Whip’s importance to Michael Scofield became clear during Tuesday’s episode of Prison Break — and he’s got a familiar family member.
It turns out, in his early attempts to get out from under Poseidon’s (Mark Feuerstein) thumb, Michael (Wentworth Miller) asked to bring on a partner for one of his prison breaks. But Michael didn’t just align with Whip, a.k.a. David Martin (Augustus Prew) for extra help, but because he knew who the kid really was and could someday use his identity as leverage. As the rest of the group headed from the Middle East to New York, Michael sent Whip to Chicago where he would find answers — and boy did he! It turns out, Whip is actually T-Bag’s (Robert Knepper) son.
“I wanted all the characters to be in the narrative for a reason,” EP Paul Scheuring tells EW. “In my opinion, you can’t make the show without T-Bag, but at the same time, Michael and Lincoln really wouldn’t hire that guy or try to get in bed with him on an escape. But I felt like if Michael manipulated him and brought him in to do something that only T-Bag [could do] in exchange for something very human, which was revealing to him that he had a son, then T-Bag’s participation in the series becomes more organic. It’s hard to see T-Bag be bad, but it’s also new and wonderful to see him have the chance of having actually a family life that he’s been deprived of all through this series.”
As it was Michael who was the mysterious benefactor who got T-Bag a new hand, he’s asked that T-Bag take a life for him in return. Will T-Bag, therefore, play a pivotal role in taking down Jacob in the finale? “It’s always been an aim of mine not to make Michael murderous, not to have him be a guy running around with a gun or a knife just taking out bad guys that way,” Scheuring says. “Before the series started, he was a structural engineer and yet he has to be wise enough to know that to take such a shrewd operator like Jacob out of the picture, you’re really going to have to kill him, and that’s beyond Michael’s ethical framework.”
The other burning question: What has really happened to Michael and Lincoln (Dominic Purcell), both of whom appeared to meet a grim fate in the penultimate hour? “A lot of people are not going to make it out of the finale,” Scheuring cautions. “We always like to kill off characters on Prison Break, and I’m trying to think of how many characters died, but yeah a lot of people aren’t going to make it out.”
