Prison Break Season 4 ended with Michael’s death and now, all of a sudden he’s in the Middle East? Why? How? We’ll have to wait and see how Michael survived not only electrocution but a brain tumor, and how he got locked up in Yemen. But Executive Producer Paul Scheuring does have an answer for why the show is heading to the Middle East instead of another part of the world.
Scheuring tells Entertainment Weekly’s spoiler room it’s because the setting takes inspiration from the Odyssey.
“I wanted Michael to show up in the most unexpected and distant and foreboding place,” EP Paul Scheuring says. “The deepest, darkest part of the Middle Eastern struggle might be that. It raises the question: How the hell of all places did he end up there? Doing honor to the Odyssey , one of the big components of the season was Odysseus went through hell, he went across half the globe to get home. That’s what I wanted to do with Michael.”
Over the course of its four seasons, we’ve seen the cast locked up in mainly three prisons. Of course, Fox River State Penitentiary in Illinois was the focus of Season 1. Penitenciaría Federal de Sona in Panama was the setting for Seasons 2 and 3. Sara’s escape from Miami-Dade County Penitentiary wrapped up the series in 2009. Now, Michael is stuck in Yemen.
What will make this season different from the rest is that hardest part won’t be the prison escape itself. Getting out of the country with a rough political climate, combined with the trauma Michael has experienced from being thought dead for so long, make the stakes higher than ever.
“It’s not just a matter of getting out of prison or getting out of a country, but it was traversing half the globe to get back to his wife and the son he hasn’t seen before, to really play that Odyssey feel as opposed to just getting out of a prison in the United States and getting back to them,” Scheuring said.
The show taking place in the Middle East also gives the series a chance to approach new episodes with a political angle. “This new show is very politically motivated,” Dominic Purcell said on Australia’s Sunrise morning show this summer. He also said the series is committed to portraying Muslims in a positive light. C-Note has recently converted to Islam and the Prison Break writer's room on Twitter teased we’ll meet a Muslim heroine.
“It’s tying into what’s going on in the world today with terrorism. The show is taking place in Yemen; we’re dealing with ISIS and ISA,” Purcell added. “Obviously we left off with Michael presumably dead. He wasn’t, he ended up working for this organization. It got to the point where he couldn’t do it anymore, and they threw him in a jail in Yemen to change his mind. He didn’t change his mind, they set him up…”
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