The walls, the cellmate and the chair

ACADEMIC LEARNING FROM A FUGITIVE
Part III

All he had said was a big understatement.



Remembering "how they used to talk", I learned to appreciate the word "understatement" more. All throughout the four series, Michael talked and wrote in riddles, while the rest of his team were left to crack them up.

Inverted reading of bloshoi booze produces
numbers which are actually coordinates

BEHIND THE SISTINE CHAPEL TATTOOS


Cute poison, Ripe Chance: Woods, and bolshoi booze. Michael had seriously considered designing codes and scientific jargons to slip past the guard's suspicions and to divert and confuse the FBI's equally smart acumen.


1. His whole body tattoo obviously hides the penitentiary's blueprints, and their escape plans after breaking out.

2. Cute poison is actually a chemical equation he needed to produce a corrosive substance to destroy the infirmary's drainage path, their last door to open to get to the infirmary and escape through the windows.

Ripe Chance: Woods

3. Ripe Chance: Woods is not a storage facility in Oswego as what the police had thought: It should be read as RIP E. Chance Woods. This is the graveyard where Michael hid their clothes and passports to escape to Panama.


4. Bolshoi booze is not a place; it's a series of coordinates of a desert where Michael would meet Spanish colleagues he made a deal with in exchange for their escape plane.

First origami message sent by Michael
Rendezvous: Sundown Hot

HOW MICHAEL AND SARA USED TO TALK


1. Michael had also left Sara with Origami cranes bearing the message of their rendezvous after she was also chased by the Company. Michael used dots to keep the message hidden, which actually correspond to the letters of a cellphone. The message was: Rendezvous Sundown Hot, El Gila NM 6-3, meaning Sara should stay at Sundown Hotel in Gila, New Mexico at meet him at a certain place on June 3 (6-3).


2. In season two, chapter 15 entitled The Message, Michael and Lincoln sent a videotape to the FBI saying they're innocent, but deliberately used body languages elaborating a bad liar to keep the FBI distracted. Michael also left a message for Sara in the video in understatements, mentioning words from Sara's medical book leading to a place where she needs to hide and where Michael would call her.


3. Sara had announced a call for a "Michael Crane" in the receiving area of the hotel Michael had told her, referring the word "Crane" to the origami cranes he'd sent to Sara.


4. In season three, Michael had also called Sara and reminded her of "how they used to talk". Sara mentioned words giving clues as to where she was being held by the Company with Lincoln's son LJ. She said it was a "lost cause", which actually refers to the statue in Panama known as "The Lady of Lost Causes".

The Scylla card

BAD GUYS USE CODES, TOO


1. In season four, the Company were as equally smart. The General had codenamed the datacards as Scylla, and in the Mythology archives, Scylla is a six-headed monster Odysseus had to pass through his journey home and needed to sacrifice six of his men. When Michael and his team had already stolen a datacard in less than a day, they found out it was incomplete and realized Scylla actually consists of six cards.


2. The General had also sent an e-mail to all cardholders the team had hacked into one of the cardholder's (Tuxhorn) PDA. It was about an arrival in London but the team didn't found any meeting in Tuxhorn's schedule, and Mahone suggested the message was a code spelling the word SCYLLA, meaning the Company would have a meeting about Scylla.

The Scylla device

3. Michael had overheard the General talking about "power" in Chapter 6 of season four (Safe and Sound), and the word "bargain" when he went under (because of his terminal brain tumor). Bargain is actually a compilation of chemical element symbols B (Boron), Ar (Argon), Ga (Gallium) and In (Indium). Michael had told Sara about a certain theory that when one combines these elements in a specific way he would be able to produce a revolutionary solar power technology.

The Art of the Deal: Michael and Company agent Gretchen 

THE ART OF DEALS, SENSING FOES


One thing I also learned from Michael is the art of making deals, or better yet the art of acquiring heavier leverage to win the deal. The team had encountered a lot of business negotiations involving life-or-death decisions, some even required little time.


1. Breaking out a Company asset from the Panamanian prison (Michael had been imprisoned in Panama in season three) in exchange for Sara and LJ


2. Obtaining the Scylla device with little time to spare or else they would all back to prison


3. Sometimes they were able to lead the deal and at one point asked the General to let them go unharmed from the Company building or else they would kill his daughter held by Sara in another place.


I also learned to identify foes because of Michael's--and especially Lincoln's paranoia. They would often eye on suspicious-looking people and immediately identify if the civilians were actually Company men.

THE CLOUD OF POLITICS


It just occcured to me GMA had done the same strategy during her regime.


In Prison Break's season two chapter 14 (John Doe), one of the General's "pawns" ordered his liaison officer to set Florida on fire or make any important event on scandal just to cover up for the video made by Lincoln and Michael exposing the Company's secrets. 


I then remembered Ms. Josephine Bonsol saying GMA was the smartest president of the Philippines, and my Filipino teacher telling us how GMA lit the Sandiganbayan and Mindanao provinces on fire and explosions just to cover up her NBN-ZTE deals and Hello Garci tapes and Le Cirque expenses.


These serve me right: we can learn a lot more from villains, from motivated people, from fugitives who didn't actually want to be one in the first place.

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