Episode Report Card Sobell: B+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Alexander And The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
By Sobell | Season 3 | Episode 1 | Aired on 09.16.2007
Lechero: Get out. Now.Oh, Lechero. You were doing so well before you turned into a girl asking her boyfriend whether her new jeans made her ass look fat.
After another tasteful pause where the commercials would normally be, we get a brief pan over everyday life in Sona, and then we join Michael as he engages in extended flashbacks recounting his relationship with Dr. Sara. We then cut to Linc in a Panamanian police station, trying to see if Dr. Sara has been spotted, or maybe checked in, or anything. Linc extracts a promise from a cop to call if he hears anything.
Back in Sona, Bellick's stringy friend now has a handsome pair of leather sandals. Bellick wants to know where the shoes came from, and Stringy points to the corpse that's still in the courtyard. He does not add, "It's still got pants, hint, hint." The same guy who ushered Michael et al. into orientation comes over to tell these two lower-caste cons that "it's time to start earning your rent around here." Bellick lips off, "There is no rent around here -- it's prison." The stooge is like, "Please keep talking. I need an excuse to kick some more ass." He hands both men plastic trash bags to wear as tarps and then we see that -- oh my God. Y'all. I have worked as a lifeguard in water parks. I have dealt with diaper blowouts in a wave pool, intestinal distress on a water slide, people who confused changing stalls with composing toilets. I have seen how humans treat public facilities and it makes the Tragedy Of The Commons look like drawing-room manners. But this feculent cesspool...oh, my god, it makes all that look a Martha Stewart Living spread. Now guess who has to clean it all? Karma, yo.
We get another life-in-prison montage, all the better to set up the courtyard so we can see T-Bag arriving in the prison. How is he not dead from some dreadful infection in his stabbed arm? Anyway, Michael catches sight of him and his face dissolves into pure panic. That poor guy, trapped behind bars with three of the people whom he hates and fears most in the world. And two of them, it's the second time.
Fortunately, Michael has a visitor. It's your generic middle-aged white guy kind of visitor, which, to those of us versed in Prison Break conspiracy lore, practically screams, "Shadowy Stooge!" And...well, the guy is a shadowy stooge. Elliott Pike at first offers to represent Michael, who snots, "The court already appointed me a lawyer," and then Elliott offers to be of assistance in a different way: "I've got a lot of big guns behind me, Mr. Scofield. People you might like to have in your corner should you ever decide to, say...break out of here." To his credit, Michael does not immediately burst a blood vessel in fury. He just asks whom Elliott represents, and Elliott's all, "Hey, once you're out, the world will be your oyster. Except in months that don't end in 'r,' of course." Michael stares some more, and Elliott drops another giant clue to the season set-up with "There's a reason a guy with your skill set was put in here, you know." Michael currently does not. Elliott leaves with the warning that, hey, they tried to get his consent for an as-yet-unnamed mission the easy way.