Episode Report Card Sobell: B | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT It's so hard to find good conspiracy participants
By Sobell | Season 1 | Episode 5 | Aired on 09.18.2005
We then transition a little more smoothly to the Bible that Lincoln's keeping in his lap while he sits in chapel. Michael sits down behind him, weighs what he's going to say for a moment, then leans forward to tell Linc that he's going to go into the prison walls tonight and get up on the roof. Linc's all, "Were you going to tell me about the transfer?" in the same wounded tones one normally associates with "Were you going to tell me about this lipstick on your collar?" Michael assures Linc that he'll take care of it, and Linc snipes, "Sounds to me like you're reaching." Michael admits, "Maybe." And maybe he's regretting his whole blemish-my-entire-life-for-an-ungrateful-mope move. And then he admits, "A little." Linc carps some more about how he had made his peace with being a pawn in some mysterious chess game and then Michael, damn him, had to offer him hope. Shut up, Lincoln.
Also, shut up, Prison Break with the flashbacks to when the two were kids. The whole point to this flashback is to establish that on the day of their mother's funeral, an adolescent Linc promised the younger Michael they'd always stick together. And when Michael asked, "What if something happens to you?" Linc replied, "You just have a little faith." And yes, the whole point of this flashback is also that Michael remembers that sage lesson, even if Linc does not. Back in the present, Michael claps Linc on the back and whispers, "Have a little faith." At this point, Linc looks like he needs to have a little CPR. Seriously. Way to be non-reactive.
Meanwhile, on the outside…Nick the Legal Beagle and Veronica are looking at a still of Linc on the surveillance tape and discussing how very lifelike the still image appears. I kid! They're going to go with the crazy notion that Linc was telling the truth and he didn't fire a gun. Nick suggests, "Maybe what we're looking for is not there." Veronica fixes him with a look like, I was only in the middle of my law school class. That means I need to have big, strong men explain things to me. The two of them go through the tape more carefully than Kevin Costner ever did in JFK and we see that Steadman was sticking his head of the car to look at the camera; then he sits in the car for 10-15 seconds as if he were waiting for someone.
Then we see Lincoln point the gun and the flash goes off: Nick the Legal Beagle asks, "That's a 9MM -- shouldn't we see a kick or something?" "Lincoln's pretty strong," Veronica asserts. Strong enough to defy the laws of physics, apparently. Nick disputes this, then points out that other things seem off: "You hit someone for revenge -- do you take the time to go through the glove box, or do you just get out of there?" Veronica counters that Lincoln could have tried to make it look like a robbery, and Nick the Legal Beagle's all, "Christ, do I have to do everything in this relationship? Look at the angle at which Lincoln leaves the frame. He walks away from the car, and someone who's hiding his face from the camera comes around to check the passenger side of the car. Did nobody ever consider the possibility that we're talking about two different people? And that the whole thing was set up to ensure that the bloody pants already planted in Lincoln's apartment made some sort of evidentiary sense?" Veronica says, "This is great. Who should we go to?" Nick the Legal Beagle loses all coherence with, "Nobody. We're backing a horse that died in the gate." And then he grabs Veronica by the bridle and leads her around to the conclusion that the tape's been monkeyed with. Wow, isn't it lucky for Veronica that a totally overworked lawyer has taken the time out of his busy schedule to help her unravel a time-sensitive conspiracy? And that he's totally smart and seems to know all the answers?