Like "24," Fox's "Prison Break" is a shark that must keep moving forward to live. Especially after the first season, it has relied on relentless momentum to carry viewers past the insane plot twists and downright ridiculous turns of events. When the pace flags, "Prison Break" seems about to jump the shark. But somehow the writers always pull off another triple lutz and get things moving again. The first half of Monday's two-hour fourth-season premiere is one such occasion.
Actually, triple lutz doesn't begin to convey the degree of difficulty of the maneuvers the writers execute in this episode.
At the end of season three, Michael and Linc were on the run in Central America, Sara was still dead, and most of the rest of the original Fox River Penitentiary gang was still imprisoned in the Panamanian hellhole known as Sona. Meanwhile, Gretchen and Whistler were off to do their nefarious thing for the mysterious and homicidal cartel known as The Company. But by the end of Monday night...
STOP READING RIGHT NOW IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW! SPOILERS AHEAD!
...Michael and Linc are swiftly returned to the United States to work for a government agent who's secretly investigating the Company. Bellick and Sucre and Mahone get transferred out of Sona to join their team, all of them slaving like the Dirty Dozen in hopes of having their prison sentences eliminated. T-Bag is still South of Border, trying to make his way home with a suitcase full of money. At least two characters take bullets. And as any "Prison Break" fan who hasn't been living in a cave for the last three months knows, there's one huge surprise in the offing:
Dr. Sara is alive. And Monday she and Michael are reunited at last.
This was widely reported when actress Sarah Wayne Callies started doing press for the show again, so it's not much of a spoiler, I guess. But there are a lot of fans who've always wanted nothing more than for Dr. Sara Tancredi and Michael Scofield, played by Wentworth Miller, to get back together. They will be happy to see a reunion (right) tonight. Not that it's entirely happy for long, or that Sara has had an easy time of things when they were apart. But at least she and Michael can be snuggle bunnies even as she joins him in the fight against The Company.
Pretty amazing how the writers pull it all together in that first hour. The sheer brazenness of what they've done made me grin at times. The second hour is more straightforward but still pretty pulse-pounding, as long as you don't think too hard. Our Dirty-Not-Quite-Dozen get to work tracking down the McGuffin that drives the plot, a computer memory card code-named Scylla that contains all The Company's secrets.
They've
got to steal it without anyone noticing, or at least steal the data, and then decrypt it, which will require this gang of escape artists to break into Company headquarters...
The one astonishing feat of imagination in the second hour is that the writers have actually thought of a taboo that T-Bag has not broken. Once again, the most psycho character on this over-the-top show does something so vile, so gruesome, that you can't help but giggle. As I've said before, this performance by Robert Knepper (left) is a thing of wonder. No matter what evil T-Bag is perpetrating, the actor still lets you see the broken man inside. That does not keep him from being very, very scary.
Another underrated performance on the show - again, underrated because the character is such a scumbag - is the disgraced prison guard and craven whiner Brad Bellick, played by Wade Williams. He has two hilarious moments on Monday. One's a moment of joy that I won't spoil for you. The other is the perfect delivery of a very short line, "We're screwed," that's filled with so much resignation and disappointment that I laughed out loud.
There are also three new characters who make the plot go, and I'll rank them from best to worst:
Agent Don Self (left) is bravely battling The Company from inside a government riddled with Company spies. He puts Michael Scofield et al to work for him because they're almost the only allies he's got. Self is played by Michael Rapaport, best known for his biting work in sitcoms "My Name Is Earl" and "The War At Home." He's a worthy addition to the cast.
Wyatt (right) is the guy who does all the dirty work for the leaders of The Company. He's the remorseless, relentless dude in a nice suit and black gloves who kills, kidnaps and tortures in hopes of catching up with Michael and Co. before they can harm the company. Cress Williams does what he can with a familiar character.
Roland (left) is the criminal hacker and inventor who Self gets out of jail to add some cyber expertise to Michael's team. So far, at least, he's a typical resentful young brainiac, and there's not much actor James Hiroyuki Liao can do with the underwritten part.
Overall, I was expecting tonight to be another chance for this show to jump the shark, as the producers pulled back to convenient Los Angeles for filming and coughed up a whole new plot. But the writers pulled it off with panache and a couple of wild grace notes. This still isn't "The Sopranos" or "The Shield." It's not a show you have to take seriously. But on Monday, at least, it is once again highly entertaining.
