Episode Report Card Sobell: B | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT …And Now Miguel
By Sobell | Season 3 | Episode 2 | Aired on 09.23.2007
Down in the gutters, Mahone is taking a multipronged approach to negotiating with Whistler: begging nicely on one hand, and grabbing the guy by the shirt and yanking with the other. Whistler begs, "I have a family." "So do I," Mahone replies. He hauls Whistler to his feet and begins dragging him. Just then, Lechero's crew comes down with a lamp. Mahone raises the crowbar menacingly, holding Whistler against a wall with his other hand. Michael walks into the middle of all this and looks around in dismay; we get a tight close-up of Mahone saying, "He's coming with me." As, I would hazard, are any number of willing viewers there, Mahone. Stopping looking so attractive and evil! And…pause for commercial break.
Michael advances on Mahone and asks, "You don't actually think that killing someone's going to help you get out of here?" Mahone concedes, "It does seem pretty strange. But this is a really strange place. One that I want to get out of." Michael says he'll help Mahone: "I'll testify for you, whatever it takes." Mahone says, "Wow! Look at that halo. It just appeared over your head." Ha! Mahone, you're not quite up to Kellerman's levels of mordant wit and trenchant observation, but you show promise. Anyway, the dialogue here more or less disintegrates into Mahone telling Michael that maybe he shouldn't have been such a swotty little so-and-so the day before, and boy, shouldn't he be sorry now. Michael gives him a hurt look and whispers intently, "Let me help you, Alex." We cut to Whistler looking around all, What the HELL is going on? Eating rats is nowhere on the Scale of Weird compared to this. And then he makes a break for it. Mahone fends off all other would-be pursuers; Michael heads back to the surface world.
Lechero's getting touchy because, inexplicably, a bunch of parched inmates are not too sore-throated to shout insults and boos in his general direction. Michael walks in and says he needs to talk to Lechero, and Lechero snaps, "Don't ever walk in here without being called." Michael replies, "I'm sorry, but it's worth a breach in etiquette." Lechero doubts that. Michael makes a staggeringly ineffective sales pitch: instead of saying, "I'm a structural engineer and can MacGyver you a whole new water source," he merely gets cryptic with "there are ways I can help you. Just take the bounty off Whistler." Lechero laughs about this. His five consecutive life sentences more or less guarantee he's staying in Sona, and he sees no reason to deprive another man of a chance for freedom. Michael blurts, "I need you to trust me." Lechero laughs at that and says, "I don't know you good enough, bruddah." He calls for "Teodoro" and T-Bag sidles in with an unctuous "¿Si patron?" Lechero asks if Michael is trustworthy, and T-Bag spits, "He's a snake. He stabbed me in the back every chance he got." Something about that delivery totally channels Babs from Animal House and her "That boy is a P-I-G, pig." Lechero gives T-Bag a look before saying bemusedly, "A snake who will stab a man in the back?" You can tell he's thisclose to asking, "Does he hold the knife in his coils? Or his tail? How does that work, exactly?" However clumsy T-Bag's slanderous rhetoric, it provides a fine cover for Lechero to blow off Michael.
Michael hustles through Wyatt's riot and finds Splenda. He hands him the fat wad of cash Linc gave him, and asks Splenda to bring him all the moonshine he can. Splenda replies, "It's not the time for [a] party, bro," and Michael is all, "It's not the time for smart-mouthing, bro -- bring me the booze, pronto."