Warning: SPOILERS ahead for Prison Break
The Prison Break revival series has wrapped up after nine episodes, and while fans got a happy ending, they may also have been left scratching their heads. Just like the original series, the revival is complicated and filled with twists and turns, and they are all packed in to only nine episodes. So with the show finished, what exactly happened? If you’ve got questions, we’ve got answers.
The final episode ‘Behind The Eyes’ picked up a few minutes before the previous episode ended with its blood-splattered cliffhanger. Michael (Wentworth Miller) is back on American soil, having discovered that Sara’s (Sarah Wayne Callies) new husband Jacob (Mark Feuerstein) is actually the crooked and dangerous CIA operative Poseidon. Lincoln’s (Dominic Purcell) been shot and left for dead, Whip (Augustus Prew) has been reunited with long-lost father T-Bag (Robert Knepper), and everything is about to come to a head as the final secrets come to light.
JACOB’S AGENDA
We’ll start with Jacob, and his long-con on Sara. The finale begins with Jacob tying Sara to a chair as she (rightly) calls him a psychopath. Jacob (or Poseidon) is actually a CIA operative, but he’s not only been leading a secret cell named 21 Void, he’s actually been working against the CIA itself at times, and even murdered the deputy director Harlan Gaines.
Jacob ‘recruited’ Michael against his will, first by imprisoning Sara (pre-revival), and then by framing him for Gaines’s murder. He’s used his hold on Michael to place him in various prisons in order to break out prisoners that the government want to use for their own ends – and when he was done, he sent him to the Yemen prison as Kanil Outis. It wasn’t to break anyone out, though that was what he told Michael. Instead, Jacob intended Michael to die there, tying up his loose ends and leaving Jacob with Michael’s family.
This plan failed, however, and now Michael is back and Sara knows that her husband has been lying to her for years. As a result, Jacob has a new diabolical plan: he’ll kill both Sara and Michael, burning her to death and having one of his operatives shoot him in the head. (He’ll then raise Mike Jr. as his own.) And when Michael and Sara prove difficult to kill? He’ll turn Michael in as Kanil Outis, and have him imprisoned for life.
MICHAEL’S MASTER PLAN
Jacob has his work cut out for him, however, and Sara hits on a key truth when she tells her husband that Michael is far smarter than him. Since the night that Michael was framed for murder, he’s been plotting his revenge, and it’s all about to come together.
First, he set aside blood from the murder and sent copies of the security tapes to a ‘wild card’ who loves to build obsessively detailed dioramas. This episode, T-Bag and his surprise son (!) Whip are sent to collect both the blood and the wild card, bringing them to Michael. Then, he encrypted his hand tattoos and sent Jacob on a wild goose chase to the zoo, while he broke into Jacob’s secret CIA office. As always, it’s the tattoos that save him, as Michael reveal that the dots and shadows on the back of his hands come together to look like Jacob’s face and fool his facial-recognition scanner. There, he took the blood from the murder and planted it in Jacob’s office.
Finally, he lured Jacob to another meeting point by telling him that he had his secret hard drives full of incriminating evidence. There, he was able to lead Jacob on a chase through the warehouse, intentionally letting Jacob take his gun and ‘shoot’ him… in a life-size replica of the Gaines’s murder scene. The replica (built by his diorama-loving associate) was created inside a truck, and Michael loaded his gun with blanks. As a result, he now has video footage of Jacob apparently committing the murder that he actually did commit seven years ago and framed Michael for.
His end game is a particularly clever one – come clean about everything else that has happened, including Jacob forcing Michael to work for him, and e-mail the ‘missing’ stills from the murder footage to the CIA director to prove Jacob’s guilt. Combined with blood evidence in Jacob’s secret office, and the testimony of one of Jacob’s accomplices who was taken down by Lincoln, it’s enough to get Michael freed, and he finally walks away a free man.
HAPPY ENDINGS
With that, Michael’s long odyssey is over. After years of breaking people out of prison, being framed for crimes he didn’t commit, and living on the run, he can finally have the ‘boring’ life he wants.
The final scenes show Michael sitting with Lincoln, reflecting that it is all over. His hands aren’t shown, but his collarbone appears tattoo-free, suggesting that he may have had some laser surgery to wipe his slate clean. As the brothers talk, they look out at Sara and Mike in the park with a football, chatting with Sheba (Inbar Lavi), who is presumably now in a relationship with Lincoln. Despite the happiness of this scene, there is some sadness under the surface – and it is going to take Michael a long time to recover from his long ordeal.
As for the rest of the characters, the series ends with a surprisingly moral note: the good guys go on to live their lives, the bad guys are punished. Sucre and C-Note are not seen in the finale, but are presumably back to living the lives they had at the start of the revival. The 2 Void agents are dead – Van Gogh (Steve Mouzakis) was shot by his partner, and his partner A&W (Marina Benedict) had her neck snapped by T-Bag. The only unfair ending came for Whip, who was shot in the stomach and died in the arms of the father he just met, who was then arrested for the death of A&W.
THE FINAL CODA
Of course, there’s a reason for T-Bag’s loss, and it comes up in the final coda. The series revival ends where it all began: in Fox River Penitentiary. Jacob, arrested for his crimes, is led into a cell. He’s still beaten up from his encounter with Michael, so presumably he is awaiting trial – and he doesn’t seem concerned. He’s actually got a sly smile on his face, and he tells the guard that he’s not going to be there long. Obviously, Jacob thinks he’s going to get out again, and he’s probably going to start making trouble for Michael again.
Except that he’s never going to get that chance. Whether this was part of a master-plan of Michael’s or not isn’t entirely clear, but Jacob’s cellmate is none other than T-Bag. T-Bag, who is a confirmed murderer, and who spent most of the finale talking about the revival of his killer instinct, and Michael’s possible plan to have him kill Jacob. T-Bag, whose son died in his arms after being shot by Jacob’s agent. The shot zooms in on Jacob’s panicked face, before panning out and away from the cell, leaving the viewer to hear his screams as T-Bag takes his revenge, and the saga comes to a violent end.
