Escape plan (Prison Break)
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The escape plan from the American television series, Prison Break, forms the plot of the show. The protagonist of the show, Michael Scofield (Wentworth Miller) creates an elaborate plan to break himself and his wrongly-convicted death-row inmate brother, Lincoln Burrows (Dominic Purcell) out of Fox River State Penitentiary. The storyline of the show revolves around these two brothers and their escape plan.
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[edit] Preparation
Before his arrest, Michael gathered vital pieces of the puzzle which would help him once he was inside such as information on inmates who would later become his allies. His master stroke of genius came in the form of a full top-half tattoo, detailing the prison's schematics. He previously worked as a structural engineer and a few years before his arrest, the company he worked for had been delegated the task of re-fitting the prison which would house his brother. He had access to all of the blueprints for the facility and was able to map out a tattoo, hiding piping systems and important pieces of information in gothic imagery. This was revealed in the flashback episode, "Brother's Keeper".
Michael also used his credit card in various places, including Allen's Self Storage in Oswego, Illinois, to throw the Department of Corrections off his trail once he had escaped. He commissioned the construction of a yacht in Panama, dug out the grave of E. Chance Woods and placed clothes in the empty grave, buried a box of medical nitroglycerin in the Blanding Botanical gardens, and received the coordinates to meet up with a Coyote.
His last free act in the outside world before being imprisoned in Fox River was staging the armed robbery of a bank, in which he discharged a deadly weapon in front of civilians, which was shown in the opening of the series pilot. In court, he pled nolo contendere to attempted armed robbery, against the advice of his counsel Veronica Donovan, and was sentenced to five years in prison. He asked only that the judge place him in the prison closest to his home; the judge agreed, and Michael was sent to Fox River State Penitentiary.
[edit] Season 1
The breakout begins and ends in the infirmary. Upon his arrival at Fox River, Michael locates the resident contraband dealer, Benjamin Miles "C-Note" Franklin and makes a deal to acquire the insulin blocking medication PUGNAc, which will alter his blood-sugar enough to make him diabetic, thus requiring him to make regular visits to the infirmary for insulin shots from the prison doctor, Sara Tancredi.
[edit] The toilet
After obtaining a quarter-inch bolt from the bleachers in the prison yard, he files it against his cell floor until he whittles it down to the shape of a hex key that matches the size of a mark on his tattoo. It is then ready to use to unscrew the bolts from his cell toilet, installed by the Schweitzer Company. Since continued activity in his cell will not go unnoticed by his cellmate, Michael tests Sucre's willingness to keep a secret for a stranger, and is temporarily hindered when Sucre makes it clear he wants no part in the risky endeavor. Michael is assigned a new cellmate, schizoinsomniac Charles "Haywire" Patoshik, who becomes obsessed with the geometry of Michael's tattoos; when Sucre learns that his cousin Hector is making a play for Sucre's girlfriend Maricruz on the outside, however, Sucre changes his mind. Michael has Haywire transferred, and with Sucre back on board, begins chipping away at the cement behind the liberated toilet.
[edit] Connections
Michael also makes several crucial connections in his first days at Fox River. Foremost among them is his paternal relationship with Warden Henry Pope, who is constructing a scale model of the Taj Mahal in his office for his wife's anniversary; Pope recognizes Michael's skill in structural engineering, and allows the convict to aid in the construction. From time to time, Michael seeks advice from Charles Westmoreland, whom he believes to be the elusive D. B. Cooper. Although Westmoreland denies being Cooper, Michael remains convinced, especially since the ransom money that Cooper is alleged to have escaped with is crucial to Michael's post-breakout plans.
Michael also cuts a deal with fellow inmate and mob boss John Abruzzi; in exchange for the whereabouts of the informant who put Abruzzi in prison, Otto Fibonacci, Michael wants to join Abruzzi's prison-industry crew. Part and parcel to the deal, Abruzzi will have a prop-plane ready for take-off at a nearby airstrip on the night of the escape. Michael's resolve is quickly tested when Abruzzi demands to know Fibonacci's whereabouts immediately; Michael loses two toes in the process, but refuses to give up the informant without getting onto PI. As a member of the PI crew, Michael gets access to the cleaning chemicals he needs to make an anhydrous phosphoric acid, which he then covertly empties through a grate in the infirmary; the highly corrosive chemicals begin eroding the metal pipe under the grate. With the help of one of Abruzzi's lackeys, Michael also gets a copy made of the key to the hallway door of the Warden's office.
Apart from employing him to dig out of their cell, Michael also uses Fernando Sucre to acquire items for his plan, without gaining suspicion.
[edit] English, Fitz or Percy
Once Michael breaks through the wall behind the toilet in his cell, he fabricates a reason to stay in Pope's office late to work on the Taj Mahal model. After Pope has left, Michael leaves as well, uses the hallway door key, and scales the prison to the roof. When he is not in his cell for the nightly inmate count, the alarm sounds, and Michael watches the three streets that border the prison — English, Fitz, and Percy — to find that Fitz Street is clear in the event of a breakout. Using the hallway door key again, Michael manages to be in the Warden's office.
[edit] The pipes
Michael then engineers a riot in the prison by cutting off the air-conditioning in order to afford himself more time at a stretch to drill through a wall and access a pipe. Michael enlarges a drawing of the Devil's face from his tattoo and transfers it to the wall, marking nine points on the image that correspond with weak-points in the wall's structure; Michael, Sucre and Abruzzi all help drilling through the wall. While the riot unfolds, Theodore "T-Bag" Bagwell discovers the hole in Michael's cell and uses his knowledge to blackmail Michael into adding T-Bag to the break-out team.
[edit] The storage room
The next stage involves accessing an old storage room under which a specific pipe runs — the pipe that Michael accessed through the wall, which leads to the infirmary — but the plan stalls when the team discovers that "the old head" has been converted into a break room by the guards. Michael turns to trustee Westmoreland, who causes a fire in the breakroom that allows the PI crew to get assigned to the clean-up. During their hours of unsupervised work, the team proceeds to smash through the cement floor while slowly rebuilding the breakroom. After C-Note discovers the growing hole in the floor and confronts Michael, he is added to the break-out team; Westmoreland also joins the team after discovering that his daughter is dying of cancer.
[edit] Timing
Michael gets a visit from his wife Nika, who smuggles a card into the prison during a conjugal visit, which turns out to be a key-card that allows Michael access to the storage room where his personal effects are being held. He retrieves a tape-recorder, a black suit, and a trash-bag, but finds that his gold watch is missing; he then stuffs the trash-bag into a drainage pipe at the bottom of a tall underground room. He then enlists the help of new inmate David "Tweener" Apolskis, who made his trade as a "snatch and grab" pickpocket, to get the watch back from Roy Geary, who had stolen it; Tweener fakes a seizure, and easily liberates the watch. Michael then hides the watch and tape-recorder in the grass under the infirmary window in order to time the rotation of guards in the vicinity. He learns that the corridor between the infirmary and the prison wall is clear for an 18 minute window.
[edit] Beneath the infirmary
While on PI, Michael covertly opens a valve, filling the underground room with water that reaches just inches below its ceiling. Later, he returns to the room, using the water to swim to the ceiling and remove a grate; climbing through the opening, Michael enters a storage room, and finds a metal pipe along the ceiling. That pipe, he sees, has been corroded nearly all the way through by the phosphoric acid, and will allow him access to the infirmary. Michael ties a rope to the grate and descends back into the underground room, replacing the grate and providing a means of ascending the tall chamber.
Unfortunately on the night of the escape, Michael finds that the eroded pipe has been replaced with a brand-new thicker joint which cannot be removed. In their attempt to dislodge the new pipe, the crew attracts the attention of a guard, and only barely manage to hide themselves; in the few seconds they get, they quickly return to the breakroom unscathed, just in time to remove the barricade at the door to let C.O. Bellick back in. Note that the episode in which this occurred was originally going to be the final episode of the series, and so the pipe replacement allowed the series to continue with the eventually successful escape attempt.
[edit] The chair
After Lincoln's return to the SHU to await execution, the electric chair is tested, and Michael makes one last effort to forestall the execution by using a rat to cause a short-circuit in the chair's power supply. However, Bellick, using Tweener as a snitch, discovers his plan and forces the electrician to replace the fuse. Lincoln is led to the chair, strapped in, and nearly electrocuted before the execution is suspended based on new medical evidence concerning the deceased Terrence Steadman.
[edit] Psych ward
Michael has determined that the team must now gain access to the infirmary through the psych ward, which requires overground recon work. Sucre convinces his cousin Manche Sanchez, who works in the laundry, to procure a guard's uniform; Michael then navigates the pipes to come up through a grate in the yard at night, in officer's uniform, and accesses the psych ward. After locating the hatch he will need to use in the basement of the psych ward, Michael sets about returning, but in the process of staying hidden, burns a hole through the uniform and his own back including a piece of the tattoo that detailed the warren of pipes.
Refusing to divulge the origin of his burn, Michael gets transferred to the SHU as well. Seemingly overwhelmed by his recent failure and inability to remember the layout he lost from his tattoo, Michael appears to suffer a nervous breakdown, railing against the concrete wall until his fists bleed and frantically trying to reconstruct the missing schematics with his own blood. When Michael stops responding and appears catatonic, Dr. Tancredi examines him and has him transferred to the psychiatric ward. There, Michael snaps out of his trance, locating Haywire in the dayroom and approaching him; unfortunately, the schizoinsomniac is back on his medication, and remembers neither Michael nor his tattoos.
Michael forces Haywire to vomit out his pills, and soon after, Haywire remembers Michael, as well as his tattoos; Haywire draws the missing piece of the schematic, but only relinquishes it when Michael promises to take Haywire over the wall. Later, Sucre, Lincoln and Manche frame Geary for Michael's burn, and Michael and Sucre return to their cell.
[edit] The infirmary door
The final piece of the revised breakout plan is the acquisition of the infirmary key. Michael calls on Nika again, who meets with Sara outside of Fox River and steals her keys. Nika gets them to Michael, who copies them and returns them to the infirmary for Sara to find; Sara catches on to the scheme, however, and has the lock changed on the infirmary door.
Soon after, Bellick discovers the hole in the breakroom by shattering the cement covering after a tip-off from Tweener; Westmoreland catches Bellick in the act and knocks him unconscious with a coffee pot, suffering a grave injury in the altercation. Westmoreland leaves Bellick bound and gagged in the pipe under the breakroom, and Michael revises the escape plan again. C-Note acquires peroxide for the PI crew to bleach their work uniforms so that they match psych ward uniforms, and the escape team rub down their cells to cover their scents.
In his final trip to the infirmary, Michael resorts to revealing the plan to Dr. Tancredi, pleading with her to "make a mistake" by leaving the infirmary door unlocked.
[edit] The Taj Mahal
In his last visit to the Warden's office, Michael removes the brace from the Taj Mahal model. That night, Pope attempts to have the model moved, causing it to collapse; he calls Michael back to his office, and Michael pulls a shank on Pope, demanding that he call for Lincoln to be transferred to the infirmary. Pope obliges, and Michael binds him to his chair, gags him, knocks him unconscious, and locks him in his office closet.
[edit] The escape
Michael returns to his cell and as tier-time begins, the breakout team slip out through the back of Michael's cell with their newly-white jump suits. They catch up with Bellick in the pipes where Michael takes his guard uniform. He leads the escapees to the grate under the yard and ascends to the ground to set off the psych ward fire alarm in order to empty the unit into the yard. The escapees then blend into the psych ward population and enter the psych-unit, where Michael sedates the guard.
The team uses the hatch and navigates the pipes to the infirmary, where Michael finds Lincoln and that Dr. Tancredi did, in fact, leave the door unlocked. After ripping the bars off the infirmary window, they proceeded to climb across the wire. Westmoreland dies from his wound after revealing to Michael that he had stolen not one million but five-million dollars and where they can find this money.
Michael, Lincoln, Abruzzi, T-Bag, Haywire, C-Note, Tweener and Sucre make it across the wire but the alarm sounds before Manche can make it.
[edit] Flight
On the outside, the escapees successfully evade police dogs, who cannot track their scent. Michael leads the team to a mill where he has left a van waiting for them; Abruzzi sends Haywire on a task to distract him as Michael, Lincoln, Sucre, C-Note, T-Bag, Abruzzi and Tweener flee in the van. Soon after, T-Bag handcuffs himself to Michael seconds before Abruzzi was preparing to shoot him; when the team reaches a barn, however, Abruzzi solves the problem by hacking T-Bag's hand off with an axe. The remaining escapees leave T-Bag and continue toward the airstrip, but they are impeded by a roadblock that forces them to abandon the van.
Michael sends Tweener on his own way as well, and the last five members of the breakout team scramble for the airfield. As police converge on the landing strip, Abruzzi's prop-plane takes off seconds before Michael, Lincoln, Sucre, C-Note and Abruzzi reach the field to see their ride leaving. With police on their heels, the remaining five flee across a field and into a forest.
[edit] Season 2
After the events of Season 1, the group of convicts run through the night until daybreak, when they reach a railroad track and cross ahead of (and through) a moving freight train to cut off Bellick's officers.
[edit] Ripe Chance Woods
Following the assignment of FBI Special Agent Alexander Mahone to the escape case, Michael procures a vehicle and leads the team to a cemetery in Oswego, Illinois. While they dig up the grave of E. Chance Woods to recover a cache of supplies, Bellick and his team take the bait of Michael's credit card receipts, which show an active storage unit at Allen's Self Storage. Mahone, however, decodes Michael's tattoo "Ripe Chance Woods" ("Ripe" meaning, "Rest In Peace E.") and finds the excavated grave moments after the team has fled, allowing Michael to see the new federal agent on his trail. Michael, Lincoln, Sucre, C-Note and Abruzzi quickly blend into Oswego, and Michael obtains food for the escapees before giving a wad of money to Sucre and C-Note (and a dollar to Abruzzi) and sending them on their way.
[edit] The car
Michael leads Lincoln to a car parked in a garage and jumps the battery, instructing Lincoln not to touch the radio. The escape is delayed, however, when Lincoln realizes that his son is being arraigned on a double-murder charge, and Lincoln resolves to break L. J. out of the Cook County Courthouse. The minor prison-break fails, however, as Mahone once again decodes a cryptic message and prevents the brothers from liberating the teenager.
When Lincoln is shot in the leg while fleeing the Cook County Courthouse, Michael rushes him to Nika's house to perform a bit of impromptu first-aid. While Lincoln recovers, Michael locates the missing getaway car at Brewsters Towing and retrieves it; unfortunately, the backpack of supplies in the backseat has been stolen. Michael and Lincoln set out from Nika's toward a location indicated in a barcode tattoo on Michael's wrist: "38-12-1037," indicating Route 38, mile-marker 12, and radio-station 103.7. When they reach the designated destination, Michael removes parts of a corpse from the trunk and puts them in the front seat, setting the radio to 88.7 and hitting the scan button to reach the detonation channel, 103.7; the plan hits a glitch when the radio jams, and Lincoln is forced to set the explosion off manually, just moments before Mahone finds the car. Michael's plan was to fool the authorities into thinking that they were dead.
[edit] Westmoreland's money
Michael and Lincoln were temporaily stalled from their plan to Westmoreland's money after being captured by Bellick and Geary. They finally reach Tooele County, Utah in the fifth episode, "Map 1213". After discovering the map they need has already been taken, they quickly locate T-Bag in town. T-Bag claims that Tweener had stolen the map. However, once they find Tweener, they discover that in fact, T-Bag had the map and has swallowed it after memorizing it. When they arrive at the location that had formerly been the Double K Ranch, they find out that Westmoreland's money is now buried beneath a subdivision.
After locating the house under which they believe the money to be hidden, the four pose as a team of electricians to infiltrate Jeanette Owens' house and gain access to the garage. Soon after, Sucre and C-Note rejoin the escapees. Over the two episodes, "Subdivision" and "Buried", the six convicts (which later reduced to four), continue to dig before unearthing Westmoreland's five million dollars. Their escape is halted when Sucre demands the entire sum.
In the subsequent episode, "Dead Fall", Sucre flees on his motorcycle, only to be met later in the woods by Michael, who reveals that Sucre's hold-up was a ploy to cut T-Bag and C-Note out of the deal. It is then, however, that Michael and Sucre realize that T-Bag had taken the money. The two continue their escape with the $5,000 that Michael has on him, but are temporarily waylaid when Sucre becomes trapped while crossing a river. They later separate with Sucre off to find Maricruz and Michael heading for Gila, New Mexico to meet Sara.
[edit] Sundown Hotel
The day after the escape, Sara receives a note written on one of Michael's trademark origami swans including several strings of clustered dots. Over the next several days, she receives three more origami swans, each with what appears to be a phone number written on it. After finding her father murdered and nearly being assassinated twice herself, Sara fled her home and went into hiding. She soon discovered that the clustered dots and phone numbers combined to form a basic substitution cipher; she translates the first swan to read "RENDEZVOUS" and the second swan to read "SUNDOWNHOT" before realizing that she had left the third swan in her apartment during her hasty escape.
Kellerman and Mahone intercept the third swan, which appears to translate to "ELGILANM63," indicating that Michael wants Sara to meet him at the Sundown Hotel in Gila, New Mexico on June 3. Sara soon chances upon the realization that "Sundown/Hot" referred to the Sundown Hotel and located several establishments by that name across the country, including one in Gila, New Mexico. In the episode, "Rendezvous", Michael eventually reunites with Sara but separates again after she expresses her reluctance to go to Panama and leaves. She changes her mind however, but is then captured by Agent Kellerman before she can reach Michael.
[edit] Bolshoi Booze
Before Lincoln left for L. J., who was being released from prison in Kingman, Arizona, Michael instructs him to make sure he is at a location codenamed "Bolshoi Booze" in three days, by six o'clock PM on Thursday. When turned upside down "Bolshoi Booze" is revealed to actually be cooridinate points , a location along the New Mexico/Texas border.
After parting ways with Sucre in "Unearthed", Michael stops off at the Blanding Botanical Gardens in Blanding, Utah in an attempt to recover a stash of 3,200 medical-grade nitroglycerin ampules. However, the retrieval is intercepted by FBI agents, costing Michael a crucial bargaining chip. In a subsequent episode, he is forced to stop in Maljamar, New Mexico to buy a case of sugar-water and a GPS handset before heading into the New Mexico desert.
Coming to the geographic location encoded in Bolshoi Booze, Michael meets a Mexican coyote, who eventually reveals the location to a prop plane after a short standoff, where Sucre arrives and saves Michael. Coyote and his men leave moments before Lincoln and Aldo Burrows arrive at the locale, followed shortly by Agent Mahone who quickly opens fire on the fleeing fugitives. Sucre, Michael, Lincoln and Aldo escape in a nearby getaway car, but Aldo is fatally wounded by Mahone and dies en route to mile-marker seven of Route 4, where the prop plane will pick them up.
Michael and Lincoln bury their father and, when the plane lands, decide to stay in America in order to expose the conspiracy that put Lincoln in prison. They part ways with Sucre, who boards the twin-engine and takes off for Mexico; Sucre and the pilot later bail out of the plane as a fighter jet — called in by Mahone — targets them. Sucre lands safely, while the pilot is killed on impact, in the Sonoran Desert in Mexico.
[edit] Turning the Tables
The escape plan is put on hold as Michael and Lincoln head back to Chicago to avenge their father's death by exposing the Company. On the road, they are captured by Agent Mahone and subsequently extricated by a newly-rogue Agent Kellerman who pledges his assistance to the fugitives. The three then head for Blackfoot, Montana where they extract Terrence Steadman from seclusion in order to deliver him to Washington, D.C. where his identity can be verified. Before they can leave the state, Steadman commits suicide in a motel room, and Michael, Lincoln and Kellerman take a news cameraman hostage in order to film and release a public statement declaring their innocence.
The message also contains coded instructions for Sara, who reunites with the brothers at a train station in Evansville, Indiana. The quartet boards a train for Chicago, where Sara's father kept a humidor at a cigar club, the key to which Sara found at the scene of her Frank Tancredi's staged suicide. The four avoid capture — despite a failed attempt by Sara to strangle Kellerman on the train in retribution for an earlier attempt by Kellerman to drown Sara — and reach Chicago. Michael and Sara track down the "retired" Henry Pope, also a member at the cigar club, and convince him to retrieve the contents of the humidor.
Pope procures a thumb-drive from the cigar club and delivers it to Michael, Lincoln and Sara, who abandon Kellerman before going into seclusion at a hotel to listen to the audiofile on the thumb-drive. Discovering a conversation between Reynolds and Steadman, recorded after Steadman's alleged murder, that alludes to an illicit incestuous relationship, Michael contacts one of his father's former associates, Cooper Green, who determines that the tape is inadmissable in court because of its time-stamp, but that it may have blackmail value.
With Reynolds touring Chicago on her way through Illinois, Michael allows himself to be captured by Secret Service after passing Reynolds a note — "We have the tape." With Michael and Lincoln occupied, Mahone traps Sara in her hotel room, but later allows her to escape in order to lead Agent Lang to the escaped brothers. Meanwhile, Michael manages to get an audience with the President, and offers to keep the tape under wraps in exchange for presidential pardons for himself and Lincoln. Reynolds agrees, but later reneges under pressure from the Company, resigning from the Presidency instead of keeping her word.
[edit] Panama
Having run out of options, Michael's escape plan resumes with Lincoln procuring safe passage on a freighter for Michael, Sara and himself. Sara discovers that she's being followed en route, however, and turns herself in rather than giving up the brothers. The freighter disembarks, and after a weeklong journey, Michael and Lincoln reach Panama where they meet Señora Vasquez to pick up the location of the Christina Rose, a yacht named after Michael and Lincoln's mother. The last piece of the escape plan, the yacht was encoded in a tattoo portraying Christ-in-a-rose with the number 617 etched on the stem as a reminder of the combination to the ship's padlock. Provisions on board the ship included a large supply of alcohol, and an internet enabled mobile phone.
However, the escape was once more put on hold when Michael received a message — which he believes in from Sucre — on Europeangoldfinch.net informing him that Bagwell was in Panama City with Westmoreland's money. While Lincoln is below deck, Michael heads back in-land to capture T-Bag and end his killing-spree. In Panama City, Michael runs across Sucre, now working with Bellick to track down T-Bag, and learns that the message was not posted by his fellow escapee. Together, the three of them track Bagwell to the Fin Del Camino Hotel, where a pair of federal agents are staking out the convict.
Discovering Michael's absence, Lincoln returns to Panama City in time to cross paths with Agent Mahone. In the subsequent struggle, Mahone gains the upper hand and captures Lincoln, while Sucre, Michael and Bellick overtake the pair of agents and corner T-Bag in a rundown building. T-Bag flees, having led them into, but Michael and Sucre escape while Bellick is arrested by Panamanian police for the murder of a prostitute who was actually shot by Bagwell. Sucre and Michael manage to capture T-Bag, who subsequently attacks Sucre with a screwdriver and flees again.
Michael pursues him to an abandoned shack, and in a brief struggle, pins Bagwell's good arm to the floor with a knife and ties his legs to a bed, leaving him for the Panamanian police to find. Michael then returns to the Christina Rose to find Lincoln missing, and gets a call from Mahone, who offers to trade Lincoln for Michael's yacht and Westmoreland's money.
| Production: | Season 1 | Season 2 | Broadcasters | DVD releases | Mobisodes |
|---|---|
| Miscellaneous: | The Company | Escape plan | Europeangoldfinch.net | Fox River State Penitentiary | Reynolds-Again.com |
| Characters | |
| Main: | John Abruzzi | Theodore "T-Bag" Bagwell | Brad Bellick | Lincoln Burrows | L. J. Burrows | Veronica Donovan Benjamin Miles "C-Note" Franklin | Paul Kellerman | Alexander Mahone | Michael Scofield | Fernando Sucre | Sara Tancredi |
| Secondary: | List of minor characters |
