TV is the New Reading

Case closing on ‘Prison Break’s’ improbable joyride

Four years ago The Company -- a wide-ranging cabal of uncertain motives and shadowy government ne’er-do-wells -- framed the wrong man’s brother for a capital crime.

As it turns out, the man, Lincoln Burrows, was the long-lost son of not one but two Company operatives. More importantly, he had a brother -- Michael Scofield.

Thus are the elements of FOX’s “Prison Break” set in motion, tracing the adventures of Scofield, played with intensity by Wentworth Miller, in his efforts to free Burrows, played with equal intensity by Dominic Purcell. The show resumed last week with back-to-back episodes toward the end of its four-season run.

With Burrows on death row inside a prison Scofield actually helped design, Scofield figures he’s the perfect candidate to break him out. Of course, he built it pretty well so he’s got a lot of layers to peel away -- assisted by the blueprints he has tattooed over his entire body. And while he can plan for a good number of contingencies, there’s some help he can only put in place one he’s inside.

So he stages an armed robbery and gets stuck in Fox River Penitentiary, where he begins making the connections he needs to make and the tunnels he needs to dig in order to spring his brother from death row. And while he and his merry band of bandits encounter an improbable number of setbacks, they do manage to escape, but not before Scofield falls in love with the beautiful prison medic, Dr. Sara Tancredi, the governor’s daughter and a recovering alcoholic played by Sarah Wayne Callies.

Once on the run Scofield, Burrows and the rest of the Fox River Eight, pursued by the Feds, make their way across the country to uncover a fellow inmate bank robber’s stash of cash, dogged on the way by countervailing motivations and squabbles within their loose confederation. They make their way to Panama and on the verge of extradition, the Company snaps them up and sends them inside Sona, a jungle gulag where the prisoners make their own rules and their own justice.

They send Scofield and Co. inside so as to spring a figure named Whistler, a man capable of recovering a Company database called Scylla. Sadly, Whistler is killed shortly after Scofield and the Gang get him out of his jungle lockup, so Scofield is impelled to track down the six-part key to Scylla -- on threat of being sent back to prison.

He and his team track the database, gaining more knowledge and leverage against the Company, until Scofield is betrayed by a Company operative and Scylla is once more in play. Unfortunately, a congenital brain aneurysm takes him out of the chase.

So when we left our antiheroes, Scofield was recovering from intensive neurosurgery in a remote cabin village run by the Company that reminded me of nothing so much as “The Prisoner.” His brother and band of merry men gave chase to Scylla and tracked it to -- dun dun DUNNNNN -- Burrows and Scofield’s mother, Christina Scofield, played by Kathleen Quinlan.

Her reappearance reopens a few old wounds for the brothers and puts Burrows and Scofield at odds on how to proceed with their plans to recover Scylla and reclaim their lives. But some cold deception and an assassination attempt later, it’s easy to see that Christina is one bad mother.

Let the final leg of this chase begin.

“Prison Break” airs the balance of its episodes Fridays at 7 p.m. on FOX.

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