Episode Report Card Sobell: B+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT He ain't dead, 'cause he's my brother
By Sobell | Season 1 | Episode 16 | Aired on 04.02.2006
Michael is now designing his tattoo. We see him work several phrases into the blueprints: "Cute Poison," "English Fitz Percy," "Ripe Chance Woods," and "bolshoi booze." The calligraphy in the last phrase is so stylized, it can be read upside-down as 320091045709. No doubt this will come in handy later.
Then he heads off to Mexico, and there's some ambiguous negotiation with the token Swarthy Guy With An Accent, but he is soon subdued by the Blue Steel and so slides over a piece of paper. Swarthy Guy With An Accent warns, "You show this to anyone else, I'm calling the whole thing off."
The camera pulls back to the tattoo design, highlights the phrase "Ripe Chance Woods," and then we transition to the snowy woods on an evening. Whose woods these are, I do not know. The camera seeks to stop here, though. We see Michael standing at a grave; his shovel bites into the snow.
We go back to the Wall O' Plan one more time so we can see some clippings of Abruzzi and an ad for Czechoslovakian mail-order brides, with the ad strategically placed next to a notation about a water main leak. We see some clippings about Pope, then Michael making notes about Pugnac.
Cut to Susan in the prison waiting room. T-Bag is escorted into the big mesh cage to see her. For a moment, he almost looks concerned at her appearance. Susan says brokenly, "My therapist said...she said I'm holding too much in. And that I need to confront you to let you know how betrayed I feel." T-Bag is watching impassively as Susan says, "I let you into my life, my home...my god, I let you near my children." T-Bag says very low and emphatically, "I never touched them." Then he makes it all about him. "You think you're the only one who feels betrayed? I loved you, Susan. Real love, for the first time in my life," he says. And then chokes back a suitably dramatic sniffle. Then, voice breaking, T-Bag continues, "And then, and then? To treat me like that, to just throw me out, just toss me out the back door --" Susan points out that T-Bag happens to be something of a child-molesting serial killer. T-Bag bellows, "That's enough." His face is now hard and set in a familiar, deadly expression. Wow, some people really don't take the "I don't want to be friends" speech well. T-Bag says, "I have sinned in the past. But when I met you, that person, the one who did all those terrible things, he died. I was reborn. By the grace of your love, I was a new man. A better man." Susan's not buying it. T-Bag grits, "When you sent me here to this place, with these people, it brought that old dirty bastard right back home. Like there was a candle in the window, just waiting for me to walk up them front steps." Then he lowers his head and gives Susan a really creepy look. He promises her, "I'm gonna get out of here someday. And when I do, don't think I won't remember what your front steps look like." I'm thinking after the way that went, perhaps what the therapist should have suggested is that Susan practice a little more repression. Susan spits on the window, then storms off to put her house on the market. T-Bag looks at the spit and thinks, "Well, here's my Season Two plotline, all wrapped up and presented for my approval."