What’s the most harrowing stranger in a strange land setting for this, both for Michael in a prison and for Lincoln (Dominic Purcell) trying to aid him, but for it to be a country that collapses and falls under control of ISIS? That itself becomes an additional escape situation. Subsequent to that, it becomes a story about getting out of a country, in the vein of Argo. The rug gets pulled out from underneath you right when you’re going to make the escape. For me, I felt like the prison escape should almost be the opposite of what you think it’s going to be. I think it would’ve been a disservice to the fans. “Getting inside baseball here, I thought, if we’re coming up with a new season of the show, it can’t be a whole season of Michael Scofield getting the yellow key to unlock the pink lock to get out of the green prison. “For me, it really was not trying to make a political statement, or anything like that,” adds Scheuring. It turned out to be very timely, but originally, just tracking along with The Odyssey, what’s an old mystical place?” That alienness and foreignness was more the choice than anything else. “The goal more was to put Michael in an old place, a place of mystery, that feels far away - a place where it’s known that the prisons are particularly awful, tough and harsh. “I don’t think Paul was trying to be timely in terms of conflicts in the Arab world, terrorism or anything like that it just turned out to be timely,” Wilmott says of the decision to set much of the show’s action in Yemen. In the context of the show, Scofield’s new prison home of Ogygia resides in Yemen, on the brink of civil war. That absolutely informed our storytelling, and within that framework, we used the Prison Break model of clues and surprises and messages and coding.”Īnother explicit reference to the epic poem comes in the form of the prison at the heart of the new season: Ogygia, an island featured in The Odyssey, where Odysseus was trapped for seven years - the same amount of time since Prison Break was last on the air. “Characters have to come back together across huge spaces. “It’s international, it’s epic, across oceans, across continents,” adds executive producer Vaun Wilmott, weighing in on the further parallels between Prison Break season five and The Odyssey. This is very much a modern rendering of The Odyssey.” Sara lives in Ithaca now, Poseidon is trying to stop Michael. “Odysseus disappeared for seven years after the Trojan War and had to get back to Ithaca to Penelope and Telemachus. “I started thinking, ‘Wait, I know this story. To me, felt like the story of a man who died and has been rebirthed, and his whole thing is about getting back to his wife and the child he’s never seen.”ĭo those story details sound familiar? If so, it’s by design: just as Scofield’s body is covered in tattoos that inform his future plots and schemes, so too is the new season of Prison Break covered in ancient blueprints. One, we have to bring him back in a fashion that’s palatable enough for the audience where they’re saying that’s cool, and actually making it the mystery of the season: how could this guy come back? Part and parcel with knowing we need to bring Michael back, there had to be an emotional core to the story, and at the end of season four, Michael has died and his wife is newly pregnant. “There’s no show without him,” Scheuring tells THR. While the specifics behind Michael’s apparent resurrection remain under wraps for now (and remain a central mystery through the season’s early episodes), there was no doubt in creator Paul Scheuring’s mind that the show could not go on without Miller’s protagonist in place. 'Prison Break': 10 Questions About the Fox Thriller's Return

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