Prison Break: "Shut Down" - Episode 403

Hello, Prison Breakers! I don't know about you, but I'm really digging the new and improved A-Team-style approach to this new season. The episodes we're getting are neater, cleaner, and a hell of a lot more fun to watch each week than the usual 'let's dig another hole' stories that bogged down the show for the last season and a half or so, don't you think? Best part about them is that above all, they're really just trying to be good, clean fun. Not every serialized TV show nowadays needs to be 'Lost', and in light of that, I think Prison Break is succeeding where shows like Heroes are failing. Prison Break is just a fun show to watch, and to me, seeing Lincoln Burrows stride into a building carrying a fire axe with a bad-ass look on his face will ALWAYS be more enjoyable than having to endure yet another brood-fest from that pansy-ass emo poster boy Peter Petrelli. Go check your hair, hero - the boys are back in town to kick your ass. More Prison Break after the jump...

I'm not sure how many of you are familiar with how I structure my recaps for Lost, but in the interest of keeping these Prison Break posts as neat and tidy as possible, I think I'm going to assemble them in a similar fashion. As we know, there are many storylines going on in Prison Break at the same time, so I'll be detailing each of them separately, and then tying them all together at the end. This strategy might not work as well for Prison Break as it does for Lost, but we'll give it a shot anyway. Tell me how it's clicking for you in the comments below, okay? Off we go...

MICHAEL'S CREW - Well, as we saw last week, Michael, Lincoln, Sara, Mahone, Sucre, and Bellick have all been recruited by Homeland Security to steal what is known as 'Scylla', a data card that is essentially the little black book of the shadowy organization known as The Company. They managed to grab what Homeland Security Agent Don Self thought was Scylla, but it turned out to be only one of six cards. Uh-oh. Don gives Michael and his crew a day to get the next card, but if they can't, they'll all be going to back to jail. They start their search in the portable hard drive that Roland (the team's computer geek helper-guy) downloaded the contents of the first card onto. Apparently, while the card was next to Stuart Tuxhorn's PDA (Stuart's the guy whose house they had to break into to even get close to the first Scylla card), the hard drive downloaded a bunch of emails along with the contents of the data card. The team starts scavenging through those emails to find a potential location of the next cardholder, and through some pretty miraculous fact-finding, they determine that Tuxhorn's next meeting with the next cardholder is taking place that very day at 4:00. But where?

Roland rattles off some gibberish about what happens to an email after you send it, and from that, he traces the IP address of the email that told them when Tuxhorn would be holding his meeting, and he deduces that the server it was sent from is in Anaheim. So I guess they're going to Anaheim, right? Right. The team makes its way to the actual building that the mail server is located in (I know, I know), and once again, Sara's the bait here. She enters the building and tells the front desk that she has an appointment for a job interview that day, but what she's really up to is swiping the guard's badge when he's not looking. She grabs the badge and hands it off to Michael and Roland as they make their way to the server room (I know, I know), but as she tries to split, the guard catches her and accuses her of swiping the badge. Uh-oh. Luckily, Lincoln and Mahone are watching from outside the building in a parked car, and as soon as they see that Sarah's been nabbed, they call Michael and tell him what's up. Michael flips the fire alarm to create a diversion, and Sara slips away in the confusion.

Roland gets the information he needs from the server farm, but as he and Michael are set to leave, they discover that the tripping of the fire alarm has caused a little snag - the door to the server room has been automatically locked, and in addition to that, all the oxygen is now being sucked from the server room as a security precaution. Now, Steve Jobs I ain't, but I do know at least that computers need oxygen to keep themselves cool, and being that I didn't see all those computers shutting down as another part of that security precaution... Oh, forget it. I might as well start complaining how hard it would've been for BA Baracus to run from the bad guys with all that gold around his neck. On with the show.

Well, Michael calls Lincoln outside and tells him their predicament while Roland sucks up even more of their precious oxygen with his bitch-ass hyperventilating, so Linc grabs an axe off the fire truck that has just rolled up in response to the fire alarm and strides inside with it. I don't mind telling you that he looks like a seriously bad-ass mothafucka while doing it, either. Go Lincoln! He finds the server room lickety-split and bashes in the window with the axe, allowing Michael and Roland to escape.

Meanwhile, Sucre and Bellick are playing stakeout in a car outside, and Bellick starts floating around the idea of the two of them making a run for the border, and I don't mean Taco Bell. Sucre shuts him down with yet another diatribe about how badly he wants to see his daughter, and before long, BAM! A bunch of guys in suits and ties roll up on them with guns and start yelling at them to put their hands up. WTF? Who is this? And what was that text message that Sucre sent right before the two of them got pinched?

Back at the warehouse, Michael and crew think they've got a lead on where Tuxhorn's meeting is based on some info Roland downloaded from the server farm, but it turns out to be a dead end that Mahone's a bit too familiar with. Mahone recognizes the website that the email came from as one that he used to visit with his now-dead son, but when he checks it out, the potential lead for the team turns out to be yet another dead end. Roland tries to get back into the system provided for him by Don Self and Homeland Security, but he's been locked out. Wait, what? Why would they be locked out? Michael gets the first clue towards this in the form of a text message - 'RUN'. That's right - it's from Sucre, and it's tipping him off that the bottom is falling out of their mission. Don Self is apparently pulling the plug on the whole operation, but why?

Michael and his crew take the hint from Sucre, and they all split from the warehouse and are soon being followed by Don Self and his team. Michael calls Don and asks him what the deal is, and he tells him that the plug has indeed been pulled from the entire operation. No more funding, no more cool oceanfront warehouse to play spies in, nothing. The Scylla project is dead, and the first mess to clean up is Michael and his team. Needless to say, the team is reluctant to just give up, so a big-ass car chase takes place, ending at a power plant that the team has deduced is the meeting place for the next cardholder and the bigwigs of The Company. As Michael's crew is being thrown into a van en route back to jail, the team plead with Don to hear them out and just take a short walk over to the other side of the damn power plant to see for themselves. No go, says Don. Get in the van, suckas!

Michael escapes all that mess, though, and right as the rest of the team is about to be loaded in full into the van, he rolls up on Don and crew in a carjacked taxicab and presents him with his cell phone. 'Push the video button', he says, and when Don does so, he sees some footage that Michael just recorded of the Company bigwigs meeting just a few hundred yards away on the other side of the power plant. 'It's not only one cardholder that was meeting here today,' explains Michael. 'It was all of them.' Sure enough, there they are - all six cardholders in The Company meeting to compare notes. Don calls his bosses who were ready to shut down the Scylla project and tells them to go pound sand up their ass. Hell, he even called a damn senator to get the whole thing back up and running again. No shortened season here - Michael and his crew are set free and taken back to the warehouse to reboot their mission of finding the five remaining Scylla cards. See, if I were Don, I'd just call for backup and surround the damn power plant so that the cardholders would've had nowhere to go, but I guess that's just far too logical or something. I mean, come on - it's Homeland Security. Those guys can tap the phone of a jackass like me, but they can't circle the wagons on a shadowy organization when the time comes?

Alright, that was the main plot of the episode. Let's fill in the blanks a little, starting with...

DON SELF - Don's turning out to be quite the conflicted little worry-wart, isn't he? The first shot we see of him in the episode was him looking at his wedding ring, and then hiding it in his pocket real quick when Michael rolls up to tell him about the other five missing Scylla cards. Speaking of those five cards, I thought sure he knew that there were six of them opposed to just one, but according to the chat he had later with his boss, he actually didn't. In fact, not even the uppity-ups at Homeland Security knew that there were six cards, and when he finds out that there are, that's what gets the ball rolling towards shutting down the entire project with Michael and crew. If it were up to Don, that never would've happened. Personally, I think Don's got some kind of personal ties to this Scylla project somewhere, and THAT'S the real reason why he's so insistent on keeping Michael's crew so hot on the trail of it. It might even have something to do with what he was doing with his wedding ring at the beginning of the episode. Ya think?

ALEX MAHONE - Mahone's not exactly having a good season so far, is he? Poor guy. Having found out what happened to his wife and son, he contacts his old FBI accomplice Agent Lang and convinces her to get him some information on their case. We later find out that only his son is actually dead (turns out the info Agent Lang got him were AUTOPSY PICTURES of his kid - Yuck!), but his wife is still alive and being used as proof of what The Company will do to him if he strays too far off his path. Hang in there, Alex! With how much the show is hyping the presence of Bad Guy Wyatt so far, I'm fairly certain you'll get a little facetime with the man who killed your son before long.

WYATT AND BRUCE BENNETT - Alright, so at the end of last week's episode, bad guy Wyatt had found out where Bruce lived and gone to his house to shake some information out of him about where Michael and Lincoln were. Bruce posted bail for the both of them, so he had to know something, right? Wyatt's injected Bruce with some kind of truth serum, and he's got him tied to a chair while he tries to convince him to give up the info. Bruce is a hard nut to crack, though, and it takes three more injections of the truth serum before he gives up anything. All Wyatt manages to get out of Bruce is that Michael and Lincoln are in Los Angeles, and apparently, that's all he needs. Wyatt ends their little therapy session with a bullet in the back of Bruce's head. Whoa. I'm sure a few episodes down the road, we'll find out that Bruce isn't really dead because of the truth serum's ability to reflect bullets away from human flesh or some dumb-ass shit like that, but until that happens, I'm gonna call it - Bruce is dead.

T-BAG - Which brings us to our favorite character, Theodore 'T-Bag' Bagwell. T-Bag had just hit the jackpot last episode when he intercepted Whistler's mission and found all that stuff in the bus locker in San Diego. Fake ID, credit card, brand-new job description at somewhere called Gate Corporation, the works. T-Bag doesn't do that bad for a one-handed flesh-eating pedophile rapist, does he? Not bad at all. Anyway, he reaches Los Angeles and checks out his brand-new furnished apartment courtesy of Gate Corporation, despite the fact that the picture on his new fake ID looks absolutely nothing like him. Details, details. He makes himself comfy and then starts poking around the information packet that he's found from Gate Corporation. It's a real company with a real phone that gets answered when he calls it, and according to the info in the packet, his new name is Cole Pfeiffer, his new job pays 75K a year, and what's more, that job comes with a $10,000 signing bonus. Not bad! T-Bag calls Gate Industries to see what he can do about getting that bonus sent his way (remember, DB Cooper's $5 million was stolen by the 'coyotes' and is long gone by now), but instead, he starts talking with one Gregory White, some bigwig at Gate Corporation who is very much looking forward to meeting Cole Pfeiffer. Turns out T-Bag is now the #1 salesman in the Northeast Region for Gate Corporation, and Mr. White wants to shake his hand in person. The two men make an appointment to meet the next day, and all is set. Now, the Gate Corporation's GOTTA be a front for something else, right? Probably The Company, if I know these kinds of shows by now. Should be interesting if it is, being that Michael and his crew have made it their mission to take down what T-Bag is about to become a very large part of.

ODDS AND ENDS - Here's a place for me to yack about whatever else was in the show that doesn't really need its own section. Check it out -

Lincoln and Mahone had a nice little scene at the end of the episode, and to be honest, I think it contained some of the finest acting we've seen over the duration of the entire series. William Fichtner's bringing his A-game so far, so I'm excited to see it continue. He and Linc talked about what happened to Mahone's son, and the two men commisserated over their now-common goal of taking down The Company as revenge for continuing to fuck with their kids. Should be fun to watch, to say the least.

Nice to see Bellick trying to worm his way out of any kind of responsibility again, and I mean that sarcastically. Writers, come on - you've more than avenged Bellick's assholery towards Michael and Co. from the first season. Isn't it about time to give the man something to do besides grovel and run away from stuff?

As creepy as the scene between Wyatt and Bennett was, I really want to see some serious bad-guy shit being thrown down by Wyatt. It's all been implied so far, and to me, that's not enough. Make this guy SCARE ME, dammit. So far, I'm not seeing that.

At the meeting between the cardholders at the power plant, we got a tiny taste of what those freaks are up to. Remember last week when the piece of paper reading '10,000' was being floated around between Stuart Tuxhorn and the big bad bald guy from The Company? 'Is this an acceptable number of people for you?' Well, according to Bald Guy and the rest of the cardholders at the meeting, it turns out that that number has something to do with the country of Laos now, a place that will apparently be serving as a guinea pig for whatever brand of dastardly deed The Company's got up its sleeve. Dun-dun-dun!

Alright, so that's it for this week. Drop me a comment below! Love to hear from ya.

-littlebigmouth.