Prison Break: Michael's Advantages Crumble, Along With His Hope

A hallmark of Prison Break is that Michael Scofield (Wentworth Miller) and his prison-breaking buddies are always one step ahead of the other guys... until they aren't. The most meticulous of plans can sour at any moment, and they often do, forcing these chain-breaking hunks to improvise a new plan to get out of a sticky situation, and it looks like that's exactly what Michael will have to do following the "The Liar."

As an hour of television, "The Liar" really served as a set up to the rest of the season following the two opening hours of establishing the new setting and situation. In other words, now we're getting somewhere!

The big deal here was that we were finally, definitively, 100 percent prison breaking! Michael's plan to run for it during a planned power outage was finally coming to fruition, and we should have known it wasn't going to work because it just wasn't complicated enough. I mean seriously, turn the lights off and run? That's not how this show breaks out of prisons. A proper Prison Break plan needs at least one billion moving parts.

The power outage actually caused an ill-timed prison riot, and when a few other inmates -- including bad dude Abu Ramal -- noticed that Michael and his cell mates were making a break out of a ceiling vent, they tried to go, too, crowding Michael's cell and alerting the guards. Michael, Whip (Augustus Frew) and president of the Freddie Mercury Fan Club Ja (Rick Yune) were arrested on the roof, their dreams of freedom dead.

Elsewhere, Lincoln (Dominic Purcell) passed time by getting a fake passport from the guy who took his real passport -- yep -- and broke up a sexual assault on Sheba (Inbar Lavi) in a totally unnecessary rape scene. Meanwhile, Sara (Sarah Wayne Callies) got a real mainsplainin' to about a hacked phone by her holier-than-thou husband Jacob (Mark Feuerstein) and learned that Kellerman (Paul Adelstein) may have been the hacker. She also avoided getting murdered by the mysterious agents causing trouble in her life partly because she's crafty and partly because the mysterious Poseidon wants her alive in order to lead them to Michael. With a total dud of a husband not backing her, she *gulp* phoned T-Bag (Robert Knepper) to ask for his help. That's how desperate she was.

Prison Break: What the heck is Michael doing?

We also learned that Whip and Michael have been on some prison breaks together before, presumably in the seven years when we believed Michael was dead. And the reason they were in Ogygia was because the U.S. government wanted them to break Ramal out "for their own convoluted foreign policy," according to Michael. But they were betrayed (by who?) and now they were on their own. Michael's new plan did not involve breaking out Ramal anymore, so the attempt in this episode meant ditching Ramal, despite telling Ramal they would break out in last week's episode. Note to Michael: don't lie to a terrorist's face unless you know you can get away with it.

This obviously didn't sit well with Ramal, and it sets up one of Michael's most difficult situations: he's stuck in a foreign prison with a bloodthirsty terrorist who wants revenge for being betrayed by him. When we last saw Michael, the broken man was recording an "I'm probably dead" video for Sarah on a phone that ran out of batteries. Yikes. This sense of unknown was exactly what Prison Break needed, and given that there are only six episodes left in this revival, there isn't much room for the show to slow down.

Prison Break airs Tuesday nights at 9/8c on Fox.