Good old William Fichtner. He’s survived a lot of rubbish in his time, mainly through being a good actor. He managed to make a whole episode of the dire fifth season of The West Wing watchable. He’s been a high-point of various series and movies, including the never-seen-in-the-UK series MDs, which co-starred John Hannah, and the I-wish-it-had-never-been-seen-in-the-UK movie Armageddon.
Lately, though he’s been reduced to being creepy in Invasion. As we all know, that’s now been cancelled, the moral of the story being never star in sci-fi shows written by former members of The Partridge Family who also happened to play little Joe Hardy of The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew fame (I’m not saying it’s an easily generalisable moral). What a shame.
But the good news is that now that show’s over, he’s free to appear as Prison Break’s equivalent of Lieutenant Gerard. He’s the one with the unenviable task of chasing Michael “I have a cunning plan” Schofield and the other prisoners through Dallas (yes, season two’s being shot in Dallas instead of Chicago – where will all that snow go?).
Incidentally, that move reunites him with Dominic Purcell, who plays Michael’s brother Lincoln, since they both appeared in the Christian Bale Matrix-a-like flick Equilibrium, a film that knows its audience so well, it actually had a “view fight scenes only” option on the DVD. Cracking scenes they were, too, since an entire new martial art, “gun kata”, was invented for the movie, but all the same…
