It was loud, dumb, but a lot of fun.Īnd with so many narrative and characters thrown up in the air as Season 2 wound down, I thought that Season 3 would continue the on-the-run juggling act for a bit longer. But it has, or had, enough interesting tweaks on the “jail break” tradition to keep you hooked from week to week, a certain knowing disregard for even the barest hint of believability, but delivered with an entirely straight face. No one could accuse Prison Break of breaking the mold - if anything it reinforces it. There has to be more than one prison to break out of, doesn’t there? It’s genre television at its most blatantly obvious, with all the formal and narrative strictures that necessitates. I guess there’s a certain inevitability embedded in the show’s title that a critical viewer must just accept. But now here I am, watching and reviewing Season Three, loving every overheated, ludicrous moment of it, and wondering why I ever gave it up. Prison Break, a show I enjoyed immensely for a good season and a half, was finally broken. I also vowed never to watch the show again. So when just about every name character left alive did in fact end up, through a series of machinations and coincidences too ridiculous to recount, in a squalid, lethal, maximum security Panamanian prison, I was not at all surprised. It would be a cheap and lazy solution, sure, but also the most logical move, given the show’s title – but still cheap. As off-the-rails and stupidly brash as the show had been for two seasons, I didn’t think it would have the gall to go through all the trouble of busting Scofield et al out, just to throw them back in.

When I half-jokingly wondered aloud, while watching the second season of Prison Break, whether Michael Scofield and Company would just end up back in a different prison after a season on the run, I didn’t know that the show’s writers a) were listening to me and b) actually taking me seriously.

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