‘Break’ brothers are back

“PRISON BREAK” isn’t about anything as mundane as crime, punishment or escape. All those things are just pretenses to draw attention away from the thing about the show that’s the most conventional -- and the least audacious. The reality is this -- “Prison Break” has always been about family.

Its lead, Michael Scofield (Wentworth Miller), got himself arrested and sent to prison so that he might help his brother, the wrongly convicted Lincoln Burrows (Dominic Purcell), escape. The confusing conspiracy that they’re crawling away from involves Lincoln’s alleged murder of Terrence Steadman (Jeff Perry, doing prime-time double duty; he’s also Thatcher Grey, Meredith’s dad, on “Grey’s Anatomy”). Terrence’s sister, Caroline Reynolds (a glowingly fierce Patricia Wettig), became president at the end of Season 1, at least in part because of the staged murder of her brother, who in reality is stowed in a remote Montana mansion, cut off from the world.

Scofield and Steadman are more alike than they’d care to admit -- men who sacrificed themselves so that their siblings might improve their station.

When the second season, on hiatus since November, picks up again Monday (Fox, 8 p.m.), the two sacrificial sibs are on a collision course. Michael and Lincoln have successfully eluded capture over several days and states. Now teamed with Paul Kellerman (Paul Adelstein), the government agent who’d previously been tasked with capturing them, they’re headed to find Steadman and prove that not only is Lincoln innocent but also that the government had been responsible for setting him up.

“So this is the conspiracy, huh?” Michael asks Kellerman. “A buncha little boys in suits running around trying to kill each other. It’s pathetic.”

And then -- what exactly? As with last season, “Prison Break” precedes “24,” the show it owes most to in terms of basic conceit (along with “Lost”). But at least “24” has a logical conclusion each season. As did, it seemed, “Prison Break,” which debuted in fall 2005 and ended the season with the convicts’ escape.

To their credit, the show’s creators and producers have smartly elided some of the conundrums their format creates for them. This season’s hunt for the escaped cons has been occasionally riveting thanks to William Fitchner’s sallow-looking Alex Mahone, an agent dispatched to kill them, one by one. Over the weeks, though, he’s done away with some of the wrong characters. Peter Stormare’s chilling mobster John Abruzzi was one of the show’s most engrossing figures and likely one with the most back story to mine. Alas, he was killed first. Instead, we’re left with Rockmond Dunbar’s C-Note, whose struggles to unite his family have begun to tire. (At least we still have lecherous and heartless T-Bag, played by the sublime Robert Knepper.)

With a show centered on two hopeless stoics -- Michael and Lincoln, who have maybe five facial expressions between them -- disproportionate weight must fall on these secondary characters. And yet, for the story to progress, the brothers must move ever forward. Early in the series, we’re told that Michael has some sort of psychological condition that compels him to help others even to his own detriment. It’s certainly one of the only explanations for his relentlessness. He only sometimes radiates at a temperature above lukewarm -- that calculation played well inside prison walls, but now, on the run, it seems like a liability.

Indeed, once all parties are brought together in this episode, Michael, for the first time, is the least important person in the room, and it feels that way. “Terrence, you made every man in this room a prisoner, including yourself,” he gravely intones. “It’s time to set us free.”

Naturally, this sentence is quickly followed by a bullet, followed thereafter by Michael throwing his hands up and biting his lip hard (at least in theory) while realizing that there’s ever more ground to cover and ever fewer methods for so doing. Even if he meets a happy fate, will he know what to do with it?