7 years after his apparent demise, Michael Scofield reappeared...
Full spoilers for Prison Break continue below.
Nostalgia is a powerful force on FOX. It’s led the network to revive three of its biggest hits in the last couple of years: The X-Files, 24, and now Prison Break. It was over a decade ago when viewers first met Michael Scofield (Wentworth Miller), a man so determined to save his brother, Lincoln Burrows (Dominic Purcell), from a death sentence that he got himself locked up at Fox River Penitentiary with the escape plan for the prison tattooed across his body. That was a great hook for the series, and the show kept trying to recapture that initial spark throughout the four season run. Sometimes, the creators went to great lengths to keep the series going, including throwing half of the cast in a Panamanian prison and turning almost all of them into unofficial intelligence operatives in the final season.
There was one big problem with reuniting the cast for a revival: Michael died at the end of the fourth season. The only way around that was to make Michael’s survival and his whereabouts one of the key mysteries of the new season. That also gave Lincoln a reversal of the initial dynamic, as he was the one who had to save his brother this time. Now that we’ve seen the entire season, it’s safe to say that this was the best way to handle that issue. However, not everything holds up once you realize how it happened. Considering the lengths that Michael went through to set the events in motion, it doesn’t seem likely that he could pull it off with the limited resources that he had.
Prison Break has never been big on logical storytelling, and this is a show that requires a massive suspension of disbelief if you want to go along for the ride. The revival did manage to recreate some of the thrills from the original series. A lot of that was due to the power of Miller and Purcell’s performances. They aren’t actually related, but it’s so easy to buy into them as siblings. The greatest love story on this show has always been between the two brothers, and their emotional reunion was the high point of the season.
Questionable writing has also been a hallmark of the series, and that bogged down a few of the major players. Sara Tancredi-Scofield (Sarah Wayne Callies) was the biggest victim of those poor decisions, as she spent most of her time away from Michael and Lincoln. To be fair, Sara’s marriage to Jacob Anton Ness (Mark Feuerstein) was an emotional complication that worked for several episodes. But watching Sara team up with T-Bag (Robert Knepper) defied all reason, and she fell for an incredibly obvious ruse that didn’t do her character any favors.
Knepper was actually one of the best parts of the show, even if T-Bag’s apparent change of heart never really felt genuine. In fact, it made absolutely no sense at all, but Knepper acted the hell out of what he was given. He even made T-Bag’s reunion with someone close to him into an emotionally affecting scene. It’s easy to see why the producers of this series were so eager to have Knepper back, even if it felt forced. Rockmond Dunbar was also quite good as C-Note, but his character was almost entirely reconceived for this series. C-Note never had a real bond with the brothers, yet he acted like they were his closest friends. That caused a pretty big disconnect for anyone who watched the first four seasons.
Sadly, Fernando Sucre (Amaury Nolasco) and Paul Kellerman (Paul Adelstein) had only minor roles this season, as both added a lot of value to their appearances. Sucre was particularly hilarious once he returned to the fold, but it was all too brief. As for Kellerman, his new status quo didn’t quite track with the ending that the original series gave him. Kellerman just kind of showed up where the plot needed him to be and he didn’t serve a higher purpose in the story.
Unfortunately, many of the new characters, including Whip (Augustus Prew), Sid (Kunal Sharma), and Ja (Rick Yune) were underdeveloped and frankly, not very interesting. That made them seem very inconsequential and expendable. With only nine episodes, there wasn’t any way to give everyone the time that they needed. But if the show was going to ask the audience to make an emotional investment in the new faces then we needed more than just bizarre rumors about the fate of Freddie Mercury’s ashes.
Aside from the shaky story logic and the plot twists that just didn’t quite work, the biggest issue that held back this revival was the laughably cartoonish and incompetent villains. The new enemy agents, A&W (Marina Benedict) and Van Gogh (Steve Mouzakis) barely had a single personality between the two of them until the series attempted to add some depth to their motivations very late in the game. By then it was already too late to make the viewers care about them. Poseidon fared much better once he came out into the open, but there were still moments of unintentional hilarity, including Poseidon’s ability to fake a child’s drawing. The fact that the show bungled the reveal of Poseidon’s identity also meant that his ultimate unmasking lost all of the power that it could have had.
However, Prison Break did the one thing that FOX’s other revivals refused to do: it offered closure for both the series and the revival. There are no more cliffhangers here, and no lingering plotlines to exploit years down the line. If you loved these characters in the original series, then you were probably happy about their place in the world in the closing moments - except for one familiar face who was absolutely screwed by the so-called “grace” that he was offered. But maybe we’ll see him again if Breakout Kings ever gets a revival.
The Verdict
Although the Prison Break revival came close several times to self-parody, the reunion of Lincoln, Michael, Sara, and the rest of the original characters had enough power to carry the show through its sillier moments. If nothing else, Prison Break finally got the ending that it deserved and it may have achieved the greatest escape of them all by making it incredibly hard for FOX to force another season of the revival series.
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire