carmen_lj | this is mostly about prison break

I think it's very unfair of telly shows to put Nana Visitor in things when I decided to stop watching them. That is cheating. Bad form, Torchwood, BAD FORM. (Here is a lovely picture of her being adorable with Terry Farrell.)

This week I finally finished Prison Break, several years after I stopped watching about six episodes from the end of the show. I blame this vid. It is Micheal/Mahone and is pretty much the vidly embodiment of my favourite thing about the show. Sadly, as soon as I started watching from where I quit it, I remembered exactly why I quit. WHAT HAPPENED TO THIS SHOW? It's like after 4.12 the writers were overcome by a bunch of vaguely sentient bananas, the bananas locked them in a cupboard and wrote the rest of the show. Then the writers made a heroic escape but there were only five minutes left to write and those five minutes had to be AMAZING to make up for a half season of wtf is this shit? Which is great, and I'm very glad the actual end is smashing. Sadly the ten episodes beforehand are the most sudden and disappointing deterioration of a show's quality I can think of right now.

There's so much wrong I don't know where to start. Lincoln is just awful. The whole point of the show is Micheal saving him from being executed for a murder he didn't commit and what's he doing in the second half of season four? CHEERFULLY GUNNING DOWN THE CANNON FODDER. Oh, the guns. I know the US has RATHER A LOT OF THEM but Prison Break always made them scary before, made them dangerous and have consequences. But here it suddenly decides that what would be REALLY AWESOME is ENDLESS GUN BATTLES OF TEDIUM where no-one important ever gets hurt and our heroes can have many a shoot-out in broad daylight in the middle of Miami, surrounded by The Public and there are NO CONSEQUENCES. Then there's all the convenient Nick Of Time arrivals; the lobotomy suffered by the bad guys complete with half-assed, barely thought out plans that change for no particular reason; the endless swapping around of Scylla; their ridiculous opinion of the Indian Prime Minister, and worst of all the fact that Christina Schofield being alive should have been this AMAZING THING and it turns out she's a CARTOON CHARACTER. (Which is extra bloody annoying both because Prison Break has managed a lot of awesome, really scary villains - Gretchen and Wyatt esp - and it's so very not a show about women, but the women they have, even for the bit parts, I almost always found really well-written and Christina is just rubbish and painfullly uninteresting.)

And to top it all off, y'know how RTD has a habit of half-assed deux ex machina finales? IT IS NOTHING TO WHAT HAPPENS IN PB. NOTHING. I cannot BELIEVE THEY DID THAT. Just right out of the blue, no foreshadowing, no real explanation of how this magical solution would work. It was just THERE and it was terrible.

Thank goodness for the last five minutes. They were amazing. And then there was The Final Break, which partly made me bitter it wasn't a whole season, cause there was clearly too much plot for an hour and a half. But other than that it was just lovely. And like a proper pay-off for four seasons of watching these dudes, cause everyone was basically in love with everyone else and they were A TEAM who had managed to resolve their slight trust issues. And Team!Gretchen&Sarah made me very happy. OH FOR A SEASON OF THAT. And the way they were like "yeah, we shall just do another prison break" so casually as though it were NOTHING for they had had MUCH PRACTICE and the FBI dude was all "TOTALLY ON TO YOU" and Micheal was "WHATEVS I KNOW NOT OF WHAT YOU SPEAK."

So, not very well done Prison Break, not very well done at all. But at least it managed to finish well.

Apparently Doctor Who is back on on Saturday, hurrah! That didn't seem like a terribly long time away at all. This made me flail a bit, for it is lovely (Matt and Karen and Arthur behind-the-scenes, no spoilers):