Liberum Arbitrium: dipping your french fries in a milkshake

Wow, i got my first trackback ever, including a mention by my blog hera* Lindsay Beyerstein of Majikthise. Getting over the shock that anybody would read my writing, I'm especially tickled that people from Massachusetts read this. It's hard being the only Sox fan here and a little hometown flavor makes my day.

Of course, gratitude is truly deserved by David Chase & Co. for making such a blog-worthy episode this week. Every week they make it hard for all the other shows out there. Reminds me of the exception clause (e.g. 'except Touched by an Angel') that seems added onto everyone's favorite rant: Everything on Television is a Bunch of Crap! Really there are other good shows...

Such as, you say? Glad you asked: Prison Break has me totally locked-down with love. I suppose I should thank Lost too for bringing movie production values to TV, but the hell with them: "we have to press this button every twenty minnutes or a polar bear will eat us!" C'mon, give me some real suspense, like a structural engineer navigating physical and psychological obstacles to his genius plan for breaking his falsely-accused brother out of Death Row. Yes, give me that any day over drug-filled Virgin Maries and a season of flashbacks. (And I know this week's PB was a flashback episode, but it gave us so many interesting tidbits along its dramatic way, including a radical revision of Michael's motivation in rescuing his brother to the aside that Steadman has no teeth!..but its one episode not the whole damn season) On PB, the conspiracy actually makes sense.

Also, the trifecta of strong female characters is unique for TV, especially considering the show has most of its action in a men's prison. Dr.Tancredi, Veronica and VP Reynolds are great personifications of the three conflicting forces in PB: love, justice and power, respectively.(As noted by Patricia Wettig in an interview) VP Reynolds is the most magnetic character in the bunch. Her relentless drive to destroy Linc is such a disgusting abuse of power that the early scenes with her slicing vegetables in a pastoral ranch are mesmerizing in their juxtasposition of comfortable domesticity and ruthless political engineering. ("Surely," she says, hacking a red bell pepper into ribbons, to a wayward SS agent, "you can handle a girl who graduated in the middle of her law class at Baylor") Another, 'the real criminals are outside' moment.
And what's with the music in the 'conspiracy' scenes?: there is this eerie sound effect of a bouncing ball that turns out to be really nerve-wracking for some reason. I like the prison 'war' music with its subtle drums and Chinese flute riffs. I hope the series ends with the VP in a prison jumpsuit, but that would be unrealistic, but poetic justice.
Yes, the real reason I watch is probably to see Wentworth Miller's body and lament that this show is on Fox and not HBO during the shower scenes, but the cliffhanger every episode idea doesn't hurt either.