"Prison Break" wrests free from the shackles of logic

Monday's season-4 premiere of "Prison Break" begins with some voice-over narration: "My name is Michael Scofield and I'm a fugitive."

Hi, Michael!

Michael's (Wentworth Miller) in L.A., rabid for revenge for Sara's (Sarah Wayne Callies) murder last season: "It ends today. I will seek the justice that I now know the system cannot provide."

Well, good luck with that, because before long, the show goes out of its mind - again. I can't keep track of it (and I could follow "The Wire"), and I'm not sure its writers can, either.

(The "Prison Break" cast gather 'round a laptop and try to make sense of a script for the next episode.)

The whole thing revolves around a data card code-named Scylla that belongs to The Company, which isn't, in fact, the CIA. For a while, it seems like The Company's trying to buy the data card back from itself, but that certainly couldn't be the case, and anyway, bodies are dropping like flies at the Roosevelt Hotel during a daytime cocktail party and Michael shows up anxious to add to the body count and then he's told that Sara's alive.

Not that Michael has any reason to believe anything anyone in The Company has told him before, but he drops his guard long enough and then the cops are coming and everyone has to skedaddle and there seems to be some sort of Scylla switcheroo but that doesn't seem to be borne out since the guy who did the switcheroo still has it.

(She's baa-a-aack!)

Some sinister guy says, "This is a security breach that could have catastrophic ramifications for the Company." But wasn't it already a security breach that could have catastrophic ramifications for the Company?

The good thing is, "Prison Break" hurtles along so fast that you're not given much time to scratch your head over every narrative lapse because another one's coming in just a minute or two. Like, Linc (Dominic Purcell) just blithely lets it drop that Sona, the Panamanian prison that Michael broke out of last season, burned down and all the inmates escaped - remember, these psychotic, worst of the worst villains - and Linc is imparting this information from Panama City, where he's enjoying a nice al fresco meal with his son and his girlfriend, and everyone's pretty blasé given that they should be locked in their homes, crouching in fear.

But that does mean that the whole gang will soon be able to get together again and fight The Company at the behest of a Homeland Security Agent (Michael Rapaport) who suffers from curious mood swings - one moment, he's cajoling Michael into performing all sorts of seemingly impossible acts of derring-do (which turn out not to be so impossible if you just sort of edit around the tough scrapes - ulp, he's about to be caught; cut to the next shot and whew, he's escaped); the next, he's crabbing because it's taking more than a couple of hours to do the impossible against a sinister organization he calls "this country's greatest threat to its own democracy." (Like we said, a pretty kinetic show.)

(When we did a search for "Prison Break Violence" at Google Images, this photo was on the second page. Honest!)

So they cook up a gadget called "a digital black hole," capable of stealing digital information from anything it's in close proximity to (mull that, people who work on laptops in coffee shops), and The Company dispatches this imposing guy to kill off anyone who's ever had something to do with this show (which seems just a little extreme). Imposing guy busts into Alex's (William Fichtner) wife's home and kills off a couple of peripheral characters, yet when it comes to his chance to smoke Michael, Linc and Sara as one, he lazily takes a shot through a window from his car and doesn't bother with any follow-up.

(If he concentrates hard enough, Wentworth Miller can almost forget that watching his show is like slamming down a case of power drinks and then spinning in circles for a few minutes.)

Oh, and T-Bag (Robert Knepper), out to kill Michael, manages one more transgressive act. Yum!

As crazily improbable as all this is, perhaps the most astonishing thing that happens in Monday's episode is that Michael is finally shed of that tattoo that forced him to wear all those long-sleeve shirts and jackets in humid, 90-degree heat - in one sitting, with no ill effects. Which is pretty impressive, since I know someone who is trying to have a really tiny tattoo removed and it's taken weeks of treatments and several nasty blisters.

Man, this show winds me up.

- "Prison Break:" 8 and 9 p.m. Monday, Fox (Channel 11).