Shaun Munro reviews the season finale of Prison Break season 5…
Prison Break’s fifth season concluded with an energetic but horribly-written finale that spent most of its time typifying everything wrong with this brutally truncated nine-episode event series.
Things kicked off with an alternate perspective of the previous episode’s final moments, revealing not-so-surprisingly that Van Gogh was the actual recipient of that gory gunshot. It’s a lame, predictable bait-and-switch made even more ridiculous by the fact that there’s no way that gunshot would’ve made Van Gogh’s blood splatter so far away on the door.
Elsewhere, Lincoln ended up in the hospital after being shot, only to check himself out despite presumably losing a ton of blood, and somehow having the wherewithal to go find Luca and give him a beatdown. It not only felt hilariously rushed but was just straight-up insulting to the audience’s intelligence; don’t toy with a character’s life only to pull a 180 moments later (though fans should probably know better by this point).
This was just the start of the absurd, though; Michael using a creepy tattoo of Poseidon/Jacob’s face in order to gain access to his control room was the right side of silly, but for the most part, the daft revelations elicited more eyerolls than anything. After last week’s insane reveal that T-Bag is Whip’s father, we got to see the pair briefly semi-bonding, but it never felt remotely emotionally authentic and put little paid to Michael’s motive for actually bringing T-Bag into the fold in the first place.
Whip subsequently being needlessly shot and killed, complete with cheesy slow-motion and T-Bag screaming “Noooo!”, was more unintentionally comical than affecting, especially as T-Bag’s insta-love for Whip didn’t feel remotely earned. At least T-Bag finally got a payoff to receiving the robot hand from Michael, though, using it to snap A&W’s neck, complete with her thigh-slappingly hilarious final facial expression.
Though things were going in an interesting direction with Jacob’s revelation that he did, in fact, love Sara and Mike Jr. all along, this unfortunately wasn’t lingered on, instead quickly cast aside for a howlingly overdone final showdown with Michael. The fight’s big twist, that Michael in fact staged it as a frame-up of Jacob, is probably one of the most convoluted things the show has ever done, and that’s really saying something.
Overall, the ending felt too rushed and neat; there wasn’t the expected emotional reunion between Michael, Sara, Mike Jr. and Linc, and things just basically ground to a halt with little fanfare. The final tag with Jacob sharing a cell with T-Bag in Fox River was pretty great, though, even if it’s hard not to feel like Michael ultimately ended up using T-Bag and his now-dead son for his own selfish ends.
“Behind the Eyes” was an incredibly limp conclusion to what’s been a disappointingly lazy return to the world of Prison Break. The show is at its best when the silliness is knowingly over-the-top and spiced with some cleverness, but instead it felt like the script was quickly knocked out over a weekend when Paul Scheuring probably had better things to do. This really needs to be the last word on the show, though, because bringing it back from the dead once again would just be depressingly desperate at this point.
But still, where the Hell was Sucre this episode?
Shaun Munro – Follow me on Twitter for more TV rambling.
Originally published May 31, 2017. Updated April 15, 2018.
