip is terribly unexciting because Michael is such a nice guy and the thought of him punishing anyone (save for stabbing T-Bag in his hand last season) is a joke. On the subject of unbelievability, is no one looking for these escaped cons? They spend so much time interrogating Sucre but no one bothers to check the kid’s house where his entire family is gathered for a surprise welcome-home party. The song played at the end of the episode attempts to immortalize the show and keep its characters as ever-existing, ambiguous inmates and fugitives, but it honestly worked much better when it was used in the David Lynch film “Mulholland Drive.” It is a key example of this show taking itself too seriously. Hopefully this is the end of the road for this show which needs to be put out of its misery, though rumors of a female Prison Break spin-off are horrifying. Who needs to see women get dragged through the same lengthy and far-fetched prison escape plans? This show has run its course, and its plot should die with it.