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

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.

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