It’s not the
character, let’s make that absolutely clear. The character is the lowest of the
low, the vilest of the many reprobates our hero Michael Scofield encounters on
his ridiculous-yet-awesome sojourn into the bowels of Fox River Penitentiary. T-Bag
is a bigoted rapist and murderer lacking the merest hint of a conscience, homing
in on the vulnerable like a human shark scenting blood.
It’s the actor. I imagine that the day he was cast in the role, Robert Knepper must have decided that parts like this don’t come along very often, and that he was going to make Theodore Bagwell (eight counts of murder, life without parole) into a fiend for the ages. Every line is delivered with salacious glee, sullen menace or twitchy animal dread. Knepper’s portrayal is articulate, cunning, playfully sly and savagely cruel, the Prison Break universe’s answer to the Joker. He’s one of the most watchable members of a cast where the acting quality varies considerably (coughcough Peter Stromare coughcough).
As the most feared and despised man in Fox River, Theodore is perhaps unrealistically far from the type; rather than the dull-witted brute you might expect, T-Bag’s back-story reveals him to be surprisingly intelligent, with his early academic promise ruined by parental abuse. The combination of calculating plotting and primitive survival instinct, of disarming charm and casual viciousness, produces something unexpected for mainstream American genre television: a rounded monster.
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