- Strike the Cold War back up....ok, maybe not, but it’s a fun thought for those of us who missed the first incarnation and want to see what it was like. Russia is accusing the United States of taking down a damaged spy satellite as a chance to test out our missile defense system. Russia’s defense ministry says the Perntagon didn’t provide satisfactory reasoning for its plan and thus the Russkies are concerned that we’re trying to sneak through a test of our defense systems here. Given the fact that Russia has been slip-sliding its way back to Communism with Bad Vlad Putin as its leader, the Cold War imagery might not be totally unrealistic. The official explanation from the W. administration is that the decision to smash the satellite is designed to protect people around the world from 1,000 gallons of toxic fuel aboard the bus-sized satellite as it hurtles toward Earth. Y’know, I may have to reconider my stance here. I know I’ve been bashing to Russians, but think for a minute about whether you believe a single thing W. and his aadministration tell you at this point. They lie first, lie second and then lie some more. The weapons of mass destruction still haven’t been found, so their status as the most dishonest administration in U.S. history remains intact. Cold War II, here we come.....
- Andy Pettite, you are a walking contradiction. In one sentence, you managed to totally contradict yourself on the steroid issue and chip away even more at what little credibility you had left. “I didn’t use HGH to get an advantage over anyone....I did it because I was told it might help me,” Pettite said today. Let me clear this up for you, Andy, since your reasoning skills appear to be very bad. If you were in one state, which based on past comments of yours would appear to be injured and looking to heal, then using HGH to “help yourself” was......(drum roll please).....giving you an advantage over others not using HGH. If you would have been in one state, weaker and slower to heal, without HGH and you used HGH and were in another state, stronger and fully healed, then you did gain a competitive advantage by using the drug. Pettite is basically trying to work his way out from under all of the scrutiny he’s receiving now that baseball season is underway by semantically dancing around the issue. He’s trying to position himself as a guy who ‘roided up to help him heal from an injury and get back to help his team win. His twisted logic seems to indicate that he doesn’t consider himself in the same category with guys who used steroids to bulk up and get bigger, faster and stronger. Nice try, Andy. You may not have been looking to add 5 mph to your fastball artificially, but you still cheated. Healing faster than is natural with the help of HGH is cheating just as much as getting a ripped physique with ‘roids. You’re a cheater and you always will be, no matter how you try to spin this.
- Nice to know that the sheer stupidity of paying way too much money for a vanity license plate for your car isn’t strictly an American thing. Saeed Khouri , a member of an extremely wealthy family in Abu Dhabi, a city in the United Arab Emirates, has forked over a record $14 million for the rights to a single-digit license plate that is one of a kind in a place like the UAE, which just began selling vanity plates last May. The bright spot in this one, aside from the fact that Khouri didn’t go the route of ass hats here in America who get plates with lettering like RCKSTAR or SCCRMOM, is that the money for the plate went to charity. Now Khouri has the challenge of deciding which of his dozens of cars to put the plate on. Maybe he’s onto something, though. Perhaps we should jack the price of vanity plates here in America up to $14 million and send all of the money to charity as well.....
- The rumors had better not be true. With tvguide.com reporting that FOX is undecided about Prison Break’s fate for next season and also that the show is in serious danger of not coming back, the premature season finale came tonight (thanks for nothing, writers’ strike!). No time was wasted getting up to speed, with a high speed chase between Linc and Michael and their bargaining chip with the company, Whistler. Driving a junker of a truck and a beater of an old car respectively, the two sides raced through the streets of Panama City, and after abandoning their cars in the middle of traffic, all three met went it on foot. Whistler thought he had evaded the brothers but when he borrowed a cell phone from a passerby, Linc interrupted his call to Gretchen with a fist to the face. From there, the exchange of Whistler for Sofia and Linc’s son LJ turns into a chess match. First, Michael directs Gretchen and her men from the warehouse where last week’s episode ended (and where the exchange was supposed to take place) to an open-air market in downtown Panama City, at which point both sides see that the people they are set to make trades for are still alive. Michael then reveals the next twist, that the exchange isn’t going to happen just yet. He, Linc and Whistler leave and a few minutes later, Michael places a call to Gretchen to meet him at an history museum nearby. When Gretchen and her men show up, she realizes why Michael picked this location: metal detectors at the door that require her to leave all weapons and her armed men outside. She goes in unarmed and Michael directs her to the southwest corner of the museum’s first floor where he, Linc and Whistler are waiting. The exchange finally takes place, with LJ being handed over first. Whistler then goes over to Gretchen and a debate breaks out between Sofia and Whistler. Sofia wants him to hand over the coordinates he’s told her the Company wants from him, but when she presses the issue, he and Gretchen reveal that there are no coordinates, that they were just a ruse designed to disguise Whistler and Gretchen’s partnership Sofia is obviously angry and leaves Whistler’s side to join Linc, Michael and LJ. Gretchen observes that they haven’t left yet, to which Michael counters that he believes she has guards outside every door waiting to kill he, his brother, nephew and Sofia the second they step outside. To counter, Michael smashes a glass case containing an exhibit, triggering an alarm and the evacuation of the museum. That ensures that everyone walks out together, safe and provides a window to escape. In the fracas, Michael slips an item from the gift shop that looks like an artifact in Whistler’s back pocket, which puts him on security’s radar. Gretchen’s response is to call in her men, but a security guard stops the one about to fire a shot and mayhem ensues. In the fracas, Sofia is shot, Michael gets away and so do Whistler, Gretchen and her men. Whistler wants to stay for Sofia but isn’t allowed to. Same goes for Linc, who’s ordered by LJ to leave lest the cops ID him as a wanted man. In the midst of the escape, Michael has a fleeting shot to kill Sofia but the moment passes before he can pull the trigger. Once everyone gets away, the chips begin to fall. Whistler shows up at a bar in the area and meets up with Alex Mahone, who bolted from the warehouse at last episode’s end at the time of Whistler’s escape. In a twist, Mahone accepts an offer to join Whistler and Gretchen’s plan, which we don’t know the nature out and had better find out next season (and there had BETTER be a next season, Fox). Mahone warns that Michael Scofield will hunt down Gretchen for revenge for the murder of Michael’s girlfriend Sarah Tancredi. Michael and Linc are waiting outside of the hospital where Sofia was taken after being shot, with LJ relying information on her condition to them. Once they know Sofia is going to be ok, LJ tells them that she passed along information about something hidden at her apartment that contains information about Whistler. Michael wants this item, but Linc isn’t so sure. They retrieve it and it’s a file with a name on it that neither of them recognize. Linc wants to forget about it and use the chance for he, Michael and LJ to stop running and live a normal life. Michael decides he needs to keep chasing Gretchen and takes off on his own.
During the course of the episode, we also find out something interesting about another SONA escapee:
McGrady has a name, it’s Luis and he had a near-miss with the Panamanian police at a road block near the Colombian border. But his dad, who had somehow secured a truck with a secret compartment behind the seat and reaching into the bed of the truck, where a layer of fertilizer covered everything up, hid his son and made it through a search of the vehicle by police to take his son into Colombia where a joyous family reunion awaited him. His story is apparently over at this point, so adios, Luis. Sucre wasn’t so fortunate. After prolonged torture sessions filled with beatings, being buried alive and more, he ended up being thrown into SONA as a prisoner. There, he found a disturbing scene, with T-Bag having seized power by killing a wounded Lechero, co-opting the hooker-posing-as-a-nun girlfriend Lechero had brought to the prison regularly for conjugal visits and getting her to sneak in a wad of cash that T-Bag gave away to curry favor with the rest of the prisoners. His speech on a soapbox (well, a cardboard box) ended with him leading the inmates in a chant of “All inmates are equal!” in Spanish. A rattled Brad Bellick sat by and watched it happen, just as he did when T-Bag pretended to be helping the wounded Lechero regain power in SONA only to reveal that he was about to kill the man he had once called “Patron.” If (and it had better happen) PB returns for a fourth season, this is clearly going to be a big part of the storyline as well, T-Bag, Bellick and Sucre trying to survive in and escape from SONA. As the episode and season close, a creepy, haunting a capella ballad plays and each of the characters in the show is shown in their current state, but there is no dialogue. The final image is a shot from high above as Michael speeds down a rural Panamanian highway, window down, gun on the passenger seat beside him, along with a memento, an origami flower Sarah had on her from the time Michael gave it to her back at Fox River Prison in Season One and which LJ picked up while he and Sarah were being held captive together. Here’s hoping that Michael gets the chance to continue his crusade next fall....
- Your box office champ for the weekend? Stunningly, it’s a movie starring the wooden, laconic Hayden Christiansen. To be fair, no one went to see the movie because of Christiansen’s stellar acting skills; anyone who’s seen this dude’s robotic, act-by-the-numbers performances in his previous films knows better. But Jumper, the sci-fi thriller about people able to jump to any place in the world at any time and any instant, raked in $27.2 million to outdistance it’s über-tough competition, Step Up 2, which made $19.1 million, or $19.2 million more than it should have made. Last week’s champ, Fool’s Gold, starring the man who can never find a shirt to wear, Matthew McCaughnahey, fell all the way to fourth with $13.9 million. In other words, it was a great weekend to be many places, but a movie theater was not one of them.
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