Textual Analysis Of Prison Break

Even during the latter stages of its run where the quality of the writing was odd and plot points were being reused to death, Prison Break always travelled at high-speed with edge-of-your-seat drama and nail-biting moments. That was no more evident than in the penultimate episode of its first season, ‘Go’.

After the antepenultimate episode’s climax of Michael pulling a knife on Warden Pope, ‘Go’ focuses solely on the night of the breakout. 20 episodes had led to this moment for the convicts, and a feeling of desperation and pressure could be felt in every second of the prison scenes. Sucre’s vomiting early in the episode was an over-exaggerated representation of how stressed I, as a viewer, would be over the course of the hour.

For the most part, the thing I found most exciting on the show was Michael’s tattoos. Sure, most of the time I questioned the ridiculousness of him having all these tattoos for what felt like every possible contingency, but it was always enjoyable to see him and the group get into a tough situation and wait for him to use one of his tattoos to get them out of it. ‘Go’ changed

The writing on Prison Break was never of a really high quality, but it was mostly good enough that you went along with it (assuming you never attempted to apply logic to the show: that would be a fatal error in a world where an innumerable amount of characters are brought back from the ‘dead’, conspiracies are everywhere and Michael shows off ridiculous new knowledge every single minute, among other things). Instead, the show lived off creating suspense. Once you lose that, knowing for sure what happens to the characters, the quality and rewatchability factor decreases for me. Prison Break was a fun and entertaining show, and ‘Go’ highlighted both why it was, and why it was little more, and did so in superb