Once more into the hoosegow for 'Prison Break'

Well hello, Prison Break. It's so nice to have you back where you belong. By "back where you belong," of course, I mean "in prison, where the show's title can, once again, become appropriate."

After a second season spent joyriding around the United States (and eventually Panama) in search of buried treasure and various forms of legal and spiritual redemption, Prison Break began its new season on Monday (Sept. 17) night with most of its characters back in jail. This isn't some sissified American maximum security prison like Fox River State Pen, though. Our heroes now find themselves in Sona, a Panamanian facility that only houses the worst of the worst. And, if the first two episodes sent to critics are any indication, they could be there for a while.

Continuing the show's depiction of Panama is a lawless fictional realm Way Down South Somewheres, Prison Break has constructed Sona as a prison that owes more than a little to the place poor Brad Davis found himself stored in Midnight Express. It's filthy, run-down and the guards abandoned the place to near post-apocalyptic squalor long ago.

"The government just stays back, keeps the perimeter," an embassy man explained to Linc. "To them, Sona's a one-way street. What goes in, never comes out, unless it's dead."

The fact that government officials were actually talking to Dominic Purcell's Linc encapsulates the main conflict for the third Prison Break season: The roles have all been reversed. When we began this journey, Michael Scofield (Wentworth Miller) was devising an elaborate stratagem to get his brother out of jail. Bellick (Wade Williams) was a prison guard and Mahone was an FBI agent. Now, Michael, Bellick and Mahone are behind bars and Linc's the man on the outside.

While I was glad to have a "prison" back on Prison Break, I have my concerns. If I were in jail, I would think it'd be might helpful to have Michael Scofield trying to get me out. If, however, I were in jail and I was relying on Lincoln Burrows to find some previous untapped intellectual resources to advance my liberation? Well, I'd pretty much give up, or else I'd befriend a magical mouse with messianic powers to help me pass the time. This season may be hamstrung by the fact that the people on the inside are vastly more capable than those on the outside (wait til next week, fans, when Sucre returns to whine about Maricruz).

Naturally, though, we discovered before the first episode what many of us have suspected since the last finale: Michael's only in Sona to break somebody out. There are People With Power who arranged the whole thing (though last season's plot twists were a mighty complicated way to go about setting this plan in motion). The flaw in this particular reasoning is that Michael isn't an expert in general prison breaking. He's an expert in breaking out of one specific prison and he was able to break out of that specific prison because he had several months to plan, plus he had the building schematics tattooed to his body. Anybody who watched last season knows that improvising isn't really Michael's strong suit (his idea of being a master-of-disguise was donning a baseball cap with formal wear), so if I were the People With Power (stupid vast government conspiracies) trying to get the mysterious James Whistler out, I'd have a back-up plan.

Seeing so many of the cast members pop up in Sona was a smidge like Saved By the Bell: The College Years (what a coincidence that so many of them went to the same university together, despite Zack's surprisingly high SAT scores!), but there were still plenty of new characters introduced. We'll get more on the fetching females played by Danay Garcia and Jodi Lyn O'Keefe in the second episode, but for now, the new season's stand-out is Robert Wisdom as Sona kingpin Lechero. While fans of The Wire may yell "Bunny!" the minute Wisdom comes on screen, viewers who don't necessarily recognize the actor will get to enjoy a performance that seems cribbed from Isaac Hayes' turn as the Duke of New York in Escape From New York.

Other thoughts from this episode:

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