Prison Break - Season 4

Prison Break's fourth and final season continues the series' pattern of every odd year being a jailbreak with the following year being more of a conspiracy thriller. It would be funny to see if they kept with the same pattern if it continued, but it's probably for the best that it's over now, besides a remaining couple episodes that won't air (Attention FOX: stop doing this). It's not that the show is really bad yet, it's just clearly running on fumes by the end. It starts out fairly strong as Michael and his fellow crew get the opportunity for exoneration by perpetrating a series of high-risk robberies against the shadowy "Company". A well-done heist is always a lot of fun, so there's enjoyment to be had even if the plot twists and betrayals will cause a couple eye-rolls per episode.

But at some point they get close enough to the goal that things apparently have to get crazy, because what follows is a whole bunch of nonsense as the same people get captured and leveraged and rescued over and over and over again, and things get really monotonous before they're finally allowed to end. I wonder if FOX stuck the show's final six hours on the Friday night wasteland because they knew it wasn't really worth a decent time slot (How in the hell did Dollhouse survive that?). The show's end isn't as bile-enducing as say, Heroes, it just refuses to be at all clever in its death throes. That's not completely true, as Michael has a few more clever practical ruses to pull off as he cheats death and imprisonment before the end, I just stopped caring long before. And the whole subplot with his mother's reveal and turn as a villain was awful. None of it worked at all. Once all the character arcs are finished in the show's final musical montage though, I remembered how it was usually more enjoyable than not. It's a really ballsy ending too, letting the viewer know that yes, this is over, and it isn't coming back. It was never a great series in my mind, but never boring either.