Episode Report Card Sobell: C+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT The Higher Power Of Lucky
By Sobell | Season 3 | Episode 6 | Aired on 11.04.2007
Whistler continues to protest as he's hauled into Lechero's office, and Lechero calmly tells him, "Someone saw you go down the staircase." This brings Whistler up short, and instead of protesting that it wasn't him, he weakly asks, "Is there any other proof?" While Whistler protests -- perhaps forgetting that there is no appeals process here in Sona -- Sammy hustles off to do his bidding and T-Bag quickly pockets the ring that Sammy acquired in the opening scene of the episode. T-Bag then drifts out of the room. Whistler protests that once Lechero finds the weapon, he'll find the killer. "Or maybe we'll find where you planted it," Lechero replies. Someone's been watching his CSI. Whistler snaps, "Did it ever occur to you that someone might be framing me?" Lechero wonders who would bother. Whistler's all, "Hello, bounty on my head?" but Lechero just dismisses that and tells Whistler to sit his ass down for a lecture. The upshot is this: Lechero is unswayed by the whims of the rich and powerful because he and his loved ones have been on the short end of that stick, what with his mother getting raped by her employer and "because he was rich, and we were immigrants, the police wouldn't even take a report. A week later, to gain access to his gates, I dressed as a milkman. A lechero. And I made sure that fair punishment was rendered. Now you want to tell me I favor the rich?" Well, there's the origin story.
Whistler leans forward and calmly says, "I understand the rules here, and I respect them. But why the rush to judgment? Is there a rule saying you must convict a suspect within ten minutes?" I have a hard time believing it's the countless hours at sea running tourist charters that gave him such sangfroid. Lechero says, "We have all the time in the world." Whistler gets up and says, "Obviously, I'm not going anywhere. If you need to talk again, I'll be in my cell." Or he'll just hang in Lechero's office for a while. Oh, Michael is going to stroke out when he gets wind of this development.
Or perhaps Michael will continue to play Encyclopedia Brown, quizzing all and sundry about The Case of the Cut-up Cokehead. When he visits Bellick -- who is playing dice all alone in his cell -- and attempts to get a confession out of the man (opening line: "I don't like you. I certainly don't respect you" -- doesn't that make you want to open your heart and unburden your sins?), Bellick blows him off with, "You really think I killed that [pejorative term for persons of Francophone background]? How many times have I had you at gunpoint? You think I didn't want to pull that trigger? Hell, I can't even kill myself." Michael leaves without apologizing for accusing Bellick of murder.