Episode Report Card Sobell: B | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Whoever had "burn" in the office pool wins
By Sobell | Season 1 | Episode 15 | Aired on 03.26.2006
The next morning, Judge Kessler is explaining to the unamused U.S. attorney that all he can say is he was working in chambers, an envelope of unknown provenance was slipped under his door, and the contents were compelling. The first piece of paper is Terence Steadman's autopsy report, in which his appendix is noted as present. The second is an operative report from Steadman's childhood appendectomy. The non-Veronica lawyer has a litter of kittens in the office; Veronica takes advantage of this to push for Lincoln's conviction to be overturned. The U.S. attorney recovers enough to point out that the documents aren't certified and could be a hoax; conveniently enough for him, the hospital doesn't keep records going all the way back to Terence's childhood, so it's not going to be as simple as skipping down to Cook County General, ogling the hot Croatian doctors, then pulling the reports. The judge tells everyone to chill and says, "I don't know what these papers mean. And for that reason, I'm going to err on the side of caution. I'm delaying the execution by two weeks. That should give us more than enough time to exhume the body…it's the only way we're going to know if that body in the ground is Terence Steadman." Veronica looks hopeful.
Back at Fox River, Veronica's catching Michael up on the latest developments via a phone call, and sums up, "So we're right back where we started." So this is what it looks like when the powers that be hit a reset button on an entire universe!
Michael and Sucre have a very dramatically-lit conversation back in their cell that can be summed up thusly:
Michael: Sucre, it's show time!
Sucre: Yay! Team Escarpara's going to the playoffs! Hug me.
We then go to a bizarre shot of Lincoln in which he is a) sitting in front of a black backdrop, and b) apparently lit by spotlight. It's as if he's about to give an interview for a documentary on A&E or something. Pope is busy telling him he doesn't know anything about what the hell is going on, albeit in many more words: "To be honest, I've never been in a situation like this before. If nothing else, you can be glad that you've got people who will go to extreme lengths to get you out of here." Lincoln does not begin openly giggling at the uncanny accuracy of Pope's statement. He does grunt a wry, "No kidding."
The light then gets weirder -- imagine that we've gone from live-action filming to Frank Miller drawing every scene -- and Lincoln asks Pope if he or anyone else in the prison happened to speak to the dude in the baseball hat. Pope fumbles for a folder and checks his list of those who were present: "Your brother, his attorney and three reporters." Again -- gobsmacked that the Little Conspiracy That Couldn't didn't have someone there to make sure the machinations worked as planned. However, the point is not to marvel about how quickly conspiracies can get kneecapped if they stint on resources. It's to raise the possibility that Lincoln just happened to hallucinate that he saw his dad mere minutes before his execution was halted. And to raise the alternate possibility that Michael inherited his stealth genes from his old man.