So the fourth season of Prison Break contains another twenty-two episodes of the infamous Burrows brothers and their friends and foes on the run from the law and the mysterious Company. This time however, most of the involved — including both Burrows brothers, Sarah, Sucre, Mahone, and Bellick– teaming up with outcast FBI / Homeland Security agent Don Self (Michael Rapaport). Agent Self has been working to crack The Company for years, utilizing traitors to the organization and other sources to try to find out who The Company really is, and to ultimately take them down.
His quest to achieve this has led him to bring in Burrows and the others and give them an offer: help him steal information from The Company, a device code named Scylla, or face all the prison time they had coming to them. At first the brothers are reluctant to work for the government and also with old acquaintances, but they take the offer and are provided a safe house from which to work from. One of the interesting points in this fourth season is that Michael must now help his brother Lincoln and their cohorts to break into various Company owned locations or at least get close enough to Company personal to try to read their portable data device that is part of Scylla.
Scylla is, I should mention, the codename for The Company’s black book, a critical log of all of The Company’s personal who are apart of so many organizations and governments. With the help of a government provided tech who has created a device that can capture data wirelessly from any device, the team must locate, track, and plan a variety of ‘missions’ so that they might retrieve this data and ultimately help Self take down The Company.
Of course, the season is not without its many great subplots, something that the series has always done well. Rather than provide an exhaustive episode list and synopsis, already widely available on the Net (although don’t use TV.com, as they list the show’s final episode synopsis on the front and center of the show’s profile page), I would advise you to check out summaries on other TV specific sites.
That said, when it’s all said and done, two things are for sure: this fourth season of Prison Break is as strong as the second season (with the first season still being my favorite) and thus much stronger than the third. Secondly, the series Prison Break will go down as a favorite amongst many TV show fans, myself included.
The Fourth Season DVD
Spanned across six discs, just like previous Prison Break seasons (except season three), this fourth season includes all twenty-two episodes and a few extra features, giving you nearly 1,000 minutes of content. The compact DVD case provides disc summaries for all six discs in a handy printout on the inside cover. Before detailing those, I just wanted to mention that the presentation quality is on par with what you would expect from a modern TV show on DVD — the video looks fine and is presented in 1:78:1 ratio. The audio is in Dolby 5.1 and sounds very good. Worth noting for some readers, there is no Spanish or French subtitle track included. As for the extras, here is the breakdown:
-Disc 1 – Audio Commentary on episode “Scylla” and “Breaking And Entering” by Zack Estrin, Kevin Hooks, Matt Olmstead, Nick Santora, and Karyn Usher.
-Disc 2 – Audio Commentary on episode “Blow Out” by Seth Hoffman, Graham Roland, Christian Trokey, and Kalinda Vazquez.
-Disc 3 – Audio Commentary on episode “Greatness Achieved” by Seth Hoffman, Nick Santora, Christian Trokey, and Agatha Warren. Also commentary on episode “Quiet Riot” by Seth Hoffman, Nick Santora, Karyn Usher, Kalinda Vazquez, and Nick Wootton.
-Disc 4 – Audio Commentary on episode “Just Business” by William Fichtner, Mark Helfrich, Matt Olmstead, adn Graham Roland. Also, commentary on episode “Going Under” by Zack Estrin, Matt Olmstead, Dawn Olmstead, and Karyn Usher. Also, commentary on episode “The Sunshine State” by Seth Hoffman, Kevin Hooks, Matt Olmstead, and Nick Wootton.
-Disc 5 – Audio Commentary on episode “SOB” by Garry A. Brown, Dominic Purcell, Karyn Usher, and Kalinda Vasquez. Also, commentary on episode “Cowboys And Indians” by Zack Estrin, Nick Santora, Agatha Warren, and Nick Wootton.
-Disc 6 – Fade Out: The Final Episode Featurette…The Plan, The Execution, And the Bullet Featurette…Director’s World Featurette.
To the summary…