You Can Revive a Character, But Not a Series
24: Day Seven Finale
FOX
THE NATIONAL POST
Prison Break takes its final bow as 24 lives to die another day
The ending of Prison Break is surprisingly satisfying. I can't go into details of course, but the justice meted out in tonight's double length season finale is, for the most part, remarkably poetic. Any tears shed will, I think, be happy ones.
Apart from being happy that the show is ending well, devotees will, I think, be happy that it's ending. And that's not because our nerves can't stand the strain of the characters' constant hopes, setbacks and re-alignments. Or at least not in the way that the creators might have hoped. We look fondly back to the first season in which the angelically ingenious efforts of Michael Scofield to save his framed brother Lincoln Burrows from the chair were set against the more or less convincing, and certainly absorbing, texture of life in a Chicago prison. I thought the second season was even better; it was fascinating to watch the brothers and their fellow escapees - some welcome allies, some not - fanned out across the landscape, and then fanned in again, in their struggles to avoid re-capture by the law, or elimination by a corrupt administration, itself in thrall to the ruthless all-powerful Company.
Opinions differ as to when it all started to go to hell. Probably the crucial moment was the end of Season 2, when a logical happy ending was arbitrarily denied, probably by a network intent on prolonging a successful show. (And were they ever wrong. Ratings have plummeted.) Season 3 was a complete waste of time, with Michael and company thrust into another jail, in Panama, whose own chaos overtook the story itself. Season 4 endearingly tried to act as if Season 3 had never happened, but it too got engulfed. Other fatal moments: the apparent decapitation of the lovely Dr. Sara and her unsurprising return when the actress' contract got sorted out. (We were glad to see her - at least I was - but still.) The first mention of Scylla, the miracle device that can precipitate either total war or total peace, and its relentless promotion as the show's MacGuffin. (I've never really understood its connection to Lincoln's incarceration, which I'd thought was what the show was about.) All other mentions of Scylla. The advent of Gretchen, the Mata Hari who couldn't act, and her removal just as it was beginning to seem that she could. The final act of writers' desperation: the appearance of the brothers' mother, who we'd been told was dead, and her unmasking as the most evil and least convincing of the show's evil geniuses. (She really can't act; not this role anyway.) "My husband," she tells Lincoln tonight, "used to call me Lady Macbeth," to which Linc replies, "no wonder I never liked Shakespeare." At least, I think he does; she's shot him, so he's mumbling a bit. She then tells him that he's just too dumb. Some mom.
But just as the threat of execution is said to concentrate the mind wonderfully - which, come to think of it, was this show's original premise - so the imminence of its own extinction seems to have brought on a final spurt of energy. Tonight's double-length finale couldn't exactly be called plausible, but it's edge-of-your-seat exciting. Almost to the end our heroes are having to dodge both acknowledged baddies and putative goodies. It might be amusing, someday, to tally up just who on this show has suffered the greatest number of unjust arrests. Linc? Sucre? Mahone?
It's also, as might have been anticipated, something of an old friends' night. We all knew that Sucre would come back (and it's hardly a spoiler, since it happens before the credits) but he's followed by some more surprising returns. There's one who functions as a deus ex machina, and just behind him another deus from an even shinier machine. Though since this guy - I'm itching to tell you who it is - seems to have had everyone's fate in his hands for ages, you may get to wondering where he's been all this time. Strange are the ways of fate, and of actors' availability. We can count ourselves lucky that William Fichtner's Mahone has hung in there (So who cares how many people he's killed? He's suffered and we like him) and that Robert Knepper's T-Bag - serial killer, rapist and son-of-the-South - has grabbed every stylish opportunity he's been given. His best recent moment, after some stooge said, "I never worked for the Company," was when he practically crooned the comment, "six words that never come true." T-Bag keeps promising to escape the box in which his authors have confined him, and his attempts at rehabilitation have been haunting. I guess, though, that the redemption prize on this show has already been taken, by Brad Bellick, the formerly brutal warder who ended up taking one for the company, though definitely not for the Company. They might have thrown him a last posthumous bone.
24 also ends its season, though not its life, on Monday. So presumably - I haven't been fed an advance copy of this one - Jack Bauer will be rescued from death-by-bioweapon through a transplant from daughter Kim, currently being held hostage again. One hopes this is intentional self-parody, as in order to save her Jack once again has to take villainous instructions through an ear-piece, just as in Season 1, eons ago. And he may have to pretend-kill the lovely Renee for the second time this season. (Well, I trust it'll be pretend. Jack's relationships never go well, but there are limits.) 24, by starting each season pretty much from scratch, has an advantage on Prison Break, which had obligations towards continuity, and this season, following on a couple of bummers, has been unexpectedly tense. The ethics of torture have been discussed, in a dutiful but not unintelligent way. Jon Voigt has come, chewed scenery and been blown up. The lady President's annoying daughter has been handed, at the 22nd hour, a decent plot-line. And Tony Almeida, resuscitated even more laughably than Dr. Sara, has been swinging metronomically from bad to good to bad again. There has to be another twist - I'm betting on good-but-doomed - or there won't have been any point at all. As at this point in previous seasons, America has been saved. Now we get to the important stuff.