Episode Report Card Sobell: B | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Some poor Mexican hooker -- dead!
By Sobell | Season 2 | Episode 20 | Aired on 03.18.2007
Just so you know: here are my two complaints about that scene:
1. Since when is T-Bag, former head of the Fabulously Gay White Supremacists, willing to canoodle with the melanin-blessed? Are we do understand that, just as colleges are a breeding ground for hasbians, prisons create racists of convenience? (You can thank Evany for that phrase; I was thinking "racist turned racwast?")
2. T-Bag was a better character when he didn't have feelings and wasn't busy pining and bloviating for minutes on end about how being a suburban husband and father would surely cure him of his depravity. One of the reasons evil is supposed to be so frightening is because it exists despite logic or comprehension. Give it any origin story and you hamstring the chilling effect.
In other words, I'm not buying that the man who has casually killed his way across greater North America is now unspooling because he's still upset over getting dumped. Just go listen to Pearl Jam's "Black" a few hundred times and move on with your life! Quit with the hooker-killing already.
We zip even further south to a gorgeous beach -- brilliant blue water, a wide ribbon of warm-looking yellow sand, lush tropical greenery behind it. We hear music that totally rips off The Amazing Race's scenery porn track -- you know, the stuff that plays every time there's a pan across some jaw-droppingly lovely valley or primeval forest. And then... there's a city on the edge of all that, if Michael and Linc's stumble out of the greenery and into Cristobal, Panama, is to be believed. Oh, wait. The show actually did ape The Amazing Race with the scenery pan and the quick cut to where the real action is. Michael and Linc are disembarking their shop. Despite having a week's worth of free time on his hands (as opposed to a week's worth of Dr. Sara), Michael did not manage to teach Lincoln how to button a shirt. The whole point to all this: to show us the shot of Michael's tattoo with the Christ-in-a-rose image, and to confirm that yes, he is about to move to the final stage of his plan.
We transition to Mahone, Lang and other Fibbies all trying to figure out what that tattoo means. As everyone else brainstorms, Mahone zones out and stares at the white board until he realizes that Christ in a rose can also be interpreted as Christina Rose. Frankly, I'm surprised it took him this long, since he sussed out Ripe Chance to RIP. E. Chance in, like, five minutes. And then, we all learn that Lincoln and Michael's mother was named... Christina Rose. Oh, Michael -- other cons just get "MOM" tattooed on their arm. You put on airs and get interpretive.