Get ready to start deciphering Michael Scofield’s (Wentworth Miller) crazy riddles, puzzles and clues all over again, because almost 12 years after Prison Break first premiered, the FOX series is making its big return with an all-new season. The limited run event series is reuniting Scofield with his brother Lincoln (Dominic Purcell) and his longtime love Sara (Sarah Wayne Callies), plus his allies and enemies for one last adventure spanning the globe. Sure, Michael died at the end of season four, which ended back in 2009, but that won’t stop the showrunners from resurrecting the fan-favorite series with all the key players, himself including.
When clues surface that suggest a previously thought-to-be-dead Michael may be alive, his brother Lincoln reunites with Michael’s wife Sara to engineer the series’ biggest escape ever, as three of Fox River State Penitentiary’s most notorious escapees, Sucre (Amaury Nolasco), T-Bag (Robert Knepper) and C-Note (Rockmund Dunbar), are pulled back into the action. The FOX series has always been a hit both critically and in the ratings, but it actually took Miller and Purcell’s reunion onThe Flash to get talks of this rebooted Prison Break season going.
“That is where Dom and I had our reunion,” Miller said at the 2017 Winter Television Critics Association press tour. “We hadn’t seen each other for about five years. Suddenly we were back on set, talking about old times and out of that conversation came the idea of possibility of revisiting Prison Break.”
After Miller and Purcell put their weight behind their idea, creator/writer/executive producer Paul T. Scheuring helped make their dream a reality.
“The initial impetus came from Wentworth and Dominic and then trickled over to me,” Scheuring said. “In the new era of television, people are much more open to limited runs and event series. Knowing that and them coming to me saying, ‘Let’s do a limited run,’ I said, ‘That’s worth doing. Twenty-two episodes is not worth doing.’ We tell a very tight, close-ended story as to why Michael might possibly be alive. It took me back about 2500 years in literature but I found a reason why.”
The limited run was supposed to be 10 episodes in total, but wound up being only nine. “We had 15 weeks to shoot the whole thing and at the end of the day we just didn’t have enough time to shoot it all,” Scheuring said. “So two episodes became one.”
While the cast members are as excited as the fans are to return to these characters and this world, they promise it will offer up something new and isn’t just a continuation of the story from season four.
“There was a sense of risk-taking that I felt before, but you’ll really see in different episodes,” Knepper said. “This wasn’t a reboot, it was a rebirth. It felt great discovering things all over again.”
And speaking of different, Miller revealed that Michael’s going to look a little different on the outside this season, not to mention on the inside. “Different set of tattoos and they serve a slightly different purpose, that’s all I’ll say,” Miller said. “I’m not sure there’s any topping the original. This one, I think, stands on its own.”
Another major part of the show that will be different is Michael and Sara’s love story. For one, she thinks he’s been dead for seven years. For another, she is now married to someone new: a new character, Jacob Ness (Mark Feuerstein).
“I’m her guy now!” Feuerstein said with a laugh. “There’s no Michael.”
Callies added with a smile, “It’s an awkward situation.”
But according to Scheuering, Jacob isn’t just an obstacle in the way of Michael and Sara’s inevitable romantic reunion.
“I wouldn’t make it as simple as, ‘Tension ensues…,'” Scheuering said. “It’s too easy for Mark to be the foil because obviously the audience wants to see Michael and Sara together. It was critical that we have somebody that was potentially fallout from that, a noble character who finds himself, despite his own emotion and his own vested interest in the game, actually helping Sara to facilitate Michael’s escape. The noble part of his soul says, ‘I have to do the right thing and help this guy escape. But if I do that, I effectively might lose my wife too.’ We want to create those kinds of complexities within the narrative.”
Even if Jacob wasn’t in the picture, things wouldn’t be all sunshine and daisies for Michael and Sara if they were to come face-to-face after seven years.
“The question when that reunion comes, there’s a lot of water under the bridge, namely from Sara Scofield,” Callies said. “‘If you have been alive, why haven’t you raised our son? Where have you been? I almost died from grief and if you were there … ‘ Those are a lot of questions that make it unlikely that it would be a reunion where people run and fall into each other’s arms.”
As for returning fan-favorite villain T-Bag, he’s finally going to become whole again when he gets a bionic prosthetic hand. “It’s all based on real prosthetic technology,” Scheuering said. “There’s a reason within the narrative of why he gets it. It does have a dramatic reason for being on the show.”
And C-Note will have a completely new lifestyle when Lincoln seeks him out: he found faith.
“C-Note has been a chameleon from the very beginning,” Dunbar said. “C-Note has been on a hunt for happiness for quite some time. To find a lifestyle, to find his path in life has just been absolutely beautiful. Once Dominic’s character finds him and changes it all, he really needs to make a decision how far does he really want to go down this rabbit hole. He takes a journey and what you guys end up seeing is really beautiful.”
The new season of Prison Break returns Tuesday, April 4 at 9 p.m. on FOX. What are you most excited to see from the new season of Prison Break? Tweet me your thoughts and opinions at @SydneyBucksbaum!
Images: FOX
