Oh, sorry: Spoiler alert in the headline there.

The media has obsessively charted the meltdowns of Britney Spears and Amy Winehouse, but no one has talked much about the similarly spectacular and equally entertaining neural collapse that has occurred on “Prison Break” this season. While season one was taut and exciting even when wildly improbable and season two wandered around somewhat aimlessly, this season has been impressively stupefying and yet entertaining in that trainwreck kind of way.

Michael (Wentworth Miller), Bellick (Wade Williams), Mahone (William Fichtner) and T-Bag (Robert Knepper) have spent the season in a demented, through-the-glass Panamanian prison while Lincoln (Dominic Purcell) has been dealing with a psychotic CIA agent who goes by the moniker Susan B. Anthony (Jodi Lyn O’Keefe) and who wants Michael to break this guy Whistler (Chris Vance) out of the place. In stark contrast to season one, where the creative team had a pretty good idea of their prison’s setup, here, it’s anything goes. The architecture is amorphously ambiguous (those secret yet extraordinarily well-structured tunnels extend wherever it’s convenient or inconvenient for the plot), the guards are either menacing or non-existent, Michael has a cell phone that never needs to be recharged (perhaps he got it from Jack Bauer?), the chaos and danger isn’t really all that chaotic or dangerous and anything can happen at any given time if the idea pops up in a writer’s noggin.

Former bad-ass Bellick has been reduced to a whimpering, quivering mound of Jell-O. After a huge buildup in Sara (Sarah Wayne Callies) and Michael’s romance, her head wound up in a box, pretty much an afterthought. T-Bag’s accent has, if anything, gotten more loopy.

And so the first of season three’s final three episodes is uncorked tonight. As Michael’s ragtag band of escapees bicker and form alliances like they’re competing in “Survivor: Sona” (all, it seems, hot to betray Michael), the tunnel is compromised by torrential rain; the hole they’re supposed to climb out of (which seems to be in the middle of the prison grounds itself, which seems something of a tactical error, but anyway) will be revealed. They have days of further digging, they say, but then Michael decides to push up the escape to this very evening to avoid having the hole exposed. And then it quits raining but still they proceed.

Panama is a fun place; “Prison Break’s” geopolitics are as cynical as those in The Onion’s World Atlas. Lincoln can hijack a bus and not worry about the authorities pursuing him afterwards and random public shootouts start and stop and start again on a whim. Trucks come with secret compartments for hiding things at police checkpoints standard. Sucre (Amaury Nolasco) can get a job at the prison without a background check. Oops, wait – with a delayed background check; apparently, Sucre used his real name and whattaya know, someone did a little due diligence and discovered he’s wanted in the States. And still, he hilariously almost gets away with it, and then, at the last second, the schizophrenic roller coaster plotline decides, no, we want him to suffer a little longer.

And a lot is made about “the coordinates,” something technical and exotic sounding, that Whistler has and is supposed to deliver to Susan B. Anthony (O’Keefe is unintentionally hilarious in the role, but really, not even Meryl Streep could make it remotely credible). When the fate of “the coordinates” is exposed in a scene that boasts virtually no motivation, you’ll be wishing you had some of the peyote buttons the writers are gobbling like Pez.

And after kind of dismissively offing Sara, that’s brought back as the motivating force that’ll drive Season Four.

None of it makes a whit of sense if you’re bothering to think just a smidgen. But still, it’s pretty exciting, like two ranting, raving crazy homeless guys engaging a car chase.

- “Prison Break:” 8 tonight, Fox Channel 11.