2017 is certainly the year for highly anticipated television reboots. Not only will we be returning to David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, but we’ll also be revisiting those elusive escapees from Fox’s successful action-drama show, Prison Break. It’s a project that we seem to have been discussing for some time now, but as its April broadcast finally draws closer, we have a brand new trailer featuring a distinct lack of much-needed clues as to the premise of this reunion.
The clues are needed, because the 2009 finale of the popular show featured the death of the lead character, Michael Scofield (Wentworth Miller), who was also known to be suffering from a brain tumour. So, the biggest question of all, regarding this new series, is how it is that Michael can still be breathing. However this reveal is made, it would not be the first time that a beloved Prison Break character has returned from the dead. In the third season, for example, the character of Sara Tancredi (Sarah Wayne Callies) is apparently beheaded – but is resurrected in season 4, all in one piece.
It’s the outlandish and boldly preposterous plot twists that make Prison Break such a wild televisual ride, without ever descending into silliness. Its original premise was an exceedingly simple tale of fraternal devotion, as brilliant structural engineer Michael Scofield tries to break his brother, Lincoln Burrows (Dominic Purcell) out of prison. Burrows has been wrongly sentenced to death for murdering the brother of the Vice President of the United States, so Scofield has the blueprints of the prison tattooed on his body and gets himself convicted of armed robbery, so he can facilitate his brother’s escape from the inside.
Scofield befriends the prison doctor, Sara Tancredi (Callies), and the incarcerated brothers inadvertently form an alliance with six other inmates, who join in the plan. In implementing the jail break, the brothers also discover that Burrows was framed by a shadowy organization named The Company. The three seasons of the show that followed all stemmed from those events, as the group dodge various attempts to capture them, escape from other facilities, and dig further into a vast conspiracy.
Season 5 evidently picks up some years down the line, as Sara cares for her son, whose father is Michael Scofield. In the teaser above, Sara and her son discuss the idea of Michael returning, and Sara plants the seed for the idea that a returnee may be forever changed. This is intriguing, as well as being a regular theme throughout previous seasons. Michael and Sara have been continually separated by circumstance, and each time they were reunited they had to renegotiate their relationship as a result of being changed by events in the intervening period. The question is, what happened to Michael, and how has it changed him?
Whatever the answers turn out to be, it certainly looks like an action-packed ride. All will be revealed when Prison Break airs in April 2017.
