Michael Scofield: Wentworth Miller
Lincoln Burrows: Dominic Purcell
Alex Mahone: William Fichtner
Sara Tancredi: Sarah Wayne Callies
Brad Bellick: Wade Williams
Fernando Sucre: Amaury Nolasco
Theodore "T-Bag" Bagwell: Robert Knepper
Don Self: Michael Rapaport
Wyatt: Cress Williams
Pam: Callie Thorne
Trishanne: Shannon Lucio
Roland Glenn: James Hiroyuki Liao
Gretchen Morgan: Jodi Lyn O'Keefe
Pad Man: Leon Russom
Beware spoilers.
If you're still watching Prison Break, you've clearly chosen to accept season 4's radical revamp, and this fifth episode rewards you with quite a confident outing. "Safe And Sound" once again revolves around the search for a Scylla data-card; this one loc
ked inside a safe owned by a high-ranking federal agent. Fundamentally, it's another mini-mission for Michael (Wentworth Miller), Linc (Dominic Purcell), Sucre (Amaury Nolasco) and Bellick (Wade Williams) to pull off, but all of those actors are at their
best embroiled in tense, covert situations... so that's fine with me.
The only interesting piece of storytelling is still coming courtesy of twitchy Mahone (William Fichtner), with the writers clearly aware Fichtner's the only actor capable of bringing a wide range of emotions to bare. Here, Mahone meets up with his wife Pa
m (Callie Thorne), who for the purposes of the storyline doesn't blame her husband for the fact their son was murdered by a hitman after Mahone. We'll just have to accept the Mahones have a marriage strong enough to overcome this tragedy, okay.
Still, his son's death has given Mahone the perfect chance to ditch Prison Break's Scylla-obsessed story and venture off into his own, more entertaining, subplot – using his skills as a manhunter to track down and hopefully kill his boy's murderer, Wyatt
(Cress Williams). It's a simple story of paternal revenge, but it works well because Mahone's the only character acting on pure emotions.
Everyone else is only bothering to takedown The Company because their hand is being forced by their own government. And it's difficult to actually care about The Company and their baffling machinations, which lost all sense after season 1's presidential s
candal. I'm just not eager to see them punished, because you can't hate a generic evil corporation with much passion -- and Prison Break's few human-face villains are either long dead (Agent Kellerman, Mr. Kim), underwritten (Leon Russom's suddenly-ubiqui
tous Pad Man), too new to have a history (Wyatt), or have become anti-heroes you love-to-hate (Jodi Lyn O'Keefe, whose sneering villain puts her own escape bid into action here.)
The typical Prison Break episode seems to involve a harebrained scheme (here, the team drill into a safe to retrieve a Scylla card, covered by the noise of Bellick and Sucre shampooing a carpet), a torture of some description (Gretchen is left to retch ov
er a bucket of human waste), together with a few small surprises and twists of expectation (Robert Knepper's T-Bag gets some unexpected help from the sexy GATE secretary, who realizes he's not really super salesman Cole Pfeiffer and forces him to buy her
silence.)
Still, Prison Break has been a series that just gets by on an established template for years now; even its surprises carry a strange predictability about them when they strike. So far, season 4 isn't really inspiring stuff, but I have a grudging admiratio
n that it's still on-air. As always, a fair bit happens, but most of it won't have a lasting impact, and will probably be ignored if it jeopardises the smooth-running of the storyline 5 episodes from now. It's still very easy to get caught up in the secon
d-to-second drama of episodes like "Safe And Sound", while finding minor excitement and amusement along the way, but Prison Break's tricks are now blunted with age and the mechanics of everything is quite predictable.
Overall, Fichtner vs. Wyatt is the one subplot I'm genuinely engaged with, and T-Bag's story is developing quite well at GATE through pure mysteriousness. Everything else is a low hum of engaging action beats, peppered with silly moments. It's difficult t
o really care about anything very much though -- as the show historically doesn't reward viewer loyalty, it just hopes its die-hard audience will be entertained for 43-minutes, won't ask too many questions, and won't kick up a stink when the plot goes off
-the-rails to be clumsily fixed at a later date. Mind you, now Michael knows Pad Man is The Company's boss, his ominous nosebleeds seems to have their origins in a teenage illness, and Gretchen is about to make her comeback, so there's still enough to kee
p long-time fans on the fish-hook...
As of April 2009, Blu-rays and DVDs reviewed by the editor are watched on a Panasonic TH-37PX80B
37" Plasma TV with a Sony BDP-1500 Blu-ray player and played through a Yamaha DSP-AX820 amplifier.
PC games reviewed by the editor are on:
Since Jan 2011: Intel Quad Core Dell XPS 8100, i7 CPU 860 @ 2.80Ghz, 8Gb RAM, nVidia GeForce GTS 240, Windows 7
Since Nov 2005: Intel Pentium D 830 3.0Ghz, 1Gb RAM, 128Mb nVidia GeForce 6700XL, Windows XP
Since Aug 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.66Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb GeForce4 MX440 graphics, Windows XP
Since May 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.6Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb ATI Radeon 9600TX graphics, Windows XP
Since Jun 2002: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, 64Mb ATI Radeon 8500LE
Since May 2000: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, Voodoo 3 3000 AGP
Season 1-3 Boxset:
