Prison Break Season 5: Raw Breakdown 2

5.02. Kaniel Outis

• Michael hasn’t been in Ogygia for too long, it turns out, but it surely takes him little time to get adapted the new place and figure out a way to quit it, alone or with somebody in tow, these days. The cells in Ogygia are not for two people, and Michael shares it with five other people, all of different nationalities, characters and experiences. Now that we’ve been introduced to Michael’s diverse group of cellmates, I spy there will be a variety of fanfics soon;). The characters are somewhat eccentric – Ja is a Korean fan of Queen, a hacker (just like Season 4’s Ronald) and, allegedly, a dangerous killer. Sid can rival Michael in “prettiness”, which is not a good thing in prison (the actor’s name, Kunal Sharma, is fitting). “Whip” is Michael’s closest ally, yet we know about him the least, not even his real name. Whip is like present day Sucre to Michael, comic relief to serious, strategizing Scofield. Michael might be a “fish” here, but he’s a big one. By virtue of his inventiveness and reputation as an “escape artist”, he is the leader of the little company in that cell. No wonder he’s on the top bunk this time. This small community does feel like a “surrogate family”.

• Before it was structural engineering. Now it’s people engineering. In prisons, which are low-tech by nature, Michael’s main tool is his skillful manipulation of people. As Sara’s husband wisely suggests, Michael is playing a double game. He identifies people’s weaknesses and urgent needs and uses them in his favour, yet his actions look like and probably are of use to his fellow inmates too. He won’t give the morphine-based drugs to Ja to cope with withdrawal unless the Korean man gives him his phone and credit card number, yet he risks being beaten up to get them. (Michael faking fever and getting his bad cop/good cop treatment was a particularly fine piece of acting by Wentworth Miller, too.) He’s honouring Whip as his right-hand man, a weapon, and that might look like flattery yet Whip is becoming precisely this kind of ally to him. Michael is “friends” with that terrorists’ boss, who’s potentially dangerous to him and people like Sid, but as he relies on Michael to assist with his escape, he is forced to keep Michael and, by extension, his friends, safe to keep his moral end of the deal. How Michael got involved with radical Muslim rebels in the first place is beyond me yet, but I guess it was one of his double, if not multiple, games again, where everything is not as it seems. Lincoln insists C-Note and Sheba call his brother “Michael”, not “Kaniel Outis” for a reason. This double name reflects his two identities in the game that he is playing.

• By the way, “Kaniel” is Hebrew for “the Lord supports me”. Combined with Greek “Outis” standing for “Nobody”, it’s an interesting combination. Anything goes when times are desperate, God including.

• Michael’s cool composure is a thing to watch. Yet again, this cold surface obviously hides a lot of emotion.

• Michael speaking Arabic (like he spoke Spanish in earlier seasons) is also cool. For all I know, few American TV shows exhibit such internationalism. I imagine the actor had picked a lot of snippets of foreign languages throughout his career.

• If anything, Lincoln is good at people engineering too. His offer of airplane tickets money to Sheba in exchange for her help to find the Sheik of Light was skillful.

• Sheba is smart – she guessed the code straight away. Sheba obviously comes from a (former) middle or upper class family, her father used to be some kind of local authority. Hence her feeling it’s her legal right to go where she goes, do and say what the does.

• If Lincoln had to prove to her he was not related to terrorists “like” his brother, there was no better opportunity to help free the Sheik of Light, his daughter and her disciples.

• Sheba also has a fan who’s now among the rebels. It will come up in the plot later, no doubt, as will all the other little pieces briefly mentioned, such is the nature of writing on this show.

• Sara’s husband Jacob Ness, a “noted economist”, an expert in game theory, breaks down Michael’s potential motives beautifully, just like that therapist from Season 1 that Sara went to to better understand the mysterious new inmate. And, yeah, looks like Sara’s got an angel of a husband. Wonder how this highly intelligent scholar will react when his wife gets taken away from him by an ex-convict.

• I still believe the government is at least partly to blame for Michael’s troubles. Hence their insistence that he is no longer Michael Scofield but Kaniel Outis, a murderer/threat to society. The video evidence of Michael allegedly shooting a CIA agent might have been cooked indeed, as Sara notes, just like that video of Lincoln “killing” Vice-President’s brother in Season 1. They cared to follow him all the way to Yemen, tried to catch him.

• Why Michael went there in the first place is another question. Was it by invitation of the radical rebels? Was the CIA agent he allegedly killed related to that/them as well? That government intrusion might explain the weird shot of those paper cranes piled up in the sewer in the intro to episode 1. Was Michael sending these cranes specifically to request help but, as they were not delivered, had to devise a different way to contact his family (i.e. the photo)? Who has been burying them?

• There’s a downside to Michael’s reputation, of course – everyone knows he’s prone to escaping. But the escape route they’ve found is very convenient, and has nothing on Fox River’s painstaking tunneling (nine episodes don’t leave much time for drilling and unscrewing, either). Michael’s experience makes it easier.

• It will be interesting to see where that piece of Sid’s gum, requested by Michael, that led to drugs that led to the cellphone and credit card that led to a paper tulip delivered to Mike and Sara in the States, will lead. Though I still didn’t get how he made a makeshift lighter out of that gum and a battery. A piece of gum is an ironic object too – that’s what the brothers have given T-Bag as a consolation prize before leaving him in Fox River prison at the end of Season 4.

• Michael’s methods verge on the extravagant and manic. That message – “Hide everyone. A storm is coming” – must’ve really spooked Sara. There might be truth in her husband’s words about game theory being able to drive people mad.

•  Luckily for them all, the communication system in Ogygia seems to work well, but the surveillance – not so much. How else would Michael hire that street boy to deliver that crane that says “Find the Sheik of Light and I will be free”, with the Sheik’s phone number encoded in Braille-type dots, to his brother and C-Note?

• We as viewers are ourselves in Lincoln and Sara’s shoes – we’re also required to puzzle out the riddles and mysteries Michael throws our way. Michael’s messages are cryptic in terms of who they talk about but crystal clear in terms of Michael’s intentions. He likes to speak in metaphors – origami, the Sheik of Light.

• We are thrown right into the middle of the events, or even into the last stages of the planned escape. Everything has already been well-rehearsed, the only obstacle are people on the outside (the “Sheik of Light”, specifically, that is, Sid’s father, who’s also the head of Sana’a’s electrical works system). “I can’t wait another 4 years” (for another chance) – I wonder what Whip means here.

• I like the narrative flow of this episode – well-paced, how we learn the backstory through narration, the shifts between the three locations (the States, Yemen on the outside and Yemen behind the bars). It moves like waves, in an almost epic, “Odyssey” manner.

• The colours are very different from Season 1’s blue scale – they are Season 3 beige, sandy, yellow. The clothes, the landscapes. Interestingly, there does not seem to be any particular uniform in Ogygia. But while visually Ogygia resembles the Sona prison in Panama, the order and discipline here is more like in Chicago’s Fox River Penitentiary from Season 1.

• I think “Prison Break” is performing an important social duty here. In many Western people’s minds the word “Muslim” has (acquired) negative, threatening connotations. Yet in this fictional story they show that there are diverse groups of people in the Middle East countries, and the rebels, the real threats, are as marginalized as Western rebels would be in their respective countries. In their small way, the show breaks down the negative prejudice against people of this origin. Most notably, it also shows the reasons for them to leave their countries in such times. An average viewer like me, untrained in international politics, definitely finds that helpful to extend the understanding.

• With Sid, a young Yemen gay man, serving 20 years in jail for homosexuality, the writers are following the lead of many other American TV shows to increase LGBTQ characters visibility on the screens (that, potentially, could attract more LGBTQ audiences too). In “Prison Break”’s case the inclusion of such character (turning Seasons 1-4 heavily homoerotic subtext into text) is interrelated with real life. In spite of increased representation of LGBTQ characters on TV, not many series have an openly gay lead actor yet.