TV on DVD: Prison Break - The Final Break

Prison Break: The Final Break

It’s finally over. This show should have ended with season two, something I’ve said over and over again, and the series finale proved that by arbitrarily wrapping things up when it seems that it could have happened at any point during the show’s run. Well, just to emphasize how completely ridiculous the people behind “Prison Break” want its legacy to be, here’s another story that’s completely unnecessary. The show ended, and it looks like someone wasn’t happy with Michael only breaking out of two prisons during the show’s run, and therefore orchestrating a third highly illogical breakout must have seemed the logical solution. This also doubles as the women-in-prison spin-off that FOX had always planned to make. At least this TV movie was only two hours long, and viewers don’t have to be subjected to an entire series based around the ill-advised concept. Anyone who acknowledges and cherishes the existence of the third and fourth seasons of the show can easily pretend this movie never occurred, because Michael’s death was already established in the series finale. In any case, this final presentation should absolutely be ignored. But, I’d still like to share my reasons for hating it.

The biggest reason this movie stinks (and there are many) is that the show has gone and repeated itself over and over and over, to an unbearable point. The Company’s time has come and gone, Mahone’s allegiance has been questioned and proven time and time again, and Michael’s daring means of devising an escape have been tried and exhausted too many times to count. The fact that the government would still want to get Michael Scofield after he received a pardon from whomever Kellerman was working for doesn’t make much sense, and is hardly a legitimate premise for this epilogue. Then again, it’s been a long time since anything on “Prison Break” has needed a valid reason to go down any road. It seems like Michael has some sort of addiction to breaking people out of jail, and it’s literally what he does up until his final moment. But the crucial problem with Michael’s final plan is that Sara won’t have the free, peaceful life he would like for her as a permanent fugitive, though the show doesn’t seem to acknowledge that in any way. Michael would have been better off finding a way to actually get here free and clear and actually pardoned, and I know that Michael, with that brain of his, could have come up with some better plan that didn’t leave Sara alone for what would have been the remainder of his life and might have left her a free woman.

Besides those obvious issues, the movie has other problems. The entire jail scenario is at the same time devastatingly tired and highly preposterous. The initial offer of the seemingly kind-hearted guard to transfer Sara to a more comfortable room is extremely evident from the start, and though I don’t find her to be terribly intelligent, Sara’s smarter than that. The attempt to mirror the brothers’ prison situation is laughable. Sara’s “daddy” is almost an exact female version of T-Bag, and the angry, silent woman who Sara pushes her into is just a silly, stupid character. The need to incorporate Gretchen is pathetic, especially because this only proves that she has allegiance to absolutely no one, and tries to imply that she’s a caring mother who only wants the best for her daughter even though we’ve seen her act over and over as a cold, cruel, vicious killer. The reappearance of both the general and T-Bag is also only an epitaph for their characters, proving that bad people really get what’s coming to them, and no one likes a rat. Getting the rest of the gang together is fine, but wouldn’t these people want to move on with their lives? I know I sure do. That’s all the “Prison Break” I can take.

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