New TV Season

The new television season is here and this easily has to be one of my favourite times of the year. With the returning show I follow back on the air and even the curiosity that comes with checking out the new stuff.

Prison Break was the first show back on the air, and I just had a chance to watch the season 4 premiere last night - and...it had it's moments of good and bad. Mostly bad now that I think of it.

I was a huge fan of this show for the first season, most of the second season, most of the 3rd season as well. The second season ended poorly for me, but the Sona storyline kept up my interest until the final episode of season 3. Season 1 has been the only season of the show thus far that has been great in my opinion from start to finish. Every season after it has seen my interest wane towards the end of the season resulting in mini marathons of Prison Break so I can clear up some space on my PVR, Not usually a good sign, but I keep coming back for more. I've come this far.

Now with Season 4 starting - and it may be the last after seeing how many people actually tuned in to the premiere - the plot is even more convoluted than I thought it could ever become, there was a resurrection of sorts and lastly Cannibalism

The plot for this year is to take down the Company, to do so, Micheal and crew have to work together to obtain a set of electronic documents - 6 in total. In return for this the US government has promised no jail time for anyone - and everyone involved is looking at 15 years on the light side if they don't help.

The simple fact that the government is running a black ops style mission with known criminals is a little weird to me - and sounds like it was done before, wasn't the MOD squad about criminals trying to work off their sentence (I'm too lazy for research). This season's plots seem to me like a blatant attempt to keep the show going. Michael and his crew have broken out of 2 prisons, now, once they find the six pieces of electronics that they are looking for, they have to break into a Company building (they don't now where it is at the moment) and the downfall of the evil Company can start from there I guess. This season will have nothing to do with breaking out of prisons. If this show - by some miracle - lasts another few seasons, Michael and his crew will be trying to break into car after locking the keys inside. That will be 22 episodes of excitement.

Resurrections are something I'm used to as a comic book fan - a character never seems to stay dead for more than a few years at the absolute most. So, when the character of Sarah was brought back to the land of the living - it smacked of "what the hell? we saw her head in a box in season 3!" The writer's clever way around this was to say that it wasn't really her, it was just some corpse that the Company had found as a way to motivate Michael and his brother Lincoln into doing their bidding.

Just some random corpse huh? A random corpse that looks exactly like the character they supposedly killed. In the flashbacks, they did the clever editing job of never actually showing the head in the box, but I distinctly remember seeing it in Season 3, back when the actress playing the character of Sarah didn't want to come back - for whatever reason. Now she's back, so it was just some random head in a box that coincidentally looked like Sarah's twin and nobody ever saw confirmation that it was actually Sarah's head in the box. Excellent job of retconing that whole scene.

I also had issue with once scene in which Michael is getting his tattoos removed. Michael, from seeing Season 1 you'll now was covered from the neck down in tattoos. It was his way of smuggling in his plans for escape from the first prison. Season 4 sees him seemingly have his tattoos removed in a single session with a laser. I may have missed something here, but I don't think that's possible. With editing, it made it seem like Michael had his tattoos removed, at least an arms worth (a sleeve I think it's called) in less than a day. Or course we never see Michael in short sleeves so it's hard to tell, but the editing makes it seem that way. That would be one gigantic leap in logic, but I suppose the whole show is a giant leap in logic.

Lastly, Cannibalism. T-bag, stranded in the desert with a Mexican travel partner are robbed and left for dead. The Mexican travel partner snaps after days without food or water, takes a swing ant T-bag and falls killing himself on a rock. T-bag thinks long and hard for a second then builds himself a fire and eats the guy!

WTF?

Then, T-bag continues his travels, finally runs into some people that will help him get out of the desert. Before the travel start, he kind of retches at the thought of what he just had to do. The one would be savior asks "Are you ok? What'd you do have some bad Mexican?"

To which T-bag replies "Something like that"

Seriously!

Bad enough that they had Cannibalism in the first place, but they had to throw in such a bad joke to top it all off?

If this was my first episode of Prison Break, it would have been my last. But I've been here since the beginning and I'll stick it out. They're running out of ideas and if Cannibalism sounds like a good one to the writers/producers of the show I'm forced to stick around til the end.

Tom.