He’s both chaser and chased, and in season three even ends up joining his quarry behind bars in a hellish, South American prison. Mahone spends most of the series fighting demons, inside and out, all in the name of exorcising his guilt, saving his family and exacting revenge on the puppet-masters pulling his strings. He’s the kind of blinkered, brutal, suspect-murdering motherfudger you definitely don’t want on your tail. When we first meet Mahone, he’s in charge of tracking down – and secretly eliminating – the recently escaped Fox River eight, during which cat-and-mouse hunt he proves more than a match for Michael in the genius stakes. Apt, as he’s hooked on drugs drugs that help him walk the tightrope between madness and… well, more madness. Or Jon from Garfield after a ten-year battle with cocaine addiction. With his wiry frame, block-of-flats forehead, and wild, big bug eyes, he looks like one of the skeletons from his own closet. But it is, without doubt, one of the most entertaining, compulsive and exciting.ĭodgy, Company-corrupted FBI agent Alexander Mahone is like a cross between Sherlock Holmes and Dirty Harry. It’s definitely not (the cliffhanger ending sucks ass, for a start). I can’t say that it’s the ‘best’ first season of any show ever. The show’s entire first season is a glorious, twenty-four-episode homage to every prison break movie you’ve ever seen, with a helter-skelter of tinfoil-hatted, pant-crapping madness thrown in for free. Sure, there are screeds of stock characters, a whole cell-block full of cliches, and more than a soupcon of silly moments, but, ultimately, you’ll be too busy trying to stop your adrenal gland from hijacking your heart to care. Oz this aint.īut you don’t – you can’t – go in to Prison Break‘s first season expecting gritty realism or strict adherence to the rules of logic or plausibility. And that’s even before we take into account the giant matchstick model of the Taj Mahal that Michael’s compelled to structurally reinforce by the prison’s wishy-washy warden.

And he only has four weeks in which to accomplish this task. Michael then engineers his own arrest and imprisonment in said facility so that he can break his brother out before the poor lump gets his head fried off in the electric chair.

Yes, the premise is absolutely batshit crazy: Genius structural engineer Michael Scofield spends hundred of hours and thousands of pounds tattooing himself with the disguised blueprints of a maximum security prison he himself helped design, and in which his brother, Lincoln – framed by a shadowy cabal called The Company for the murder of the vise President’s brother – just happens to be incarcerated on Death Row.

Prison break season 1 characters