Christopher Nolan might be giving the age-old tale of “The Odyssey” a go next, but it turns out we already had a modernized version of Homer’s epic story by way of a fully body tattoo and a wild prison escape. Back in 2017, when Michael Schofield (Wentworth Miller) had seemingly returned from the grave on “Prison Break,” Paul Scheuring, the creator of the series (which is now getting a reboot), started to connect the dots between the last chapter he wanted to tell and one of the oldest stories in history.
The fifth and final season of “Prison Break” was a revival that premiered nearly eight years after Season 4. It featured Michael’s older brother Lincoln Burrows (Dominic Purcell) and his old prison pal C-Note (Rockmond Dunbar), uniting to break Michael out once again. This new season “felt like the story of a man who died and has been rebirthed, and his whole thing is about getting back to his wife and the child he’s never seen,” Scheuring told The Hollywood Reporter. He soon found himself mapping out Michael’s story along the same path as that of King Odysseus.
“Odysseus disappeared for seven years after the Trojan War and had to get back to Ithaca to Penelope and Telemachus. It’s very much the same thing here,” Scheuring explained, referencing the story and some of its characters. “We don’t pull any punches about it. Sara lives in Ithaca now, Poseidon is trying to stop Michael. This is very much a modern rendering of ‘The Odyssey.'”
The final season of Prison Break used The Odyssey’s timespan to tell its own tale
Since its inception, the story of “Prison Break” felt as familiarly fantastical as some of the old myths. A noble hero using cunning tactics to break out of prison and going to extreme lengths in order to do so. The final season of the show was no different, with the creatives behind it upping the scale and scope for Michael’s last break out. “It’s international, it’s epic, across oceans, across continents,” executive producer Vaun Wilmott shared with The Hollywood Reporter. Wilmott also made the comparison between Michael’s story and that of King Odysseus, explaining, “Characters have to come back together across huge spaces. That absolutely informed our storytelling, and within that framework, we used the ‘Prison Break’ model of clues and surprises and messages and coding.”
Fully embracing these connections, the show also managed to include little winks and nods to the beloved story they were pulling from. Besides being hunted down by Poseidon, the island that the new prison was located on was called Ogygia, the same name as the island that King Odysseus was trapped on for seven years. That’s coincidentally the same amount of time Michael had been missing before making his attempt to return home. As far as stories to pull from, “Prison Break” couldn’t go wrong by taking from one of the oldest Greek stories ever known. It’s fitting really, given that Michael had been an inked-up Trojan Horse since his first day behind bars.