To be completely honest, the third season of Prison Break turned out to be rather disappointing in its presentation. A lot of the originality that had made episodes so exciting in the first two seasons was left out in an attempt to first do too much with the season, and then when the writer’s strike happened, to wrap the season up without doing enough. Rather than present the strong cliff-hangers that the two previous years had left for the upcoming season, the third season kind of whimpered out, and it was surprising to me that so many people were still excited about the show when the finale happened. With only 13 episodes to the shows credit in the third year, it also didn’t give the fans a lot during its short and abbreviated run.

The third season opens up with main character Michael Scofield back in prison. This time though, it is not in the comfortable United States system, but down in a rough and tumble Panama jail that looks as though a bomb has already been dropped on it. The prison is not a great place to be, with a tyrannical man running the show named Lachero (Robert Wisdom) and many convicts that include people from Scofield’s past. Along for the ride in this third-world prison are character T-Bag (Robert Knepper), Bellick (Wade Williams), and Mahone (William Fichtner). They aren’t all friends, and that of course leads to some past drama re-surfacing, all while they grow accustomed to their new surroundings. None of them wants to be there though, so of course along with the struggles to survive, they begin courting plans on just how they can break out of there. Meanwhile Michael’s brother Lincoln tries to work on his own way to get him out of prison from the outside.

The first wrong move is who Linc tries to elicit for help on the break-out, and the domino’s continue to fall with twists and turns taking place in nearly every episode. Everyone has their own ulterior motives to working together, and when the season starts to come to a close in the final two episodes, a lot is revealed as to the motives of each character and why they were taking the routes that they took. The ride though, isn’t as exciting as it should/could have been, and for that, you can choose to either blame the writer’s for going on strike and leaving this show in a real lurch, or for the source material of the show starting to show thread-bare edges as it ran out of original ideas. Just about everyone in the show has already turned on each other (except for the brothers) and some of the better supporting characters didn’t even make it to the third season of the show. That leaves Wentworth Mille (Michael) and Dominic Purcell (Linc) to carry a majority of the acting load, and while Dominc may be eye-candy for the female audience, he isn’t the best actor in the guild.

Season three of Prison Break on has 13 episodes in the DVD set, and as such, you aren’t getting all that much if you are looking to buy the entire season. It is spread over a 4 disc set, with the fourth having a number of bonus features, which include a number of alternate scenes, some director’s cuts, a few behind the scenes moments with some characters, and a few trailers of other shows out on the market. If you are a die-hard of the show, and really want to own it, or you were a big fan of the first two seasons and just need to get caught up with Prison Break then this could be a good purchase for your collection. However, if you are just getting into it, or are a fair-weather fan, this one could be quite disappointing, because it doesn’t end strong, and while there are some storylines that don’t get completely finished, you might court the thought of “who cares?” It’s exciting television when compared to some of the other shows out there, but this was the weakest of its three seasons so far.












Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD