TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

'Prison Break' begins race to series finale

ADVERTISEMENT

By WALT BELCHER

The Tampa Tribune

Published: April 17, 2009

The wild ride is almost over for the bad boys and good guys on "Prison Break."

The Fox thriller returns at 9 tonight for a short run that will end with the series finale on May 15. A "Prison Break" rerun at 8 tonight recaps the past and sets up the final storyline.

There will be several twists and turns, surprises, returning characters and a death or two along the way.

Fans want to know what will happen to brothers Michael Scofield (Wentworth Miller) and Lincoln Burrows (Dominic Purcell), who have survived some improbable adventures.

After a riveting first season in which the ever-cool mastermind Michael helped the wrongly convicted Lincoln escape from the Fox River Penitentiary, they have been on the run.

Michael landed in a Panama prison, and, after another breakout, he and Lincoln are trying to bring down a mysterious conspiratorial agency.

The cast, crew and producers "always knew there would be an expiration date," says executive producer Matt Olmstead. In a telephone interview Wednesday, he said it was time to pull the plug because they had run out of plausible ideas to keep the show going.

"Prison Break" often stretched the bounds of credibility. Part of the fun was in seeing how thin the stretch would be. Olmstead says the biggest stretch for him was when Michael's body tattoos were erased overnight.

Michael first went to jail with the floor plans of the prison worked into a full-body tattoo. By the second season, actor Miller was suffering from skin irritations from the temporary skin art.

To explain the removal of the tattoos, "we kind of fudged it a little bit when he went to a supersecret tattoo removal place," Olmstead says.

A bigger stretch for me involved the show's resident villain Theodore "T-Bag" Bagwell (Robert Knepper), who while on the run had a hand chopped off by an ax.

The evil T-Bag then forced a veterinarian to sew it back on. Amazingly, he survives the ordeal only to cut the hand off himself later in the story (to escape after being chained to a radiator).

He eventually got a prosthetic hand, presumably from a poor guy that had the misfortune to cross paths with T-bag in a bar. But how he attached it remains a mystery.

Olmstead says T-Bag is "a real cockroach" who is able to survive to cause trouble. "But obviously he's a big fan favorite," he says. "And it's a bit heartbreaking to see where he ends up. But it makes perfect sense."

Olmstead also says there's a "big surprise reveal" on the way with a returning character that will really shake things up. He says the relationship between Michael and Sara (Sarah Wayne Callies) "wraps up unexpectedly. It's bittersweet but very satisfying."

SHUT DOWN: Fox introduces a new animated comedy at 8:30 p.m. Sunday that's not worthy to be in the same lineup with "The Simpsons" or "King of the Hill."

"Sit Down, Shut Up" is an annoying piece of drivel set in a Florida high school where the students are crude and the teachers are dipsticks. Talent is wasted here. The voices are supplied by Jason Bateman, Will Arnett, Kristin Chenoweth and Henry Winkler.

It was created by Mitchell Hurwitz, who won Emmys for his clever "Arrested Development." He won't win anything for this.

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT