I started watching this show around the fourth episode, and I thought it was pretty cool. Then I watched the first three episodes and found out it was OH MY GOD SO AWESOME.
You may or may not already know the premise: Michael, a structural engineer who's clearly smarter than you (and better looking, says Julia), gets an extremely intricate full-body tattoo and then robs a bank very poorly. (That's the only part I'm not completely happy with -- I know he wanted to get caught, but couldn't he have come up with a more awesome near-miss plan, just to prove he could've pulled it off? Well, I'm not thinking practically.)
Michael pleads no contest and gets put in maximum security prison -- the same one, it turns out, that houses his brother, on death row for killing the Vice President's brother. (And in this week's shocking finale, we learned that the VP is -- wait for it -- a chick! And not Geena Davis! What's that about?) He swears he's innocent, but honestly, who cares? Michael's tats are actually a complicated puzzle filled with mneumonic devices and mathematical formulae that translate into the prison's blueprints and an escape method.
You had me at "prison break."
If you're not yet convinced that this show is awesome, here's three components of Michael's plan that I didn't know about until I saw the first few episodes. Remember, if any of these fails, he's stuck in prison for a long time and his brother will die.
- Michael needs frequent access to the infirmary. No problem -- he has type 1 diabetes and needs insulin shots. Except that he does not, in fact, have diabetes at all. When he starts to get the shakes, he has to buy insulin blockers from the guy in prison who can get you things (you know...Morgan Freeman), which is unfortunately complicated by a race riot and a menacing guy named T-Bag. (I won't explain that on this site, which is read by my parents.)
- When they escape, they'll need new identities, and an airplane. Luckily, before he robbed the bank, Michael sought out and photographed a guy in the FBI's witness protection program (for some reason the guy's name is Fibonacci, like the sequence -- presumably a reference to the naming convention in Cannonball Run II). An imprisoned mob boss, played by the crazy guy from Fargo, will join in the escape in exchange for Fibonacci's whereabouts.
- This is my favorite part. Michael realizes that they'll need a lot of money when they get out. So his plan depends on one inmate actually being D.B. Cooper. Wow.
For some reason, the story keeps getting sidetracked by some other peoples' attempts to get the brothers out of jail legitimately. The writers try to spice these scenes up by exploding people, but it just isn't working. We need more prison! MORE!!! And more of the breaking out thereof.
A warning to you, TV people: if Michael's tattoos also contain the secret for creating zombies and/or time travel, I will jump through my 9th story window knowing that I have seen humanity at its very best, and that there's simply no point in going on.
Just so you don't think all I do is watch awesome TV all day, last night Julia and I went to a play, "The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial" starring Ed Asner and The Guy Who Played Q in Star Trek: The Next Generation, and it was completely terrible. It was like listening to a reading of an encyclopedia article. I know what the writer was going for -- they saw Inherit the Wind, realized it was very inaccurate, and decided to set the record straight. But can't a story be both accurate and dramatically compelling? Does it have to be a bunch of guys reading from transcripts? Ugh.