Summary
Fun, but no more logical than usual, “Prison Break” brings us closer than ever to the season finale.
This recap of National Treasure: Edge of History Season 1 Episode 8, “Prison Break”, contains spoilers.
Breaking out of prison is, by all accounts, somewhat difficult to do. They’re kind of built to make that difficult. But breaking in, at least according to National Treasure: Edge of History, is pretty easy. So easy, in fact, that a few kids can figure it out in five minutes, and even getting back out again doesn’t seem too much trouble, though at least that provides just a little resistance.
National Treasure: Edge of History Season 1 Episode 8 Recap
The Prison Break
I’m bringing this up since, as we learned at the end of Episode 7, Jess thinks that Billie is going to make an attempt on her father’s life, and the only way to save him is to break into the prison where he has spent the last two decades of his life and break him out. As we learn at the top of “Prison Break”, Billie is more interested in harming Jess than Rafael, but admittedly as a lesson to him — she thinks he killed her brother, Sebastian, and wants him to know what it feels like to lose the person he loves the most.
This is Billie’s big villain moment. There’s no ambiguity anymore. She has done her whole “frenemies” shtick in Episode 6 and now she’s getting down to brass tacks. She means business. It’s about time someone did.
Oren is the only member of Jess’s Scooby gang who thinks the prison break is a terrible idea, so he heads back to the U.S., but not before clueing the others in on how to get inside. They can use the water runoff system that’s intended to prevent the place from flooding. Since Tasha is a master hacker, she can use a repurposed algorithm to empty one of the pipes, giving Jess a brief window to get in, get Rafael, and get out again. As I said at the top, getting in is simple. But getting out is a bit harder.
This is mostly due to the fact that Rafael is in the midst of his own escape attempt. While Jess was figuring out how to break in to save him, he was figuring out how to break out to save her. He’s not in his bed when she arrives, which throws her timing out of whack, so she has to go along with Rafael’s plan, which involves wriggling through a convenient tunnel, navigating the old cell block, and then cutting through the outside fence without being shot dead by a sniper. That latter stage of Rafael’s plan requires two people, one to run and another to blind the sniper with a piece of metal, so I have no idea how he was intending to get out before Jess arrived, but let’s not linger on the details or we’ll be here all night.
What are Liam and Myles up to?
While all this is going on in Mexico, Liam and Myles have teamed up Stateside in order to figure out where Jess is. Since Billie tracks everyone she interacts with like a paranoid maniac, they can use her own technology to track Jess down. This, though, involves ambushing a couple of her goons, which would be dangerous anyway without Liam being completely unable to stop himself from doing that whole “answering the phone to the villain after taking out one of their henchmen” routine. This, Myles angrily tells him, means that Billie can track them, but they manage to find some evidence that it was Billie who killed not only Liam’s grandfather but also his father.
The ending
At the end of “Prison Break”, Jess and Rafael are indeed able to escape from prison, aided by someone shooting the sniper who was seconds away from killing Rafael. They send Ethan and Tasha back to the U.S., where the FBI are waiting for them, and then go on another brief errand until they’re interrupted by Billie.
Earlier in the episode, Rafael had received some shoes that he had written off as divine intervention, but they were really a gift from Billie, who had placed a tracker in them. It was Kacey who shot the sniper, allowing Jess and Rafael to escape. Billie was biding her time so that the two of them could figure out the map that the opened puzzle boxes form.
Who should show up at this point than the long-haired, slightly scruffy-looking guy who we first thought was a spy for Billie and then assumed was an agent of the real Salazar. He claims to be trying to stop Salazar, though, but before he can explain any further he’s shot dead by Kacey. With her father held at gunpoint, Jess surrenders, leaving the episode on quite the cliffhanger as we get closer and closer to the season finale.
You can stream National Treasure: Edge of History Season 1 Episode 8, “Prison Break” exclusively on Disney+.
