Episode Report Card Sobell: B+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT "You're a Waste of My Fries"
By Sobell | Season 1 | Episode 17 | Aired on 04.09.2006
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.LJ truly is his father's son: compelled to act, but doing so without the benefit of any long-term planning. After he, Veronica, and Nick revisit the Unalawyer cabin and discover Quinn's body in the well (Sob! There go my hopes for Quinn coming back in a dramatic sweeps arc), LJ gets two pieces of evidence: Kellerman's name, and another scratched name, Kravecki. The boy quickly looks up the address for Kravecki, and we discover that it's Kellerman's alter ego. For an alter ego, Kravecki's not doing too badly -- nice house, big boxes of jerky lying around -- and when LJ turns out to be a terrible shot, it's a good day to be Kravecki/Kellerman indeed: the police quickly come and take LJ away. All of you who think breaking LJ out of prison will be a second-season plot point, raise your hands.
Meanwhile, on the insideâ¦Dr. Sara makes things harder for Michael by taking her suspicions about the guards abusing Michael to Warden Pope. When Michael refuses to talk, he gets tossed in SHU. From thence, he commences drooling like a maniac until he's tossed into the Psych ward, where it becomes clear that this was his plan all along, as it'll let him pressure Haywire into recalling the tattoo. It turns out Michael's strategic thinking skills have rubbed off on Sucre, who crafted a plan to finish the floor in St. Louis before the COs detected it. Best part of the plan: T-Bag has to take one for the team. Worst part of the plan: Sucre also gets tossed in SHU.
And in the most ominous side effect of the plan: after Sucre's successful last-minute repairs in St. Louis, Bellick concludes that Tweener's useless as a snitch, and hands him over to the biggest, ugliest inmate he can find. The moral of the story: fast food is bad for you. Want more? The full recap starts right below!
Every week, FOX promises me explicit scenes, and every week, they fail to deliver. Well, I'm not falling for their carny tricks any more. Unless an episode features human decapitation or an orgy that even Caligula would have found unnerving, I'm not passing on any more warnings to you.
Michael's working on the Taj Mabadiea. Pope comes in and seems heartened by the progress that's been made on it thus far. A rather unshaven Michael warns that plaster adds a lot of weight, so he may have to add reinforcements. This bothers Pope not one whit, so long as the Taj Mabadiea is done in time for the big anniversary. Good to know he and the missus are still planning on meeting that benchmark, even after the recent news of Pope's secret fatherhood and bereavement. Michael imperiously says it'll be done, then thrusts the model's dome toward Pope, commanding, "Hold this." Ever a people person, the warden jovially shares the story about how Shah Jahan loved the Taj Mahal so much, he planned on building a second one across the river from the first -- a darker one, so it was like the Taj's Evil Twin or something -- except that the Shah was then overthrown by his favorite son Aurangzeb, Michael dismisses it as a myth. That's okay, Michael. We here in TV Land are dismissing it as "really obvious foreshadowing as to what will happen to Pope." The good warden insists the story's 100% true, then adds, "I think." He begins chortling, and even Michael's sour puss relaxes for a moment.
Just then, Pope gets a message that Dr. Tancredi's there to see him. As Michael's escorted out of the office, he gives the good Dr. Sara a long, loaded look. When he leaves, Dr. Sara's all, "Funny how coincidental that is, since I'm here to talk to you about Michael Scofield and how he has burnt crunchy bits of prison guard uniform in his ugly burn."
The topic of all this twittering is back in his cell, trying to reconstruct the piece of tattoo he burned away. To bring home the point that verily, this tattoo is complex, Michael is wearing a wife-beater, the better to show off his intricate skin art. Sucre asks what Michael's doing. Could that question be more superfluous? You're stuck with the man in a tiny cell; it's not like Sucre wandered in from the other end of the estate and discovered Michael in the middle of an unfamiliar activity. So it's kind of no wonder that Michael pissily explains he's trying to reconstruct the tattoo. Well, it'd be no wonder even if Sucre had just come in from tilling the back forty -- we've established via flashback that Michael's not exactly what one would call a bubbly personality.