Writer: Seth Hoffman
Director: Karen GaviolaCast: Wentworth Miller (Michael Scofield), Jodi Lyn O'Keefe (Gretchen), Amaury Nolasco (Sucre), William Fichtner (Mahone), Sarah Wayne Callies (Sara), Dominic Purcell (Lincoln), Wade Williams (Brad), Michael Rapaport (Don Self), Robert Knepper (T-Bag), Leon Russom (Pad Man) & Cress Williams (Wyatt)
If you're still watching Prison Break, you've clearly chosen to accept season 4's radical revamp, and this fifth episode rewards you with quite a confident outing. "Safe And Sound" once again revolves around the search for a Scylla data-card; this one locked inside a safe owned by a high-ranking federal agent. Fundamentally, it's another mini-mission for Michael (Wentworth Miller), Linc (Dominic Purcell), Sucre (Amaury Nolasco) and Bellick (Wade Williams) to pull off, but all of those actors are at their best embroiled in tense, covert situations... so that's fine with me.The only interesting piece of storytelling is still coming courtesy of twitchy Mahone (William Fichtner), with the writers clearly aware Fichtner's the only actor capable of bringing a wide range of emotions to bare. Here, Mahone meets up with his wife Pam (Callie Thorne), who for the purposes of the storyline doesn't blame her husband for the fact their son was murdered by a hitman after Mahone. We'll just have to accept the Mahones have a marriage strong enough to overcome this tragedy, okay.
Still, his son's death has given Mahone the perfect chance to ditch Prison Break's Scylla-obsessed story and venture off into his own, more entertaining, subplot – using his skills as a manhunter to track down and hopefully kill his boy's murderer, Wyatt (Cress Williams). It's a simple story of paternal revenge, but it works well because Mahone's the only character acting on pure emotions.
Everyone else is only bothering to takedown The Company because their hand is being forced by their own government. And it's difficult to actually care about The Company and their baffling machinations, which lost all sense after season 1's presidential scandal. I'm just not eager to see them punished, because you can't hate a generic evil corporation with much passion -- and Prison Break's few human-face villains are either long dead (Agent Kellerman, Mr. Kim), underwritten (Leon Russom's suddenly-ubiquitous Pad Man), too new to have a history (Wyatt), or have become anti-heroes you love-to-hate (Jodi Lyn O'Keefe, whose sneering villain puts her own escape bid into action here.)
The typical Prison Break episode seems to involve a harebrained scheme (here, the team drill into a safe to retrieve a Scylla card, covered by the noise of Bellick and Sucre shampooing a carpet), a torture of some description (Gretchen is left to retch over a bucket of human waste), together with a few small surprises and twists of expectation (Robert Knepper's T-Bag gets some unexpected help from the sexy GATE secretary, who realizes he's not really super salesman Cole Pfeiffer and forces him to buy her silence.)
Still, Prison Break has been a series that just gets by on an established template for years now; even its surprises carry a strange predictability about them when they strike. So far, season 4 isn't really inspiring stuff, but I have a grudging admiration that it's still on-air. As always, a fair bit happens, but most of it won't have a lasting impact, and will probably be ignored if it jeopardises the smooth-running of the storyline 5 episodes from now. It's still very easy to get caught up in the second-to-second drama of episodes like "Safe And Sound", while finding minor excitement and amusement along the way, but Prison Break's tricks are now blunted with age and the mechanics of everything is quite predictable.
Overall, Fichtner vs. Wyatt is the one subplot I'm genuinely engaged with, and T-Bag's story is developing quite well at GATE through pure mysteriousness. Everything else is a low hum of engaging action beats, peppered with silly moments. It's difficult to really care about anything very much though -- as the show historically doesn't reward viewer loyalty, it just hopes its die-hard audience will be entertained for 43-minutes, won't ask too many questions, and won't kick up a stink when the plot goes off-the-rails to be clumsily fixed at a later date. Mind you, now Michael knows Pad Man is The Company's boss, his ominous nosebleeds seems to have their origins in a teenage illness, and Gretchen is about to make her comeback, so there's still enough to keep long-time fans on the fish-hook...
23 September 2008
Sky1, 9pm
