The walls, the cellmate, and the chair

First of three parts

The world behind bars

Home and family will always be the last journey.


He became America's most wanted fugitive for one reason: to save his only brother he never thought would be a stranger after all.


Paul T. Scheuring's Prison Break series generously opened me to the world behind bars, where convicts haunt and hunt each other, play basketball involving a deal of chomping down the losing team's lunch, riot at most times and replace the guards' horrid and loud "night head counts". All these are considered as norms of the prison walls, while a certain "Fox River Eight" worked at Prison Industries, dug an escape tunnel, collected horse poo (to lay off scent) and bleaching chemicals to make the most historical break-out of the century since John Wilkes Booth.

Michael Scofield: Structural engineer, fugitive

Michael Scofield (Wentworth Miller, Residet Evil 4) is a structural engineer looking at a successful future with his principle of "connecting things". But out of nowhere, and where the story originally started, he was already looking at a five-year jailtime at the same prison his rogue brother, Lincoln Burrows (Dominic Purcell) was condemned to the electric chair for killing the president's brother.


Coincidence? If it was, Michael was stupid enough to join his brother and see him endure the excruciating pain of the penitentiary's power supply running through every neuron in his body. But it was more than coincidence; he had obviously planned it.

What could you possibly see beyond that Sistine Chapel tattoo? THE ESCAPE

To surpass John Wilkes Booth's record of tasting freedom for only 12 days until he was caught and sentenced to death, maybe Michael should need more than just memory and uncertain Plan A's to smoothly break his brother out and disappear in Panama. He realized no matter how genuine and smart he was, he could never store Fox River's blueprints in memory alone--much less if he's looking at a scheduled death sentence of his loved one. Theoretically he should have a MAP WITH HIM unseen enough to pass through the prison guards (who are thieves as well). And there was only one way to do it: TATTOOS. 


Eventually the story evolved into a political conspiracy of The Company, a group of high-ranking people of America trying to invade Asian countries' economies and profit by rebuilding it. Their top secret plan and the "Future" they hold are all encrypted in cards called Scylla, with data distributed to six cardholders. 

Michael and Lincoln's father, Aldo Burrows, once worked with The Company but resigned a few years later when he found out how insane its objectives are and deliberately investigated it, offering a threatening security breach after he'd discovered piles of political conspiracies.


Smart as he was, he laid low from The Company's radar and kept on searching for lost and tangible evidences. But the mouse trap the Company made him was irresistible: and that's where it all started with the trouble for the Brothers Grimm.


Lincoln, in his early years, was engaged in a lot of fights and eventually to drug business. From there the Company found an inside man, and fabricated a fake murder of the President's brother with all planted evidences leading to Lincoln.

For a father trying so hard to stay his children out of his own problems, the verdict was heartbreaking. With Lincoln being sentenced to the electric chair, it would definitely make him get out of his cave, take the Company's bait and save his innocent son.


The first series alone is more than enough for dumb delinquents and convicts to learn how to plan, recruit, steal, deceive and break out, while it gets better with every chapter. And what I've most importantly learned from Prison Break are what every human being has long taken for granted since the beginning of time...


to be continued