The walls, the cellmate, and the chair

Part II

Worlds apart: same prison, different hellholes

True, we take a lot of things for granted, until we learn to look farther in the long run, and witness other people being deprived of the things we once thought everybody has.


1. Family, Friends, Foes

The father's tears: Lincoln behind bars with his son LJ

Maybe the second dumbest thing a villain can plan is to not have a family. It actually makes little sense when bad people say family will only be a distraction, an interference, a burden. From quite a number of movies I watched, I noticed family always serves as the best motivator and the only reason to commit the most unimaginable crime that is yet to be written in the Crime Library archives.


FAMILY: Law-abiding Citizen: After a father saw his wife and little girl raped and tortured to death, he seeks for "justice the system cannot obviously provide", and comes back for the worst revenge no one can believe to be possible: killing people with his own hands--even if he's behind bars.


John Q.: Not one father can accept he will bury his son long before his son buries him. As his son was diagnosed with cardiac arrest, he almost sold his house just to pay for the hospital bills after his insurance company won't pay for it. Getting a job and waiting for the monthly salary was not an option, and the last desperate resort came to John Q.'s mind: take a hospital hostage, until the apathetic doctors perform the surgery spelling both the loving father's and the son's life.


The same theme goes for Prison Break: Lincoln was all Michael had in the world, and the only family who stayed despite their "nature and nurture" differences. For the structural engineer, enduring the laser for his deceiving Sistine Chapel tattoos, getting his toes cut and fabricating another crime to get incarcerated for the second time instead were all simply "crosses to bear". As long as his brother escapes the electric chair he obviously did not deserve, Michael was always more than ready to suffer and accept the consequences.

The "papi" who never left: Sucre and Michael digging a hole for the break-in (series four)

FRIENDS: Measuring how far a friend would go also became one of the series' moral themes. While on the run, a lot of people Michael once thought  were "friends and allies" came and went even as fast as the speed of light. But amidst his efforts to "establish trust", two people remained: Fernando Sucre (Amaury Nolasco) and Alexander Mahone (William Fichtner).


This part also taught how friends should understand each other even without words. A lot of surprises shook the team in the third and fourth series when Plan A didn't go out so well, then Michael and Mahone would look at each other with the understanding of "Let's do plan B."

The backstabber: Don Self, extreme right (series four)

FOES: At most times our protagonists had no choice but to trust their original foes because a new set of villains is on the move. But the foe in this story is actually defined as those people too smart enough to impersonate as allies, then would stab you at the back after he got what he wanted from you.


In the end, those old foes even became part of Michael's "plan C's", and somehow offered the "luck" for the team when they needed it the most.


2. Freedom

Let's admit we look at it as more boring in real life than in meaning. Of course, it only gets boring when we don't want to get another dictionary to look for its definition other than "being liberated from our strict parents".


But for a bunch of paranoid fugitives, freedom was everything.


The team's hunger for liberty from being wrongfully convicted and the itch to come home were most seen in series one: the breaking out, and series four: the breaking in. A lot of strong temptations also clouded their minds in the long run (like when Sucre and Bellick were to stand guard and wait, and Bellick tempted Sucre to drive and escape from the team instead).


But the focus on closing the off-the-books deal and seeing official papers of emancipation never faded in Michael's "tumored" brain. At one point he condemned Lincoln, and even his girlfriend Sara about the latters' deal working with the Company in exhange of saving Michael's life. He was at the brink of death after being diagnosed with brain tumor, and the only way to save him was to bring him to special Company doctors.


Michael also taught me to look at the long-term consequences of one's actions, and to not linger and be contented much on the seemingly comforting achievements at present. Since series one, he only saw two things at the farthest end of the grim tunnel: freedom and family. All through out these two kept him going.


3. The art of being smarter

Michael scammed them all.


It must truly be an insulting, and probably the brightest plan to deceive your team: you tag them along at first, then eventually dump them to your traphole, because after all, other members of your team did not certainly deserve rightful freedom.


Adopting the practical and realistic principles of a communist mind, this situation actually highlights the one being smarter; the one who knows the plan. After all, if you're a mere soldier of the army, you would most likely stay either as the contractor, the bait, the additional burden, or the dumb ugly duckling desperately keeping up with Mother Goose.


It probably looked like convicts walking in a pitch black tunnel and they even had no idea what's waiting for them on the other side. But the cruelty of each one's survival was not much of a sympathy issue: it was mainly about trying to be smarter than everybody else to escape as far as the Pacific. And not even that, it was more about being the mastermind of the escape plan.


I remember my mentor Ms. Josephine Bonsol giving a lecture about being "parrots" and riding along the "bandwagon" of the social community. I've finally understood what she meant when she indirectly taught us about the consequences of always following our friends' whereabouts and scandals and routines, and idly wanting to stay as the "buyer" and not the "innovator".


For eight fugitives on the run, with husky but swift guards and dogs at their heels, they had no choice but to rely their trust to the structural engineer who started it all. Somehow it's a very dangerous thing to believe a man with a complicated and mysterious mind; it's like jumping into hell not knowing what's waiting for you below.


We may never know how worse the scenario would get when we continue to be mimes and parrots because we "think" it's the right thing to do. After all, there is no such term as the "right thing"; it only becomes right according to us and according to what the majority says about it.