On Theodore’s ex, Susan, and whether he intended to prey on her children
I have to say this scene where Susan visits Theodore in prison after she discovers the truth about him is one of the rare ones where I sided with Theodore, despite passionately disliking him the rest of the time, almost as much as I despise Bellick.
Susan Hollander is Theodore Bagwell’s ex. We learn about her early on in season 1 as part of establishing his backstory. That’s where we learn about his first shot and attempt at normalcy and at having a regular relationship, which dramatically backfired on him when he got caught and jailed for his previous crimes which I won’t be citing here, leading up to the confrontation during prison visitation, which would become the source of many a flashback of Theodore’s, where Susan spits at him through the glass window.
One of her concerns was to her children: she says “[I can’t believe I let you into my home], near my children!” (paraphrasing).
The thing is this section always annoyed me because it’s obviously short-sighted of her, and a lack of understanding on how predators work on her part, and more generally, a misunderstanding of Theodore and how he works as well. It is obvious he wasn’t after the children because if he was he would not have put in nearly as much efforts as he did to be in a relationship with her.
The Psychology of Predators
Seducing Susan takes efforts, and Theodore, and anyone like him, because that is how predatory tendencies function and it is in their nature to function this way, enjoys short fused rewards. Low efforts rewards. Immediate rewards. Anything obtained more or less instantly that can boost the reward system in the brain. It has to be a low enough reward that it can be accomplished without putting in too much efforts, which, given the scale of the efforts put in, drastically reduces the amount of things you can obtain in proportion to said amount of efforts. Visually, think of it as man walking bent over on purpose, like someone stalking a pray; because they’re not walking standing straight with their head held high, they’re going to attract different interactions, garner different responses and provoke and different impressions from other people, which will set them up on an entirely different path had they walked straight. This is Theodore’s life, where metaphorically, he walks life crookedly, and attracts “opportunities” that fits this physically bent over standing. At this level, only a few things are attainable, because certain higher things, that are connected to and are in proportion to being able to walk straight, do not “exist” or rather are unavailable for someone not walking the proper way required to obtain these things.
As such, this is where Theodore exists. In the land of low efforts because he is too mentally crooked to aim for anything else. Aiming for anything else would require a different approach; with this metaphor, walking while standing straight. Predators are ready to put in a minimal amount of efforts on a low degree or level, that does not rise above that certain level, to obtain short term gains. It’s about the quick access to the reward sensation that matters, and on this frequency, nothing high efforts enters because that’s not what it’s about. He’ll make as much efforts as possible, as long as it remains within that line/frequency of quick and short-term rewards, but if the efforts get too high, or the end goal changes, so does the strategy, because it’s obviously no longer about the same thing.
If he was actually about the children, Susan’s children, and preparing some sort of predatory plan towards them and was approaching them from a predatory place and with nefarious intents, (by the way, the actress who plays Susan’s daughter is Danielle Campbell, who plays Davina Claire on The Originals) he would have gone about it an entire different way; he wouldn’t have gone through the hassle of seducing Susan, because seducing someone and generally putting in the efforts to ensure the health and continuity of a relationship is a high effort enterprise. Aka, it differs from the kind of efforts one makes to be predatory and move towards ill-intentioned goals.
To make a relationship work takes real effort, real work, and it goes beyond attraction and whatnot. It is a high effort venture because it is the kind of long-term benefit where true, genuine, deep-seated personal involvement stacks up on the long-term, and bring long-lasting results that can and will usually last a lifetime. It’s the type of venture that you do for a long term goal, with a long horizon in sight, because you understand that the results are profoundly beneficial in all areas, and that it’s a matter of putting in the work to set up the foundations to get to the result. And precisely because these are high horizon life ventures, these things are always fundamentally positive in nature precisely because the type of effort they require to maintain are high and deep seated efforts. In other words, you cannot maintain that degree of effort without having the accompanying grandeur of character that comes with it because then you don’t have it in you to walk that frequency. That’s why some are successful in their relationship and some aren’t. That’s one of the reasons that play into successful relationships, at least.
So while I’m not trying to play devil’s advocate, because I detested the guy and would be the first one to call the authorities on him, it was actually obvious that his relationship with Susan was real, as real as a person of his calibre (a low one) can make it to be. This was his real attempt at having a real relationship with someone, otherwise he’d have never bothered to go about that route.
The argument that he did it (approach Susan) to prey on her kids is moot because if that was the case he would have gone straight for that thing (the kids, how they represent the quick reward itself) and taken the low effort route that’s associated with the short fuse reward that comes from that kind of prey stalking.
That he went at this situation through the route of being with Susan meant that he was about something else entirely, in this one instance.
Hence why I completely believed him when she mistakenly assumed that letting him “near [her] children” was a mistake, because her first instinct was to believe that’s where his intentions lay based on what she had heard from the police. That she says this shows she has exactly zero understanding of how such a person works, and, it is ironic to say because of the gravity of the situation, but this, was one serious misunderstanding. And that is why that was one of those rare moments where I actually sympathised and somewhat sided with Theodore on this one. He deserves to be crucified any other minute of the day, but when she approaches him, and shoves herself forward, while somehow managing to throw at him all the “wrong” accusations, and I say wrong because they were inaccurate, it felt so much easier to side with him, because of all the things to crucify and blame him for, this was not it—it appears to you how much ignorance she has and how average and inadequate she is as a person. That Theodore picked her at all shows to me how desperate he was, and how that despair for something to redeem him led him to be un-discerning in his choices (although who would realistically want to be with a pedophile anyway, so where would he find someone who wants him?).
This is also not about the actor who is arguably charismatic in some way, nor about the writers who insist on endearing this character to us either (which, does not work, I still do not like the guy) through that charisma—personally, I resented that: I’m still mad he escaped, even if it’s fictional and it’s been years, thinking back on it on that second, almost 15 years later rewatch, I skipped those sections in the earlier seasons where he manages to piggyback on the escape plan because I am still so pissed at them. Dude deserved to rot in jail to be frank.— This is all just strictly about that sliver of good feelings that everyone has underneath everything that happens to you.
Normalcy & Relationships
My first reaction to that prison visitation scene was to be annoyed at her smattering of her own reactions. She walks in and smacks her own reactions on the table in a typical normie way, where the average person comforted by the average-geared approving gaze of society tells these kinds of people that they have the license to think of themselves as the default even if they are not, just because there happens to be many of them. So she walks in there with no consideration for the other persons feelings, and shoves herself in a way that is incredibly erasing. In her world, the only person that exists is herself, because Theodore, obviously being a horrible person, it means he suddenly has no feelings, his own side of the story; he is instantly dehumanised and stripped of everything that makes a person human. I understand completely the argument saying that his actions make him non-human. But that is inaccurate: his actions make him monstrous, and corrupted. But he is still human. Which is what subsequent seasons of Prison Break try so hard to accurately portray. And I want to bring up, once again, that I am not looking to play devil’s advocate because I sincerely dislike T-Bag and was delighted when in season 4, they elected to have him jailed again. But I am stating the obvious, that he remains a person, and this is called human, but most importantly, mental complexity. That the negative in him however intolerable (and we agree it isn’t tolerable) doesn’t erase human or mental complexity in a person/being. You can condemn him while recognising that.
And it was impressively ironic, this mis-blame from Susan’s, condemning him for the wrong things, considering there were ten other ways this could have been spun to tip the scale in her favour and make her condemnation valid and warranted, as Theodore is such a despicable human being in general, it sincerely is not difficult to show him, not in a poor light, but just in his regular light which is shitty and despicable by design and by default.
Because what she ultimately does condemn him for, in the end, is wanting for something normal, that exists away and above his usual gross ways. She is condemning him for something good. Which is honestly the height of insanity. Hence why I called that a ridiculous misunderstanding.
In other words instead of just Theodore being himself and her behaving like an actual victim that she was, or rather, that anyone else in her position would have been, which would have resulted in him looking culpable and guilty, and her looking like she needs defending from his ill-intent, instead she looks entitled, and he actually looks betrayed, as the character is made to say. She, miraculously, ironically, looks like she is the wrong, and the offending party, while Theodore look like the offended party. Which can’t be more supremely ironic, because take him in any other setting, and he goes right back to being the culpable party. She looks short-sighted, entitled, close-minded, generally blind, and like she has missed the point and the overall big/bigger picture. It’s a flaw in reasoning that misled her to draw the conclusions.
What she could have done is draw the conclusion that he must either seek therapy, or repent, or both, for his past crimes, while acknowledging that this, ironically, not what he was trying to achieve in this instance. In the end, she’d still have handed him to the police, it’s just that the motives would have been different.
By the way, this is not a writing critic; Susan’s given reaction is completely realistic and pretty much what’s likelier to happen in the real world. This is a general, morally theoretical explanation of the whole problem.
The writers make the character say that he feels betrayed, and that was genuinely my first instinct to think so as well when she asserts and shoves her feelings on the table first. That it was obvious his intentions, in this one singular instance, happened to not be nefarious, simply because he wouldn’t have taken the high road if it were the case. His sincerity was in other words obvious in his interest in her. He was, in his puny, and low way, trying. To be a normal, average person, who can get a normal, regular relationship. It was an attempt at a shot at a somewhat healthy relationship, made by a sincerely awkward (“”) because unused to it deranged individual, who was trying to give normalcy a go.
Whether he had some family fantasy he wanted to experience, or just wanted to experience a normal relationship, or both, as it becomes a little clearer in season 2 what his intentions were, it is obvious it was the one time Theodore was actually sympathetic, because he opened his heart and put it on the line; meaning to say, he revealed good intentions that do exist in his heart, and because positivity is always by design vulnerable, they are also “undefended.” That’s in the sense that you can do no wrong from that place, which, is also why, later on in season 2, he ultimately lets them go, Susan and her children.
This is showed even more by the fact that the women he pursues aren’t particularly always considered drop dead gorgeous by the majority of people. They are regular, normal women, and his goal isn’t necessarily to “bag” the seemingly most attractive one, but just to settle down with whomever will want him and have a nice relationship. In other words his standards are quite flexible and he’s not choosy or picky because his actual goal goes beyond the regular “just getting laid” (which, yes, isn’t applicable to him given that he is in fact also a pedophile). The one time he manages to be with a more attractive woman by all standards is almost an accident—someone he didn’t initially and actively pursue with the same goal he’s had when pursuing other women, and is the one exception to the rule compared to the rest of his adult-sized and (more or less because they don’t know the full truth about him) consenting female partners.
All of which, intentions, and feelings, for people who are naturally living in disturbing frequencies, such as predators, rarely get to walk a path of experiencing normal feelings, because they’re too… they are too much the kind of person who are incapable of experiencing those feelings in the first place. Therefore they are less likely to seek out the kind of circumstances that can get them to experience those feelings, or continue to experience those feelings.
For instance, you, as a normal person, might just seek out a normal partnership, where, say, you want someone who can support and whom you will want to support, in, let’s say, the area of your career. Maybe you want to work together with someone and have some kind of career or passion project together with them, and the relationships tryouts you’re in on your way to that goal are your attempts at finding who is the right person, who will fit the best in your life.
It would be rare for you to experience perfection, but you’re always chasing that goal so it’s actually not so odd. That’s where you float and exist. That’s where most of us exist, we try to chase our goals and refine our knowledge of what we need as we experience more of life.
For someone like him, the single experience with Susan is all that much more unique because he is not the kind of person capable of experiencing it 27 times per lifetimes. He’ll experience it once, twice. Like he said, he can’t survive the outside world as someone with his “proclivities.” (season 1 quote). Because his penchant is to go for something entirely else, he is cut off from normalcy, and the rest of him not self-motivated by let’s call it degeneracy (that’s not exactly what it is but if I open up that discussion I might as well create another article for it) suffers because of it. But because the bulk of him is all about those short term rewards he has very few internal motives and incentives to go towards anything else. So when he finds something that corresponds to that normalcy, the parts of him that are normal and thus generally neglected the rest of the time basically rejoice at having something positive happen to them, because the rest of the time the state he’s in is just all about experiencing… trash. Inflicting trash, wallowing in trash. Just trash. Just lowness, low mental currents, poorly evolved toxicity. I think that’s a good enough and varied enough amount of descriptionary to explain what this is. Besides I’m sure that, if you are reading this, I think you can understand what I’m trying to refer to.
The rest of him that is normal, or interested in normal pursuits, isn’t large or significant, nor interested enough to take over.
In this sense, Theodore is one of those rare people who sincerely belongs in a psychiatrist ward to be studied, because he is not just traumatised, as the writers try to justify him later on, (as much as I’m a strong advocate for understanding that trauma and its fallouts are negative things and that’s normal, I don’t want to misinstruct the nature of things when I speak and explain them; this is this and that is that). He is just, genuinely this kind of person who is dangerous, harmful, nefarious, and predatory.
As part of exposing my views on the system behind penitentiaries, I explain that the concept of prison is primarily punitive in nature, whereas it should be 100% about rehabilitation and psychological understanding (a logical, objective and global and neutral form of understanding and knowledge of a situation and of one’s reasoning). Theodore Bagwell is someone who would strongly benefit from a rehabilitating system that is completely about precise and accurate understanding of such a character’s circumstances and their connections to his actions. That doesn’t mean he should be out and about, but rather than going about jail perpetrating shitty behaviours, getting a low level of respect from inmates who would rather not mess with someone who is a degenerate like him, and terrorising easily influenced newbies, the only ones who would respond to his type of threats (virtually, all things that are sinking not rehabilitating), isn’t efficient either because all it does is enable his nefarious tendencies and perpetrates the attitudes that got him in jail in the first place.
Who does this help? Absolutely nobody. All it does is create more David “Tweener” individuals, without figuring out people like Theodore and “disabling” them, so to speak.
I say this to compare with other inmates, and that he unlike them as well, because of them are in it because poor life circumstances lead to restricted pools of choices to better those circumstances in the first place, which lead to committing acts they shouldn’t or don’t need to commit (in those circumstances, that usually is selling or doing addictive substances), and which snowballs into a worse life and situation than they were already starting out with, which was bad enough in the first place. While poor starter life circumstances (“poor starter pack”) is the common denominator, the morality aspect of these people isn’t actually skewed, not in that sense anyway.
These people, someone like Fernando (by the way, did you know that his name means sugar in French?), need life opportunities. They need to be opened up to a world where good things happen to them. So they can have the option to make the right decisions and choices; they need to have those right options to even present themselves to them in the first place. Because not to plunge into a second and different psychological portrait, no one offered good things makes poor decisions, that’s why there are, shockingly, people out there who are happy, because they could make good decisions, propelled by an initial positive baseline, that compounded into being able to make those good decisions that enable the continuity of that beneficial baseline, the good things they already received at the start of their lives.
But Theodore isn’t one of those people.
Which is why it wasn’t difficult to recognise the one instance where he shows humanity, because it’s so rare and tends to not happen, you recognise it when it does. That’s pretty much why this whole business with his ex, Susan, appears the way it’s meant to, and why in this case, it’s Susan that looks like the short-sighted idiot, and Theodore, well not like a victim per se, but for once, not like he actually is the problem, which he is, and would be, any other minute of the day, month, or year.
The series then, later on in season 2, continues down that path of humanising him, by having him show the rawness of his feelings towards Susan and the situation as a whole. The path that the series takes here is contradictory as far as authorial intents go (
I still couldn’t quite sympathise though because I still don’t like him. But that’s the general idea. That in this one instance. He was real and sincere. (But please throw him back in jail, I honestly can’t believe he survived this long outside, when they had the audacity to kill off David, virtually the biggest sweetheart in the story, as much as I don’t like how spineless he can be at times).
Have some thoughts?
Authorial intents with Theodore Bagwell vs how Micheal Scofield, the Protagonist, perceives him
In the end, the will of the author prevails on what to do with Theodore. Despite the constant back and forth from the writers, in the end it’s the will the author concentrated inside the character that dictates his direction.
The way it works, is that there is the will of the author, aka the will of the consciousness that writes the story; the individual that writes is animated by a consciousness, and it is primarily this deepest of entity that creates art. That is why I always say that art is the best therapy. But specifically and more importantly, it makes art the truest form of self-expression that a person can gestate and birth.
Plot points are the will of the author. Characters are declensions of the author itself; they are parts and sections of the author’s personality (or emotional reasoning), its very essence.
So Micheal, as the protagonist, represents the heart of the writer(s) the most; in multiple author productions, authorial intent shows differently. Micheal doesn’t like Theodore and neither do we. That’s because Micheal’s inner child is more or less always on the screen (I’m unclear whether that’s Wentworth Miller’s) and his inner boy is absolutely disgusted and appalled at someone like Theodore. Because Micheal has a good heart, and is a good person, and even if he plays the charismatic tough-y in front of those with whom he has to, to ensure the smooth continuity of a “deal,” ultimately Micheal is a good boy/good kid/good man/good person. The reprehensible violence and sexual immorality of Theodore and that he displays absolutely appalls him; he can’t understand it because he’s a pure and clean person. He finds it distasteful and he is shocked by it.
Because of it there’s two underhanded authorial intents currents:
- how the writers, through Micheal, view him
- how the writers view him beyond that
Both currents influence people and how the character ends up, which is why the fandom is divided into two groups, the people who hate him, but also the people who feel sorry for him, and then the people who feel both at the same time.
That’s also why, Theodore Bagwell ends up being such a weasly survivalist. He shows low resourcefulness and tenacity (can be advantageous but usually results in him paying for it, like when he chains himself to Micheal and ends up with his hand chopped off in the process. All these survivalist moments tend to turn on him, in the end, which, ultimately, proves his instincts were wrong at their source), and ends up sticking around for much longer than planned, despite and however much the characters try to get rid of him, precisely because of how undesirable and repulsive he is.
This, is 100% due to the writers wanting to keep him around, because he is just too much potential, too charismatic, to throw away and erase from the series (why couldn’t they have done that with David? I still miss the guy to this day, god, what a sweet character he was).
There’s ultimately a two-directions clash of will, where the writers find him disgusting, appalling, and where they also find him interesting, compelling, complex. The resulting charisma of the character, while being also something brought to the table by the actor, is also mostly a result of the fascination and dare I call it “addiction,” the writers have for this character, which the actor sensed and that helped awaken and tap into that charismatic aspect out and inside of him, so he could play the character well. In a way, this was truly the chance of a lifetime, for Knepper.
And the plot points are the determining factor of what do the writers want to do with [Theodore] the character, the specific current and section of their reasoning that he represents, and that’s influenced both by the will of the author that is poured into the protagonist, and that you can analyse through him, and the second undertone/current, which is what they do independently of him (Micheal) to endear him (Theodore) to the audience.
So while current #2, the one where the writers enjoy Theodore quite a bit, find him compelling, and as having too much potential to waste away via death (still sad they killed off David),
where, on one hand, his crimes repel the protagonist and his team, and thus, Micheal’s opinion shapes the viewers, there’s the other indirect message communicated through the writing to feel sympathetic towards him.
Prison Break Trivia: did you know that an introductory theme song was created specifically to help commercialise the series in France? The song itself was well-crafted as a typical rap song, with background and foreground vocals, where the foreground vocals blend into the background vocals and weave together at the start and end of each chorus, with the background vocal track taking over while blending into the foreground one, and vice versa when it’s time to go back to the next verse. The singer hired to interpret the song was of a typical ethnic group specifically chosen to fit with the mood of the series itself, and the general element of criminality corresponding both to the series and to France’s criminal world, while also trying to inject an element of relatability for the listeners and intended audiences, which ended up being a very minor element, also expressed through the lyrics, written to be sympathetic to the character performed by the chosen rapper. The general image, that the record company in charge of this promotional track attempted to craft, was an imitation of the socio-economical and cultural circumstances that African-Americans have currently experienced in the last half a century, themselves a consequence of the treatment of the cross-Atlantic slave trade, and the slavery system legally active until 1865. The problem was, that there is no such corresponding context for French audiences to relate to, not with the same historical context, and not with individuals of sub-Saharian African descent anyway, and the concept itself in part missed its shot because it did not properly calculate, or even know, which audiences it aimed for, and if those audiences even existed in the first place. This attempt at imitating the original cultural references of an American TV show, while attempting to weave it with what would be relatable to French audiences, ultimately fell flat.
The rapper himself had no career beyond this, nothing solid anyway, because he was hired exclusively for this song, and no record company cared to work with him beyond that. The success of this single corresponds perfectly to the success and associated feeling of thrill and rush that came from season’s 1 prison escape plot, and after this single fell off and no longer mattered to general audiences: when the buzz was over, so too did Prison Break’s hype die off in France and public television, which, coincidentally, also corresponds to when the series itself began to unravel past season 1 and at the start of season 2 and began to walk on shakier grounds. Here’s its instrumental.
