Run, run, run but you sure can’t hide…

If you haven’t heard of Prison Break then where have you been hiding?

It is yet another successful action series to be brought over from America. Still clueless? Ok, it’s about a guy who purposely gets sent to prison to breakout his brother. Oh and he just happens to be a genius engineer with an encrypted tattoo of the prison’s blueprints spread across his chest and arms.

So the plot does sound a little crazy, but it dwindles in comparison to some of its predecessors…dare I mention Lost? Now enters the second season where eight of the inmates have successfully broken out and are now on the run.

With legions of fans to impress, there’s only one question that comes to mind. Is the show able to survive outside the bars of Fox River?

Being cooped up in prison during the first season could have been too much of a comfort for the writers. This time round sees inmates spread across America, literally running for their lives. However, it’s this feature alone that has proven more of an advantage to the show, leading many viewers to favour the second season over the first. With each inmate leading their own path of escape, it keeps viewers gripped.

Each episode gives only a teaser of what is happening to each of the characters, rather than focussing on Michael and Lincoln alone. Every inmate has their own agenda - Sucre wants to stop his love Maricruz from getting married, T-Bag wants to find the woman who gave him up to the police and C-Note wants to be reunited with his family and live happily ever after.

This makes the show a lot more fascinating and livelier as, for some of the prisoners, you want them to evade capture. With the ‘good guy’ labelling of some of the inmates, there are of course the baddies. Although Agent Kim is as scary as a hamster and both Mahone and Kellerman keep switching from good cop to bad cop, the ultimate villain comes in the form of Theodore Bagwell.

It has to be said that T-Bag steals the show. This season allows you to get a deeper insight into his crazed mind. His creepy, eerie almost Hannibal Lecter-like presence brings chills down your spine every time he speaks in his Southern drawl. You almost shout at the screen when he’s near an innocent who doesn’t know who he really is.

This leads onto another element of the show that was a little confusing. The fact that some people didn’t know who the Fox River 8 were. Obviously they don’t watch TV, listen to radio or notice the pin-up posters scattered around America. But of course there has to be some people who don’t know the true identity of the inmates or they’d end up back behind bars after the first episode!