Not as good as the first season -- but when is it ever?

Prison Break was TV drama at its best. Edgy, often shocking, peopled by complex characters, it combined a focused story -- Michael Scofield's escape from Fox River Pentitentiary with his brother -- with twisty, turny, edge-of-your-seat suspense. Season 1 was like nothing else on television.

Season 1 ended with Michael's escape plan having ballooned to nine convicts involved in the escape. Unfortunately, elderly prisoner Charles Westmoreland did not survive the attempt to escape and died in the prison infirmary. Before he died, he owned up to the truth: he had been the fabled hijacker D.B. Cooper, and he had hidden the money in Utah.

Things continue as the eight prisoners who made it out flee, with prison authorities hot on their tails. The Fox River Eight, as they are called, almost immediately start to diverge. Tweener, who had betrayed Scofield in Season 1, is allowed to escape with them but almost immediately banished. T-Bag, who had stabbed Abruzzi in Season 1, handcuffs himself to Michael, reasoning that this is a free ticket to freedom. He doesn't reckon on the fact that the mob boss is just as violent as he is. When they fail to cut the handcuffs with hedge clippers, Abruzzi gets his revenge by taking an axe and chopping off T-Bag's hand. He is then left for dead.

Abruzzi has arranged for a plane at an airfield ten miles away, and a van to get them from near the prison to the plane. Can they make it to the plane which will leisurely fly them to freedom?

Course not; this is Prison Break. The plane is forced to take off while the cons are literally at the other end of the runway. The other cons ask Michael, "What do we do now?"

Summing up what the second season will become in two words, Michael replies: "We run!"

And so the second season starts up after this.

The second season revolves around a few issues. All of the cons want the $5 million that Westmoreland has hidden. Michael and Lincoln want to take down the Company, the evil conspiracy that framed Lincoln in the first place. Brad Bellick, the corrupt, violent captain of the prison guards from Season 1, is fired and wants revenge. The Company wants to get its hands on Michael and Lincoln.

Oh, and Michael has fallen in love with Dr. Sarah Tancredi, the prison doctor from Season 1, and wants her to join him in a new life in another country.

Some characters have their own quests. The love-to-hate-him character of T-Bag tries, and fails, to reunite himself with his adopted family in an arc that shows the character, despicable as he is, as still human. C-Note has to try and smuggle his wife and ill child out of the country. Sucre has to stop his evil cousin from marrying his girl.

The writers of Prison Break seemed to know that Season 2 would need changes in order to stay fresh. They accomplished this partially by pruning the character roster ruthlessly. Season 2 was a bloodbath for characters who weren't essential to the plot. Both characters that we liked and characters we might not have liked were dispatched from the storyline. Most were killed. One character, C-Note, was allowed a more pleasant exit into the Witness Protection Program.

The second season brought about a new character, one who easily met Prison Break's high standards for characters: Special Agent Alexander Mahone. Mahone is not part of the grand conspiracy. He's a brilliant but unstable FBI agent who will do whatever it takes to apprehend the escaped convicts -- including kill some of them, which he does without too much guilt.

The addition of Mahone was definitely a winning point for Season Two. William Fichnter is up to the task of playing the eccentric FBI agent, and thankfully the writers were willing to give Michael a nemesis whose intelligence is equal to his own. In fact, when the two confront each other, Mahone observes that the only difference between them is that Mahone is willing to kill where Michael is not.

While I resented seeing many familiar faces get zipped into body bags in Season Two, it was necessary to keep the storyline interesting. Too many subplots would have spoiled things.

I could have lived without the whole super-uber-conspiracy angle. Of course they had to explain the whole thing, after giving us a few tastes of what was going on in Season 1, but it came off as a little hard to believe. A group of multinational corporations that serve as an unreachable, unaccountable shadow government, even controlling the President of the United States, all getting together to frame one poor schmuck. Hmm.

Likewise, I could have lived without the true-love theme of Michael and Sarah Tancredi. Although it did give Michael something to hope for and added some drama to the Company's pursuit of the doctor (what, you think they'd let her off?) I would have preferred to see Veronica, Michael's friend and attorney to Lincoln, had been allowed to live and served as the love interest. But it was not to be. And there are a fair chunk of Prison Break's fandom who would hate me for saying that.

Season 1 of Prison Break was ultimately focused on one goal: Michael escaping with his brother. Season 2 did not have quite that same tight focus, and things tended to wander and rattle a bit. Overall, though, it's a thrilling, twisting, turning, and fun ride.