Episode Report Card Sobell: B | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Tweener's chance for a new life -- dead!
By Sobell | Season 2 | Episode 6 | Aired on 09.24.2006
So anyway, Michael screams at T-Bag to recall the map, and Linc turns away again, for whatever reason. T-Bag begins developing his photographic memory: "The ranch... the ranch was in the center of a box. Sheep Road on one side, Kokosing Road on the other ... " (Let me interject here that Kokosing was the name of the rancher for whom the Double-K was named. I screwed up his name in the prior recap; consider this the correction.) T-Bag continues, "In the center of the property was the ranch house, and the ranch house was surrounded by trees." All the car's occupants turn to look at the trees. Tweener is still pleading to be let out of the trunk.
Everyone except Tweener gets out. Michael notes that every tree in the subdivision is a year old, save a few. Linc is no arboreal gawker; he wants to know where the silo is. T-Bag makes a big show of tapping his head to prod his memory. We see the map in flashback. Imagine a set of X/Y axes, just like in geometry class. The house is right on Y=0, where X is a value in the negative range. The barn is in the quadrant where the coordinates will be (X = negative, Y = negative), and the silo ... well, the silo is on another axis to the right, somewhere on the X=0, y in the negative range. (All of you who teach math, you may now tell your students that what they are learning will have practical application later in life: they'll need it to read recaps.)
Anyway, the upshot is that the silo is somewhere to the southwest of the house, or down and to its left, assuming you're standing in the front door. T-Bag more or less pegs the silo there too, but adds weakly, "That could have been a barn." He's right there too, as the barn was also to the west of the house. T-Bag says, "I remembered as best I could, gents. I'm sorry, but I didn't know this place would be smothered in tract houses. I'm sorry that I'm not Rain Man over here." Amazingly, Linc does not reach over, rip off T-Bag's newly reattached arm, then beat him about the head and shoulders with it while inquiring, "Does that help jog your photographic memory any?"
We then go to Salt Lake City, Utah, where Mahone is barreling through FBI headquarters and generally getting in everyone's grill about the long-dormant D.B. Cooper case. Helpful things to take away from this scene: Mahone's first name is Alex and he's sure that the Fox River Eight are in Utah to get D.B. Cooper's money. Shouldn't that be the Fox River Seven at this point?
The cons are back in the car and T-Bag is driving them all crazy with his attempts to remember where the dang silo was. Linc frets that "we're going to get made out here," and T-Bag snaps at him to shut it, because he may have just remembered where the silo is. Unfortunately for T-Bag, Michael easily proves him wrong through logic, saying it's not inside the trees by the farmhouse. He points to a brick house surrounded by trees: the ones on the right side of the house are taller than the ones on the left, and Michael explains, "They're shorter than the rest. They were all planted at the same time, but these two didn't get as much sunlight." Linc realizes, "Something was in their way." T-Bag looks a little perturbed by this explanation: either he's realized Michael's capable of putting his book smarts to work in the field, or he's realized he's expendable now. Michael concludes that the money's right under the garage in the brick house. T-Bag snarls, "You better be right, boy." Linc looks at T-Bag like he's merely waiting for a pretext to snap his neck. Michael continues laying the groundwork for this episode: the houses were put up in a hurry, so the odds are good that the developers just laid the concrete floor of the garage over the silo's foundation. Therefore, all the boys have to do is contrive a way into the garage, dig straight down to the foundation, then take it from there.