The Mother Lode

Tonight brought the first new Prison Break episode in nearly four months, and the beginning of the end for the seires. Unforunately, it felt to me like the show had lost a lot of momentum since its last installment. This really wasn't the best place to have paused the story for such a long time.

For starters, it now seems to me like the cleaner break, from a narrative perspective, would have been to stop the season just as Linc and his gang were going to work for General Kranz. A new, final chapter could then have begun tonight, "working for the bad guys." But instead, we got one episode into that model, then had four months to forget all the particulars of it.

What's more, we didn't really come back to anything particularly interesting. Much of the episode was spent catching characters up on knowledge the audience already had, making sure everyone in the gang knows that Mama Burrows/Scofield is alive and well.

Another too-large part of the episode was spent on stereotypical villain patter. You know, conversations where bad guy and some forgettable henchman exchange phrases from the Villain Manual like "we have to keep on schedule," "I think his usefulness has come to an end," and so forth. It's unfortunately not any more interesting that the bad "guy" in this case happens to be female, and for my money, even less interesting that it's Mom (who we've known little about, so are not invested in). Right now, I think the contrivance is outweighing the drama. Hopefully, the few episodes left are enough to get over the "oh, come on" factor of the not dead Mom to tell an interesting story.

The attempt to kill General Kranz did provide one of the few surprises of the hour, but even that felt weirdly sudden and abrupt. After one previous appearance in an earlier "get his keycard" episode, some unimportant character turns out to have some vendetta against Kranz, enough to want to go along with killing him? Hell, we don't ever even get to hear what issue he had the made him go along with "Mama's Gang."

But I suppose this last brick of episodes won't likely have lots of merits as single hours of television -- they're really just setting up for the grand finale of the series. If it's a good one, once we get there, then perhaps a fairly drab episode like this will be worth it in retrospect.