“Prison Break’s” ultimate break with reality

It’s one of the dumbest – and cheapest – plot twists in all of entertainment, particularly ongoing TV series: Killing off an important character, then realizing you’ve run out of stories so you better bring him/her back.

And that’s precisely what “Prison Break” intends to do next season: Somehow, it wasn’t the head of Sara Tancredo (Sarah Wayne Callies) in that box, after all.

Here’s how executive producer Matt Olmstead tried to explain it to TVGuide.com:

“(O)nce we realized that the emotional hook of Season 3 was going to be the death of Sara, when we didn't get the actress to do it, as soon as we wrote it and shot it, we realized that there was actually a way she could still be alive. Lincoln glanced at the head in the box for a split second. That could've been anyone.”

Not buying it … (if it was someone else, why would the bad guys have sent it to Linc?)

“I don't think it was unfair, because it gave us some real juice storytelling-wise — it put teeth in the antagonists. Obviously they were now capable of killing somebody. It also gave us a couple of episodes where Lincoln withheld the information from Michael, and that gave us conflict with the brothers. But also, what were we really going to do? Were we going to see Sarah Wayne Callies tied to a chair for 13 episodes? And then if she broke free, what is she really doing?”

He’s kind of making my arguments for me. Why would the bad guys want Michael and Lincoln so p!ssed at them? And his “what were we really going to do” sounds a little like “We painted ourselves into a corner where we didn’t have much of a story.”

“(W)hen people who are fans of the show — and of Sarah — are asking, ‘Is she really dead?’, what they're saying, essentially, is, ‘I hope she's not dead.’ And then it became a kind of groundswell.”

How nice of them to be thinking about the fragile psyches of their fans at this point. Of course, they didn’t seem to care about that so much when they stuck her head in a box.

Olmstead also revealed how Michael will discover Sara’s still alive. He’ll get up one morning, head to the shower … and there she’ll be, with Patrick Duffy.