||SPOILERS|| Back for its final half-dozen episodes (plus a two-hour DVD special in the summer), Prison Break's fourth season feels ridiculously tedious and tough-going after a four-month hiatus. The show has been running on fumes since the latter half of season 2, but it can usually build enough delirious pace to pull viewers through each episode on pure momentum and machismo. Season 4 was mindlessly enjoyable until mid-season (when the twists just became too far-fetched and in service to keeping this juggling act going), and now we're coasting by... to predetermined death."The Mother Lode" has split the brothers into two groups. There's Michael (Wentworth Miller), rescued from the Company's grip by girlfriend Sara (Sarah Wayne Callies), and now on the run after discovering his mother Christina (Kathleen Quinlan) is still alive and a high-ranking Company employee. Then there's elder sibling Lincoln (Dominic Purcell), who is trying to retrieve Scylla for Company boss General Krantz (Leon Russom) as payment for Michael's life-saving brain op. To this end, The General threatens Linc's team by sending them photos of loved-ones, to ensure their obedience. Linc learns his mother's alive after Michael calls him, but his on-the-run younger brother refuses to help find Scylla.
This episode was a tedious mess. My patience is at a low ebb already, and it's been so long since the show last aired that it was a struggle to remember all the background to character's motivations. Not that they even make sense, if you know! Mahone (William Fichtner), T-Bag (Robert Knepper) and Don (Michael Rappaport) head up a subplot about retrieving the names of the group that have stolen Scylla, by gaining access to a database of names after noticing a key taken from Caruths contains a microchip. Forgotten who Caruths was? That's the problem. If it helps, he was the guy who shot Gretchen in the last episode, that feels like it happened over a year ago.It's actually very difficult to find the enthusiasm to review this episode. It's another story that creates things to give its characters something to do, usually resulting in a foot chase, shootout or break-in (that the series choreographs nicely, admittedly.) But the characters are empty puppets to be manipulated one final time, and I've about exhausted my ability to keep up with what's going on. Or really care. The Company will be beaten if the plot deems it so, as the writer's hand is always so infuriatingly visible. The fact is, nothing here makes a whole lot of sense, and I don't have much faith that the ambiguities it spoon-feeds us will be explained very well.
And the acting remains questionable at best. There's a terrible moment when Linc goes to meet with his mother; a woman he thought has been dead for 23 years and abandoned him as a child. This is a BIG moment. A moment of reunion that should have been a chokingly real, emotional real highlight. But, oh shit, you've got Dominic "the human pork scratching" Purcell as its star. Kathleen Quinlan's a decent enough actress (heaven knows what she's doing slumming it here), but she can't really help, either. Her character's supposed to be very stoical and reserved, so the whole success of the scene rests on Purcell's shoulders. And he has BIG shoulders. But, the best he can do is look vaguely numbed, before they stick on a scene afterwards where he leans against a wall to recover from the shock. Dear, oh dear.Michael and Sara spend most of the episode stuck in the back of a truck, after hitching a lift from a trucker, before it's commandeered by a bad guy. This gives Michael the chance to ponder his mother's survival (similarly, Miller doesn't have much range as an actor to do any of this stuff justice), before he employs his trademark MacGyver-like skills to escape from the locked truck and avoid the baddie, who gives chase to a local ghost town in the desert.
Overall, there's really not much to say. The impetus has gone, the show is on its death bed, the actors fail to sparkle, and there are half-hearted ways to keep some semblance of drama (they even threaten to kill off The General.) Some may say I'm a fool for even bothering with Prison Break for as long as I have, but it's generally served up a fairly consistent mix of incident, fun, escapism, silliness, twists, and fast plotting. But now, I'm just very, very bored. The idea of putting Michael and Linc on separate sides isn't one I want to see, and introducing their mother as a villain (or is she? Ooooh) just feels like another shark has been jumped.
21 April 2009
Sky1, 10pm
Writer: Seth Hoffman
Director: Jonathan Glassner
Cast: Wentworth Miller (Michael), Dominic Purcell (Lincoln), Sarah Wayne Callies (Sara), Michael Rapaport (Don), Robert Knepper (T-Bag), William Fichtner (Mahone), Kathleen Quinlan (Christina), Leon Russom (General Krantz), Dan Sachoff (Krantz's Aide), Roberto Sanchez (Rubin), Daniel Zacapa (Priest), Ted King (Downey), Shaun Duke (Griffin Orern) & David Parker (Trucker)
