It's Real: a Michael/Sara 'Shipper Essay
TITLE: It’s Real: A Michael/Sara ‘Shipper Essay
FANDOM: Prison Break
AUTHOR: Mari
EMAIL: Ficangel@yahoo.com
SPOILERS: Through 2.04-"First Down"
When we first meet Michael Scofield, he is in the middle of doing a Very Bad Thing: robbing a bank. This is not a man that we glance at and think, “Wow, great protagonist.” Worse than being a criminal, he appears to be a criminal who can’t even be competent in his chosen work. Even though the terrified bank clerk urges him to leave, Michael stays until he hears the wail of police sirens and all of his avenues of escape are cut off from him. As he turns to meet the other police and drop his gun, we see a tiny smile move across Michael’s face.
This is our first hint that things are not always what they seem, and that everyone has an interior life that is frequently completely opposite from the persona that they show the rest of the world. Hang onto that; as far as themes go, it’s one of the most far-reaching ones that the series has.
Michael Scofield, as it turns out, is not a criminal in a nice suit who just happened to have an unlucky day and get caught. He is a structural engineer by trade, a genius with a psychological disorder known as low-latency inhibition that would cripple anyone with a lower IQ, and possesses a sense of familial devotion that is frankly staggering. The ill-fated meeting with the authorities at the bank is not a foolish blunder or an act of greedy self-interest, but is instead only the first move in an intensely complicated chess game aimed at bringing about a goal that has nothing to do with money at all. Michael has an older brother, Lincoln Burrows, who is in prison for a heinous crime that he did not commit. Lincoln is going to be executed for this crime in one month, and, partially due to the machinations of a requisite evil conspiracy, all of his avenues of appeal have been exhausted.
Most people would give up at this point, but we learn as early as the pilot that Michael Scofield hardly counts as most people. As has been previously stated, robbing the bank is not the final step in Michael’s plan, but instead the first. He wants to get into same prison where Lincoln is being housed so that he can put his real plan into effect, and this is why he commits his crime. Remember, Michael is a structural engineer. As it turns out, his firm was responsible for renovating the prison a few years before, and Michael has access to the blueprints. He responds by doing what any person would do: hatching an insanely complicated plan that will not be gone into in its entirety here because it would send the essay sailing straight over its word limit, tattoos the blueprint and part of his plans for beyond the walls onto his body, and breaks his older brother out of prison from the inside.
No, really.
As is probably evident by now, the level of devotion that Michael experiences for people that he feels strong personal ties to is so far beyond what the average person on the street feels as to beggar belief. This aspect of Michael is rooted in a series of personality traits and experiences that must be explored further before understanding how the man as a whole comes together before understanding him can even be possible. For one, there is the psychological condition that I made brief mention of a few paragraphs up. Michael has a condition called low-latency inhibition which, roughly put, means that he cannot filter out most of the stimuli that most of us turn into a kind of white noise in order to function at all. If we glance at a chair, we process a swift mental image and then move on. We’re lucky if we notice much more than color and basic general shape. Michael, however, sees everything: the details of the material, the construction, the wear and tear. A person of below-normal or even average intelligence would not be even remotely able to cope with that every time that they formed a mental image, and a person of a low IQ with this particular disorder winds up mentally ill almost one hundred percent of the time. People with Michael’s IQ wind up committing, as the show puts it best, works of “creative genius”.
So that explains how Michael is intelligent and detail-oriented enough to feasibly pull off a task as formidable as breaking out of a maximum security prison from the inside. That makes him a competent man. That does not make him a worthy man, a protagonist that we should be rooting for or pairing up with our girl Sara. The additional wrinkle that pushes Michael over the line and into hero status arises from the fact that he never knew who his father was and that his mother died when he was only a child, so that the only person that he’s ever known who has not left him is Lincoln. Before seeing a psychiatrist pre-series, he had crushingly low self-esteem that means that, in addition to his LLI, he notices the suffering of everyone around him and has the capacity for tremendous compassion. The show burps a little bit in regards to Michael’s supposed low self-esteem, as he tends to exude an incredible confidence when it comes to the execution of his plan, but the fact of his compassion remains. Michael puts his master plan into jeopardy more than once so that he can help people who need him, even though he has good reason to suspect that he is only going to be bitten for it later.
Part of Michael’s intensely convoluted plan to break out of Fox River requires him to spend a large amount of time in the infirmary, where he has contact with the show’s female lead, one Dr. Sara Tancredi.
Much as is the case with Michael, our first impression of Sara does not even come close to encapsulating the woman that she actually is. Sara meets Michael as she is preparing to administer insulin for the Type I diabetes that he is faking in order to gain infirmary access. Michael goes to quick work by laying charm on Sara, which she smilingly accepts but does not reciprocate. Sara is a sweet woman, a seeming optimist and pushover, who works as a doctor in a prison infirmary because she wants to change the world. Michael is an extremely good-looking man and, while Wentworth Miller does an able job of showing that there is something subtly off about Michael every time that he does try to lay on the charisma too thickly, it’s still convincing enough that we could easily flash forward a month and see Sara tearfully telling a reporter that it had all “seemed so real.”
There is more to Sara than meets the eye, too.
While she appears at first glance to be a sunshiny optimist and easy mark, it is actually Michael who believes in things like faith and optimism in their relationship. Sara has a surprising cynical streak about human nature, making it even more remarkable that she walks into Fox River and does her best to help people every day. Much like Michael, she also has issues with people leaving her every time that she brings herself to trust them, as her mother is a deceased alcoholic and her father is the governor of Illinois, a politician on the rise who has little time for his daughter. The rift between them is not entirely the fault of her father, as Sara has her own issues that would cause her to have very low self-esteem.
Sara worked in a Chicago hospital before she went to Fox River, where it turns out that she was a morphine addict. Subsequent conversations between her father and herself suggest that this is a long-term addiction that he has intervened to save her from numerous times before she finally experiences something that causes her to pull up short and reassess her life. Sara is walking with her junkie boyfriend some three years before the beginning of the show when a boy is struck by a car directly in front of her. As both she and her friend are high, she can do nothing to help. Though it is not explicitly mentioned in canon, the most common assumption is that the boy dies.
This is the whack with the epiphany stick that Sara so desperately needs. She gets in rehab, gets clean, and winds up at Fox River to meet Michael. Due to her own ill-fated walk on the wild side, Sara is rigidly moral and shows behaviors suggesting that she sometimes has trouble understanding that what is legal and what is moral are not always the same thing. She’s strong, as anyone who has pulled themselves from an addiction has to be, and she’s still compassionate in spite of the fact that she’s working in a prison where she’s hardly seeing the best and brightest of everything that the human race has to offer.
It is a part of Michael’s plan to establish an emotional relationship with Sara in order to gain her trust and thus be watched less closely whenever he is in the infirmary. This plan very quickly spins out of control, the lines between what his is supposed to act as if he is feeling and what he actually feels soon becoming so blurred as to be nonexistent. Michael and Sara are both very cerebral people, and the swift way in which the attraction overcomes them both is overwhelming. As early as the third episode, Michael is struggling with his attraction to Sara and pleads with her not to make him lie to her (“Cell Test”). As this is supposed to be a sham relationship based upon nothing other than lies, it’s an interesting request for him to make. In spite of both Michael’s and Sara’s attempts to set boundaries on what is happening between them, it continues to grow and become a force that neither one of them can control over the course of the first season. At one point, Sara actually meets with Michael’s pre-incarceration psychiatrist (one wonders how many other inmates have roused Sara to this much action outside of the prison walls) so that she can speak about him, while Michael puts both his plan and his life in danger so that he can save Sara from the effects of a prison riot gone awry (“Riots, Drills, and the Devil”). In the second half of that two-part episode, the following exchange takes place:
Michael: You ever been to Baja? Mexico? There’s this great place down there-$20 a night, hammocks on the back deck, beers are fifty cents. Twenty-five cents at happy hour.” Beat. “You ever been to Thailand? Thailand’s great-“
Sara: Michael, if you’re trying to calm me down, you’re doing a terrible job.
Michael: But I am trying.
This episode remains a favorite among Michael/Sara shippers, for obvious reason.
After he saves Sara by leading her through the air vents, she is aware that Michael is up to something that he should not be, though she has no idea what it is. Rather than going to the warden or one of the COs with the news that there is an inmate who knows his way around the vents of the prison far more than he ought to, Sara makes the first in a long series of compromises where Michael is concerned and gives him the chance to tell her what he was doing himself. Interestingly, Michael makes no attempt to come up with a convincing lie, though he surely knew before he ever met Sara that lies were going to be part and parcel of their relationship. He even seems hurt that Sara would investigate him in the first place, and clams up altogether without giving any answer at all. It is Sara who winds up apologizing. With every meeting in the infirmary, the chemistry between the two of them continues to grow, until they are soon referring to one another as “Michael” and “Sara” rather than “Mr. Scofield” and “Dr. Tancredi”. Even Sara’s nurse, Kate, soon notices that the idle flirtation that one would expect from a male inmate in the presence of an attractive female doctor is starting to be reciprocated and is in danger of turning into something quite a bit more serious, but Sara does not heed her warning.
The first, and least serious, rift between Michael and Sara comes when Sara discovers that Michael actually has a marriage that he has been keeping secret from her (“And Then There Were Seven”). His intentions towards his wife are neither romantic nor sexual-he needs her so that she can slip him a credit card for The Plan-but Michael can of course not tell Sara this. He can only offer a weak excuse that things are not what they seem. Sara’s response is telling:
Sara: So you’re married.
Michael: Uh, well, not in the traditional sense of the word.
Sara: Michael, we’re both adults here. Put your cards on the table. (He gives her a look) Ok, I’ll go first. As one of the very few women around here, I’m used to a certain amount of…innuendo and flirtation being thrown my way. I’m not used to enjoying it.
Michael: Look, Sara -
Sara: It’s Dr. Tancredi. And, please let me finish. I'm not a jealous woman, but I am a careful one. And for some reason, when I'm around you, I'm not, careful.
Michael: You don't have to be.
Sara: Yes, I do. There are so many questions surrounding you, Michael. There are way too many. So here’s the deal. From now on, your shots, any medical concerns, they’re all fine, as long as it’s doctor-patient. But personal questions and favors of any kind are no longer a part of our relationship.
Sara is fully aware that she and Michael are crossing lines here, as the quote above makes clear. The two of them remain on chilly terms until the day of Lincoln’s scheduled execution, when Michael’s plan is falling apart all around him and the reserve and control that are the most visible parts of his character are collapsing as well (“The Rat”). Desperate to see his brother before the execution takes place, he makes this plea to Sara:
Michael: Sara-Dr. Tancredi, I’m sorry, this isn’t about the morality of the death penalty. This is about killing an innocent man, my brother, and surely your father can’t be in favor of that.
It is notable because he slips and refers to her as Sara rather than Dr. Tancredi, as he had been doing in deference to her wishes after she learned about his wife. When he is in a state of high emotional distress, she immediately becomes Sara again, when if he was really doing nothing more than running a game on her it should be the exact opposite: if he did not care about her, he should be referring to her only as Dr. Tancredi within his mind, and that is the address that should have slipped out while he was so upset. The audience has known for a long time how quickly and deeply Sara was falling for Michael; this is one of the first concrete signs that we’ve gotten to show that it’s reciprocated. When Sara makes as if to leave during the course of that same scene, Michael grabs quickly for her wrist, realizes halfway into the gesture that maybe this is unwise, given Sara’s justifiable reasons to be skittish around him, and turns it instead into a caress.
A still picture does not do full justice to the hotness of that scene. Two other characters, supposedly the loves of one another’s lives, kiss each other full on the mouth in this same episode, and it is unmoving. Five seconds of contact between Michael and Sara, building upon the insane levels of chemistry between Wentworth Miller and Sarah Wayne Callies, was hotter than a lot of pornography. Well, maybe actual, filmed Michael/Sara pornography would have been hotter, but there also would have been a rush of fangirls sent to the emergency room with sudden breathing problems.
Lincoln receives a last-minute stay and is not executed that night. It also seems as if an unspoken apology has taken place between Michael and Sara, and they are back to the slow and careful dance that will take them to the season finale and their second, much larger, rift. At one point, Michael receives a second-degree burn as a result of his nighttime wanderings through the prison and refuses to tell Sara how he got it. She, thinking that he’s being abused by a guard, is unwilling to back down this time and takes the matter to the warden. Michael is thrown into solitary confinement for his refusal to accuse any of the guards, where he either has a bit of a mental breakdown or manages to fake one incredibly convincingly (my personal theory is that it began as the first and turned into the second). When Sara is summoned to help him, he sinks against her knee in a gesture that is far, far too hot for description, especially considering that it is initiated by a man supposedly undergoing a mental breakdown.
Later, in spite of the fact that the psychiatric ward has its own doctors and she has duties back among the general population to fulfill, Sara makes a special visit to see how Michael is doing and make another plea with him to turn in the guard who burned him.
Michael: I made you something. It’s an ashtray.
Sara: Um, I don’t smoke.
Michael: Yeah, I know, but they only let us make these and jewelry. I didn’t figure you for the macaroni necklace type.
Sara: It’s very sweet. How about we talk about how you’re doing?
Michael: I think we both know that I don’t belong here. I don’t remember much of that night, but being locked up in Ad-Seg, something must have snapped. What I’m trying to say is, I think I’ve had enough of arts and crafts. But that’s your call.
Sara: And the doctors here do say you’ve been acting fine. But the problem is, if you don’t tell the Pope who burned you, he’s going to lock you back up in Ad-Seg, and after a couple days of that you’re going to be right back here. (When Michael does not respond, she reaches out and touches his wrist.) Michael, I hate what happened to you and I hate that you’re here, but you have got to let me help you. If you want to get out of Psych Ward and stay out, you’ve got to tell the Pope the truth about that burn.
I think that it’s pretty clear by now that the doctor/patient, prison employee/convict lines don’t exist any longer.
Michael lies about the origins of his burn in order to get out of the psychiatric ward and cope with a guard who was shaking down inmates, and he and Sara barrel forward towards the finale. The final wrinkle in Michael’s plan is that, as his original plan to get into the infirmary was thwarted by a pipe being replaced, he now needs a key into the infirmary. He flirts with Sara wildly as she changes the bandage on his shoulder and then, at long last, Michael kisses her.
Sara: What do you want from me, Michael?
Michael: Sara, I need you to do something for me.
Sara: What?
Michael: Wait for me. It won’t always be like this. This room, this place.
Sara: Until then, I can’t, we can’t, I can’t and I’ve gotta go.
Your ears are probably still ringing from the fangirl squee that went up over a certain event that took place about a month and a half ago-we’ll get to that in a moment-but you might have heard the joyous cry that went up over this event last May, too.
Except that Michael/Sara looks kind of sleazy in this light, doesn’t it? Michael kisses her in order to steal a key, Sara is sweet and smitten enough to fall for it, this is more than kind of stuff of a Dateline special than it is of great romance. However, Michael can’t bring himself to steal the key from her at that moment and, as he exhorts his wife to meet with Sara and do it for him, he gets caught out. Sara confronts him, demands to know the truth without any new lies or evasions, and neatly sends everyone who had believed that she was nothing more than a pretty pushover to reeling. When Michael does tell her his entire plan, as she has already read Lincoln’s file and has strong reasons to believe that there’s something fishy about his conviction, she is shocked. No, she’s shattered. It’s one thing to be furious with a man because you believe that he’s feigning romantic interest in you to gain access to drugs or needles. Saving his brother from the clutches of an international conspiracy bent on buying the presidency is quite another. Sara is still furious, but she also believes that he’s right, and it’s this confusion that takes her arc through the end of the first season and into the beginning of the second. She leaves without telling Michael whether she will or won’t do as he asks and leave the infirmary door unlocked and instead spends the rest of the day soul-searching, appealing to her father one final time to save Lincoln in a legal way, and sitting in bars contemplating relapse. Michael, as you can well imagine, spends the rest of the day quietly freaking out. He’s played by Wentworth Miller, though, so he freaks out in a very intense, self-contained, and incredibly hot way.
Sara does come back, does unlock the infirmary door, and Michael and his brother do escape, along with several other people who are not so great to have out on the streets again. Sara, meanwhile, reeling and overwhelmed by the fact that she has just done a fantastically illegal thing that she nevertheless still feels in her gut is right, just like when she felt when she was still on the morphine, has a relapse. She overdoses, either because she’s actually trying to hurt herself or because she’s so distraught that she does not realize that being clean for three years means that her tolerance is not what it used to be, and ends the season legally dead while Michael ends it running across an airstrip mere yards ahead of the cops.
Well. That sounds kind of like a downer, doesn’t it? And certainly the end of any relationship between two sane people. While Michael does make a few furtive attempts to communicate with Sara during the first part of the second season, these can easily be read by those people not interested in M/S as an attempt to perform penance and damage control, as Sara is in a great deal of trouble for her role in the escape and Michael is nothing if not a man who believes in paying his debts. However. Oh, however. There is a phone call.
Not just any phone call, either. Michael has been avoiding contacting Sara by phone, as everyone from the Feds to Kate knows that there was something taking place between Michael and Sara in Fox River that is not exactly sanctioned by the Illinois State Corrections, but he also has not been reading the newspaper regularly. Running from the law and trying to keep yourself and your not terribly cautious brother alive has a way of eating up all of your spare time like that. Michael does not know about Sara’s overdose and brush with death. When he does find out, the master of reserve and self-control kicks a man in the head and then risks his entire plan so that he can place this phone call, choked up so much that he can hardly speak:
Sara: Hello?
Michael: Sara. It’s me.
Sara: What do you want?
Michael: I don’t have time to talk. I think there’s every chance they’re listening to this call right now. But there’s a lot I want to say. Please don’t hang up on me.
Sara: I don’t-I don’t want to talk to you.
Michael: I heard about…I heard about what happened. I want you to know…I want you to know how sorry I am. For everything.
Sara: Sorry’s not gonna do me a whole lot of good with what I’m up against right now.
Michael: Listen…anyone who has any ties to me and my brother is in danger right now.
Sara: I’ve no ties to your or your brother anymore.
Michael: There’s a way I can protect you. It’s already in your possession.
Sara: What are you talking about?
Michael: It was real, Sara. You and me. It was real.
Um. You might have heard the joyous screaming that echoed all over the world when that scene aired, regardless of whether you watch the show or not. There was flailing, there was the high-pitched EEEE! noise of pure happiness that only a fangirl or fanboy receiving exactly what they wanted but never thought they would actually get can do full justice to. Because it’s real.
If that mountain of subtext that certainly wasted no time in crossing the line into text was not enough to convince you, here’s this: Michael and Sara are the perfect template for the literary idea of love as this mindless, all-consuming force. Though Sara tends to wear her emotions a little more transparently than Michael does, they are both essentially very cerebral people who have grown accustomed to being in control of themselves and their passions at all times. As Michael’s LLI will not allow him to function at all if he becomes too unfocused, and Sara has seen a little too clearly what life is like when one is close friends with Dionysus, it’s almost a matter of survival for them both. Therefore, the immediate strength of their attraction to one another is shocking to them both and is almost Shakespearean in its intensity. Unlike Romeo and Juliet, however, they do pull themselves together and do manage to keep their larger missions in mind: while Michael will risk a phone call in a state of high emotional distress, he is not throwing it all to the wind and rushing to Sara’s side, and Sara ultimately decides to leave the infirmary door unlocked so that the escape can take place because she believes that Lincoln is innocent, not because she has feelings for Michael. Michael and Sara are both very intelligent adults with eerie similarities in their abandonment issues who still function as adults, in spite of the fact that what Michael already feels and what Sara is rapidly falling into definitely counts as Big Epic Love. There is still conflict arising in their relationship from the fact that Michael got himself thrown into prison in order to save Lincoln and still considers his brother to be his first priority, not Sara, and from the fact that Sara is so accustomed to Michael looking and sounding sincere while he’s in the middle of spinning out sweet lies that she no longer knows what to believe. However, Sara is firmly in the sights of the conspiracy now, who knows that it can use her as a way to get to Michael and through him his brother. When they make their move, Michael is going to be there as the hero who uses his brain rather his brawn, Sara will be there as the damsel in distress who is still pretty formidable in her own right, and eardrums will burst all over the world.
Resources and Recs:
prisonbeak_fic: This is an all-purpose fic community, so you're rolling the dice a little bit, but I've found some gems through it.
michaelandsara: Specifically for fans of Michael and Sara in a romantic context.
msgenevieve: Beneath the Skin, The Good Doctor, Unanswered, The Most Powerful Drug, Trick of the Light (Trick of the Light is a multi-chapter fic, that link takes you to the final chapter, where other links are embedded to take you to all the other chapters). Save for 'Trick of the Light', all of these take place within the episodes themselves. MsG is very, very good at writing smoking hot fic set within the episodes.
foxxcub: Forty-Seven>, Pause.
Gravity by clutterklutz.
Five Times That Michael Will Never Hold Sara's Hand by meyerlemon.
I'm going to indulge in a bit of ego-strokeing and list my own Michael/Sara fics, too: Stumbling Like Alice and Three Beaches (a loose sequel to 'Stumbling Like Alice'), Driftwood and Lifeline (a much tighter sequel to 'Driftwood').
FANDOM: Prison Break
AUTHOR: Mari
EMAIL: Ficangel@yahoo.com
SPOILERS: Through 2.04-"First Down"
When we first meet Michael Scofield, he is in the middle of doing a Very Bad Thing: robbing a bank. This is not a man that we glance at and think, “Wow, great protagonist.” Worse than being a criminal, he appears to be a criminal who can’t even be competent in his chosen work. Even though the terrified bank clerk urges him to leave, Michael stays until he hears the wail of police sirens and all of his avenues of escape are cut off from him. As he turns to meet the other police and drop his gun, we see a tiny smile move across Michael’s face.
This is our first hint that things are not always what they seem, and that everyone has an interior life that is frequently completely opposite from the persona that they show the rest of the world. Hang onto that; as far as themes go, it’s one of the most far-reaching ones that the series has.
Michael Scofield, as it turns out, is not a criminal in a nice suit who just happened to have an unlucky day and get caught. He is a structural engineer by trade, a genius with a psychological disorder known as low-latency inhibition that would cripple anyone with a lower IQ, and possesses a sense of familial devotion that is frankly staggering. The ill-fated meeting with the authorities at the bank is not a foolish blunder or an act of greedy self-interest, but is instead only the first move in an intensely complicated chess game aimed at bringing about a goal that has nothing to do with money at all. Michael has an older brother, Lincoln Burrows, who is in prison for a heinous crime that he did not commit. Lincoln is going to be executed for this crime in one month, and, partially due to the machinations of a requisite evil conspiracy, all of his avenues of appeal have been exhausted.
Most people would give up at this point, but we learn as early as the pilot that Michael Scofield hardly counts as most people. As has been previously stated, robbing the bank is not the final step in Michael’s plan, but instead the first. He wants to get into same prison where Lincoln is being housed so that he can put his real plan into effect, and this is why he commits his crime. Remember, Michael is a structural engineer. As it turns out, his firm was responsible for renovating the prison a few years before, and Michael has access to the blueprints. He responds by doing what any person would do: hatching an insanely complicated plan that will not be gone into in its entirety here because it would send the essay sailing straight over its word limit, tattoos the blueprint and part of his plans for beyond the walls onto his body, and breaks his older brother out of prison from the inside.
No, really.
As is probably evident by now, the level of devotion that Michael experiences for people that he feels strong personal ties to is so far beyond what the average person on the street feels as to beggar belief. This aspect of Michael is rooted in a series of personality traits and experiences that must be explored further before understanding how the man as a whole comes together before understanding him can even be possible. For one, there is the psychological condition that I made brief mention of a few paragraphs up. Michael has a condition called low-latency inhibition which, roughly put, means that he cannot filter out most of the stimuli that most of us turn into a kind of white noise in order to function at all. If we glance at a chair, we process a swift mental image and then move on. We’re lucky if we notice much more than color and basic general shape. Michael, however, sees everything: the details of the material, the construction, the wear and tear. A person of below-normal or even average intelligence would not be even remotely able to cope with that every time that they formed a mental image, and a person of a low IQ with this particular disorder winds up mentally ill almost one hundred percent of the time. People with Michael’s IQ wind up committing, as the show puts it best, works of “creative genius”.
So that explains how Michael is intelligent and detail-oriented enough to feasibly pull off a task as formidable as breaking out of a maximum security prison from the inside. That makes him a competent man. That does not make him a worthy man, a protagonist that we should be rooting for or pairing up with our girl Sara. The additional wrinkle that pushes Michael over the line and into hero status arises from the fact that he never knew who his father was and that his mother died when he was only a child, so that the only person that he’s ever known who has not left him is Lincoln. Before seeing a psychiatrist pre-series, he had crushingly low self-esteem that means that, in addition to his LLI, he notices the suffering of everyone around him and has the capacity for tremendous compassion. The show burps a little bit in regards to Michael’s supposed low self-esteem, as he tends to exude an incredible confidence when it comes to the execution of his plan, but the fact of his compassion remains. Michael puts his master plan into jeopardy more than once so that he can help people who need him, even though he has good reason to suspect that he is only going to be bitten for it later.
Part of Michael’s intensely convoluted plan to break out of Fox River requires him to spend a large amount of time in the infirmary, where he has contact with the show’s female lead, one Dr. Sara Tancredi.
Much as is the case with Michael, our first impression of Sara does not even come close to encapsulating the woman that she actually is. Sara meets Michael as she is preparing to administer insulin for the Type I diabetes that he is faking in order to gain infirmary access. Michael goes to quick work by laying charm on Sara, which she smilingly accepts but does not reciprocate. Sara is a sweet woman, a seeming optimist and pushover, who works as a doctor in a prison infirmary because she wants to change the world. Michael is an extremely good-looking man and, while Wentworth Miller does an able job of showing that there is something subtly off about Michael every time that he does try to lay on the charisma too thickly, it’s still convincing enough that we could easily flash forward a month and see Sara tearfully telling a reporter that it had all “seemed so real.”
There is more to Sara than meets the eye, too.
While she appears at first glance to be a sunshiny optimist and easy mark, it is actually Michael who believes in things like faith and optimism in their relationship. Sara has a surprising cynical streak about human nature, making it even more remarkable that she walks into Fox River and does her best to help people every day. Much like Michael, she also has issues with people leaving her every time that she brings herself to trust them, as her mother is a deceased alcoholic and her father is the governor of Illinois, a politician on the rise who has little time for his daughter. The rift between them is not entirely the fault of her father, as Sara has her own issues that would cause her to have very low self-esteem.
Sara worked in a Chicago hospital before she went to Fox River, where it turns out that she was a morphine addict. Subsequent conversations between her father and herself suggest that this is a long-term addiction that he has intervened to save her from numerous times before she finally experiences something that causes her to pull up short and reassess her life. Sara is walking with her junkie boyfriend some three years before the beginning of the show when a boy is struck by a car directly in front of her. As both she and her friend are high, she can do nothing to help. Though it is not explicitly mentioned in canon, the most common assumption is that the boy dies.
This is the whack with the epiphany stick that Sara so desperately needs. She gets in rehab, gets clean, and winds up at Fox River to meet Michael. Due to her own ill-fated walk on the wild side, Sara is rigidly moral and shows behaviors suggesting that she sometimes has trouble understanding that what is legal and what is moral are not always the same thing. She’s strong, as anyone who has pulled themselves from an addiction has to be, and she’s still compassionate in spite of the fact that she’s working in a prison where she’s hardly seeing the best and brightest of everything that the human race has to offer.
It is a part of Michael’s plan to establish an emotional relationship with Sara in order to gain her trust and thus be watched less closely whenever he is in the infirmary. This plan very quickly spins out of control, the lines between what his is supposed to act as if he is feeling and what he actually feels soon becoming so blurred as to be nonexistent. Michael and Sara are both very cerebral people, and the swift way in which the attraction overcomes them both is overwhelming. As early as the third episode, Michael is struggling with his attraction to Sara and pleads with her not to make him lie to her (“Cell Test”). As this is supposed to be a sham relationship based upon nothing other than lies, it’s an interesting request for him to make. In spite of both Michael’s and Sara’s attempts to set boundaries on what is happening between them, it continues to grow and become a force that neither one of them can control over the course of the first season. At one point, Sara actually meets with Michael’s pre-incarceration psychiatrist (one wonders how many other inmates have roused Sara to this much action outside of the prison walls) so that she can speak about him, while Michael puts both his plan and his life in danger so that he can save Sara from the effects of a prison riot gone awry (“Riots, Drills, and the Devil”). In the second half of that two-part episode, the following exchange takes place:
Michael: You ever been to Baja? Mexico? There’s this great place down there-$20 a night, hammocks on the back deck, beers are fifty cents. Twenty-five cents at happy hour.” Beat. “You ever been to Thailand? Thailand’s great-“
Sara: Michael, if you’re trying to calm me down, you’re doing a terrible job.
Michael: But I am trying.
This episode remains a favorite among Michael/Sara shippers, for obvious reason.
After he saves Sara by leading her through the air vents, she is aware that Michael is up to something that he should not be, though she has no idea what it is. Rather than going to the warden or one of the COs with the news that there is an inmate who knows his way around the vents of the prison far more than he ought to, Sara makes the first in a long series of compromises where Michael is concerned and gives him the chance to tell her what he was doing himself. Interestingly, Michael makes no attempt to come up with a convincing lie, though he surely knew before he ever met Sara that lies were going to be part and parcel of their relationship. He even seems hurt that Sara would investigate him in the first place, and clams up altogether without giving any answer at all. It is Sara who winds up apologizing. With every meeting in the infirmary, the chemistry between the two of them continues to grow, until they are soon referring to one another as “Michael” and “Sara” rather than “Mr. Scofield” and “Dr. Tancredi”. Even Sara’s nurse, Kate, soon notices that the idle flirtation that one would expect from a male inmate in the presence of an attractive female doctor is starting to be reciprocated and is in danger of turning into something quite a bit more serious, but Sara does not heed her warning.
The first, and least serious, rift between Michael and Sara comes when Sara discovers that Michael actually has a marriage that he has been keeping secret from her (“And Then There Were Seven”). His intentions towards his wife are neither romantic nor sexual-he needs her so that she can slip him a credit card for The Plan-but Michael can of course not tell Sara this. He can only offer a weak excuse that things are not what they seem. Sara’s response is telling:
Sara: So you’re married.
Michael: Uh, well, not in the traditional sense of the word.
Sara: Michael, we’re both adults here. Put your cards on the table. (He gives her a look) Ok, I’ll go first. As one of the very few women around here, I’m used to a certain amount of…innuendo and flirtation being thrown my way. I’m not used to enjoying it.
Michael: Look, Sara -
Sara: It’s Dr. Tancredi. And, please let me finish. I'm not a jealous woman, but I am a careful one. And for some reason, when I'm around you, I'm not, careful.
Michael: You don't have to be.
Sara: Yes, I do. There are so many questions surrounding you, Michael. There are way too many. So here’s the deal. From now on, your shots, any medical concerns, they’re all fine, as long as it’s doctor-patient. But personal questions and favors of any kind are no longer a part of our relationship.
Sara is fully aware that she and Michael are crossing lines here, as the quote above makes clear. The two of them remain on chilly terms until the day of Lincoln’s scheduled execution, when Michael’s plan is falling apart all around him and the reserve and control that are the most visible parts of his character are collapsing as well (“The Rat”). Desperate to see his brother before the execution takes place, he makes this plea to Sara:
Michael: Sara-Dr. Tancredi, I’m sorry, this isn’t about the morality of the death penalty. This is about killing an innocent man, my brother, and surely your father can’t be in favor of that.
It is notable because he slips and refers to her as Sara rather than Dr. Tancredi, as he had been doing in deference to her wishes after she learned about his wife. When he is in a state of high emotional distress, she immediately becomes Sara again, when if he was really doing nothing more than running a game on her it should be the exact opposite: if he did not care about her, he should be referring to her only as Dr. Tancredi within his mind, and that is the address that should have slipped out while he was so upset. The audience has known for a long time how quickly and deeply Sara was falling for Michael; this is one of the first concrete signs that we’ve gotten to show that it’s reciprocated. When Sara makes as if to leave during the course of that same scene, Michael grabs quickly for her wrist, realizes halfway into the gesture that maybe this is unwise, given Sara’s justifiable reasons to be skittish around him, and turns it instead into a caress.
A still picture does not do full justice to the hotness of that scene. Two other characters, supposedly the loves of one another’s lives, kiss each other full on the mouth in this same episode, and it is unmoving. Five seconds of contact between Michael and Sara, building upon the insane levels of chemistry between Wentworth Miller and Sarah Wayne Callies, was hotter than a lot of pornography. Well, maybe actual, filmed Michael/Sara pornography would have been hotter, but there also would have been a rush of fangirls sent to the emergency room with sudden breathing problems.
Lincoln receives a last-minute stay and is not executed that night. It also seems as if an unspoken apology has taken place between Michael and Sara, and they are back to the slow and careful dance that will take them to the season finale and their second, much larger, rift. At one point, Michael receives a second-degree burn as a result of his nighttime wanderings through the prison and refuses to tell Sara how he got it. She, thinking that he’s being abused by a guard, is unwilling to back down this time and takes the matter to the warden. Michael is thrown into solitary confinement for his refusal to accuse any of the guards, where he either has a bit of a mental breakdown or manages to fake one incredibly convincingly (my personal theory is that it began as the first and turned into the second). When Sara is summoned to help him, he sinks against her knee in a gesture that is far, far too hot for description, especially considering that it is initiated by a man supposedly undergoing a mental breakdown.
Later, in spite of the fact that the psychiatric ward has its own doctors and she has duties back among the general population to fulfill, Sara makes a special visit to see how Michael is doing and make another plea with him to turn in the guard who burned him.
Michael: I made you something. It’s an ashtray.
Sara: Um, I don’t smoke.
Michael: Yeah, I know, but they only let us make these and jewelry. I didn’t figure you for the macaroni necklace type.
Sara: It’s very sweet. How about we talk about how you’re doing?
Michael: I think we both know that I don’t belong here. I don’t remember much of that night, but being locked up in Ad-Seg, something must have snapped. What I’m trying to say is, I think I’ve had enough of arts and crafts. But that’s your call.
Sara: And the doctors here do say you’ve been acting fine. But the problem is, if you don’t tell the Pope who burned you, he’s going to lock you back up in Ad-Seg, and after a couple days of that you’re going to be right back here. (When Michael does not respond, she reaches out and touches his wrist.) Michael, I hate what happened to you and I hate that you’re here, but you have got to let me help you. If you want to get out of Psych Ward and stay out, you’ve got to tell the Pope the truth about that burn.
I think that it’s pretty clear by now that the doctor/patient, prison employee/convict lines don’t exist any longer.
Michael lies about the origins of his burn in order to get out of the psychiatric ward and cope with a guard who was shaking down inmates, and he and Sara barrel forward towards the finale. The final wrinkle in Michael’s plan is that, as his original plan to get into the infirmary was thwarted by a pipe being replaced, he now needs a key into the infirmary. He flirts with Sara wildly as she changes the bandage on his shoulder and then, at long last, Michael kisses her.
Sara: What do you want from me, Michael?
Michael: Sara, I need you to do something for me.
Sara: What?
Michael: Wait for me. It won’t always be like this. This room, this place.
Sara: Until then, I can’t, we can’t, I can’t and I’ve gotta go.
Your ears are probably still ringing from the fangirl squee that went up over a certain event that took place about a month and a half ago-we’ll get to that in a moment-but you might have heard the joyous cry that went up over this event last May, too.
Except that Michael/Sara looks kind of sleazy in this light, doesn’t it? Michael kisses her in order to steal a key, Sara is sweet and smitten enough to fall for it, this is more than kind of stuff of a Dateline special than it is of great romance. However, Michael can’t bring himself to steal the key from her at that moment and, as he exhorts his wife to meet with Sara and do it for him, he gets caught out. Sara confronts him, demands to know the truth without any new lies or evasions, and neatly sends everyone who had believed that she was nothing more than a pretty pushover to reeling. When Michael does tell her his entire plan, as she has already read Lincoln’s file and has strong reasons to believe that there’s something fishy about his conviction, she is shocked. No, she’s shattered. It’s one thing to be furious with a man because you believe that he’s feigning romantic interest in you to gain access to drugs or needles. Saving his brother from the clutches of an international conspiracy bent on buying the presidency is quite another. Sara is still furious, but she also believes that he’s right, and it’s this confusion that takes her arc through the end of the first season and into the beginning of the second. She leaves without telling Michael whether she will or won’t do as he asks and leave the infirmary door unlocked and instead spends the rest of the day soul-searching, appealing to her father one final time to save Lincoln in a legal way, and sitting in bars contemplating relapse. Michael, as you can well imagine, spends the rest of the day quietly freaking out. He’s played by Wentworth Miller, though, so he freaks out in a very intense, self-contained, and incredibly hot way.
Sara does come back, does unlock the infirmary door, and Michael and his brother do escape, along with several other people who are not so great to have out on the streets again. Sara, meanwhile, reeling and overwhelmed by the fact that she has just done a fantastically illegal thing that she nevertheless still feels in her gut is right, just like when she felt when she was still on the morphine, has a relapse. She overdoses, either because she’s actually trying to hurt herself or because she’s so distraught that she does not realize that being clean for three years means that her tolerance is not what it used to be, and ends the season legally dead while Michael ends it running across an airstrip mere yards ahead of the cops.
Well. That sounds kind of like a downer, doesn’t it? And certainly the end of any relationship between two sane people. While Michael does make a few furtive attempts to communicate with Sara during the first part of the second season, these can easily be read by those people not interested in M/S as an attempt to perform penance and damage control, as Sara is in a great deal of trouble for her role in the escape and Michael is nothing if not a man who believes in paying his debts. However. Oh, however. There is a phone call.
Not just any phone call, either. Michael has been avoiding contacting Sara by phone, as everyone from the Feds to Kate knows that there was something taking place between Michael and Sara in Fox River that is not exactly sanctioned by the Illinois State Corrections, but he also has not been reading the newspaper regularly. Running from the law and trying to keep yourself and your not terribly cautious brother alive has a way of eating up all of your spare time like that. Michael does not know about Sara’s overdose and brush with death. When he does find out, the master of reserve and self-control kicks a man in the head and then risks his entire plan so that he can place this phone call, choked up so much that he can hardly speak:
Sara: Hello?
Michael: Sara. It’s me.
Sara: What do you want?
Michael: I don’t have time to talk. I think there’s every chance they’re listening to this call right now. But there’s a lot I want to say. Please don’t hang up on me.
Sara: I don’t-I don’t want to talk to you.
Michael: I heard about…I heard about what happened. I want you to know…I want you to know how sorry I am. For everything.
Sara: Sorry’s not gonna do me a whole lot of good with what I’m up against right now.
Michael: Listen…anyone who has any ties to me and my brother is in danger right now.
Sara: I’ve no ties to your or your brother anymore.
Michael: There’s a way I can protect you. It’s already in your possession.
Sara: What are you talking about?
Michael: It was real, Sara. You and me. It was real.
Um. You might have heard the joyous screaming that echoed all over the world when that scene aired, regardless of whether you watch the show or not. There was flailing, there was the high-pitched EEEE! noise of pure happiness that only a fangirl or fanboy receiving exactly what they wanted but never thought they would actually get can do full justice to. Because it’s real.
If that mountain of subtext that certainly wasted no time in crossing the line into text was not enough to convince you, here’s this: Michael and Sara are the perfect template for the literary idea of love as this mindless, all-consuming force. Though Sara tends to wear her emotions a little more transparently than Michael does, they are both essentially very cerebral people who have grown accustomed to being in control of themselves and their passions at all times. As Michael’s LLI will not allow him to function at all if he becomes too unfocused, and Sara has seen a little too clearly what life is like when one is close friends with Dionysus, it’s almost a matter of survival for them both. Therefore, the immediate strength of their attraction to one another is shocking to them both and is almost Shakespearean in its intensity. Unlike Romeo and Juliet, however, they do pull themselves together and do manage to keep their larger missions in mind: while Michael will risk a phone call in a state of high emotional distress, he is not throwing it all to the wind and rushing to Sara’s side, and Sara ultimately decides to leave the infirmary door unlocked so that the escape can take place because she believes that Lincoln is innocent, not because she has feelings for Michael. Michael and Sara are both very intelligent adults with eerie similarities in their abandonment issues who still function as adults, in spite of the fact that what Michael already feels and what Sara is rapidly falling into definitely counts as Big Epic Love. There is still conflict arising in their relationship from the fact that Michael got himself thrown into prison in order to save Lincoln and still considers his brother to be his first priority, not Sara, and from the fact that Sara is so accustomed to Michael looking and sounding sincere while he’s in the middle of spinning out sweet lies that she no longer knows what to believe. However, Sara is firmly in the sights of the conspiracy now, who knows that it can use her as a way to get to Michael and through him his brother. When they make their move, Michael is going to be there as the hero who uses his brain rather his brawn, Sara will be there as the damsel in distress who is still pretty formidable in her own right, and eardrums will burst all over the world.
Resources and Recs:
prisonbeak_fic: This is an all-purpose fic community, so you're rolling the dice a little bit, but I've found some gems through it.
michaelandsara: Specifically for fans of Michael and Sara in a romantic context.
msgenevieve: Beneath the Skin, The Good Doctor, Unanswered, The Most Powerful Drug, Trick of the Light (Trick of the Light is a multi-chapter fic, that link takes you to the final chapter, where other links are embedded to take you to all the other chapters). Save for 'Trick of the Light', all of these take place within the episodes themselves. MsG is very, very good at writing smoking hot fic set within the episodes.
foxxcub: Forty-Seven>, Pause.
Gravity by clutterklutz.
Five Times That Michael Will Never Hold Sara's Hand by meyerlemon.
I'm going to indulge in a bit of ego-strokeing and list my own Michael/Sara fics, too: Stumbling Like Alice and Three Beaches (a loose sequel to 'Stumbling Like Alice'), Driftwood and Lifeline (a much tighter sequel to 'Driftwood').