‘Prison Break’ plots latest escape: Original cast reunites for another thrill ride in limited fifth season
The characters are older, but maybe not wiser.
Nearly eight years since it last aired on Fox, “Prison Break” is being revived for a nine-episode fifth season and brothers Michael Scofield (Wentworth Miller) and Lincoln Burrows (Dominic Purcell) are in as much trouble as ever.
In its first four years, the series created by Paul T. Scheuring took some mighty strange turns. At the end of Season 3, they had Michael’s lover, Sara (Sarah Wayne Callies), supposedly die by decapitation only to bring her back at the beginning of the next year.
Getting killed “happens to all of us on ‘Prison Break,’ to be honest,” jokes Callies.
By the end of the original series, Sara was seen visiting Michael’s grave with their young son — some four years after the last action took place.
When this new season opens, Lincoln gets word that Michael is alive and in a Yemen prison.
That seems a long way from Season 1 when Lincoln was in a maximumsecurity facility sentenced to death for killing the U.S. vice president. So Michael, a structural engineer, conceives of the idea on breaking into prison by committing a crime so he can break his brother out.
He then meets Sara, the prison doctor. They hook up, and by the end of the first year there is a prison break. Michael and Lincoln, who has been framed by a shadowy group called The Company, escape along with six others.
Eventually, the series takes numerous twists and turns, including a time when Sara is broken out of prison. Apparently, despiteits tidy ending, “Prison Break” fervor never subsided.
Miller and Purcell were working together again on The CW show “The Flash” when they began kicking around the idea of revisiting “Prison Break” and they decided to approach Scheuring about doing it.
The showrunner said he was interested if they could also get Callies and Robert Knepper, who plays the sleazy ex-inmate T-Bag Bagwell. The character had lost a hand in the series, but this season gets a new state-ofthe-art prosthetic one.
“There’s a reason within the narrative that he actually gets it,” says Scheuring. “So it does have a dramatic reason for being in the actual show.”
With all, um, hands on deck, Scheuring says what interested him about redoing “Prison Break” was that he liked the idea doing a limited season.
“Twenty-two episodes is not worth doing with an open-ended kind of promise,” he says. “But if we can tell a very tight, close-ended story as to why Michael might possibly still be alive, I was open to that. So I started exploring reasons why, and it took me back about 2,500 years in literature, but I found a reason why.”
He took his inspiration from Homer’s Odyssey, and when Lincoln goes to visit Sara in the first episode, her new husband (Mark Feuerstein of “Royal Pains”) says Michael’s son thinks his dad’s “some kind of mythological hero.”
While much of the action takes place in Yemen, a political conspiracy is also afoot back at home for Sara. In keeping with the mythological angle, one of the bad guys is known as Poseidon.
“This year is just a constant
thriller, cliffhanger, revelation, one after another and another, and it just feels very dense,” says Scheuring.
Callies, who is also on USA’s “Colony” and had a been a regular on “The Walking Dead” for three seasons until her character was killed off, says it’s remarkable how “Prison Break” has “a longevity in people’s imagination.”
Scheuring tells a story to explain the appetite for a return of the series. After he, Miller and Purcell had been kicking around the idea of reviving the show in a Hollywood café, they walked outside only to have a car come to a screeching halt in front of them and two men jump out.
“You’re the guys from ‘Prison Break,’ “said the men, whothen asked them to take pictures.
“That’s the kind of hunger that’s out there internationally for the show,” says Scheuring.