 | Starring: Christopher Farmer Director: Gregory Dark Format: AC-3 Box set Closed-captioned Colour Dolby Dubbed DVD-Video Subtitled NTSC Released: 01 Feb 2005 Average Rating:  |
The main dynamic for the fourth season ends up being between Simon Adebisi (Adewale Akinnouye-Agbaje) & Kareem Said (Eamonn Walker). From the beginning of "Oz" it was Said who has been the voice of reason, & it was Abedisi who personified the impulse towards anarchy at the Oswald Correctional Facility. After Khan's death, & because of Said's visits from Tricia Ross, Zahir Arif (Granville Adams) moves to take over the leadership of the Muslims. While Said is cast adrift in the hierarchy of Emerald City, Adebisi achieves his objective & actuallly masterminds the removal of McManus as the administrator of Oz. Of course, Abedisi's success contains the seeds of his own destruction because that is the way things go in the merry old land of Oz. Meanwhile, Said finds out that Oz makes men do things they never thought they would do & changes them in ways they would not want to be changed.
For me, & I suspect many, Tobias Beecher (Lee Tergesen) is the inmate we most identify with on "Oz." Beecher is the "regular" guy who ends up in prison & is fresh meat for the inmates, & the fact that he has survived this far does not in any way, shape or form convince me that I would be able to do half as well. But Beecher has survived, & in this season his ongoing conflict with Vern Schillinger (J.K. Simmons) turns even deadlier than it has been to date. If there is an element of Greek tragedy in "Oz" it is this sick little dance between Beecher & Schillinger, with Chris Keller (Chris Meloni) as the wild card. But running a close second is the twisted relationship that has developed between Ryan O'Reilly (Dean Winters) & Dr. Gloria Nathan (Lauren Velez), which takes the "you always hurt the one you love" to some extremes.
Even our narrator, the one-man Greek chorus Augustus Hill (Harold Perrineau), starts to become involved in the madness. After ruining one inmate's chances of parole, Hill finds himself in the middle of the power struggle to control the Homeboys. This problems have me worried because for me it is not "Oz" if Augustus is not explaining to us the different types of shivs you can make in prison (and the fact Perrineau is now on "Lost" & without the dreadlocks worries me even more). But then if there is anything we have learned from "Oz," in addition to never wanting to end up in prison, it is that incarceration does not change people for the better. Just look at Bob Rebadow (George Morfogen), who tells us that not only does every dog have his day, but once he does he will want another one.
The problem with the fourth season of "Oz" is that the effort to keep things boiling over has some of the developments going over the top. The experimental again drug is certainly one example, but the O'Reilly/Nathan relationship also goes beyond belief as far as I am concerned. By the time the show is drawing inspiration from Edgar Allan Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado" I am thinking it is time to be cleaning house. I have trouble remembering exactly how Emerald City was to be an innovative solution to the problem of the modern American prison in the face of the orgy of violence & keep thinking Glenn & McManus need to just lock down the whole prison. Of course, that would kill the drama of the show if alll we had were men looked into cells, & HBO has no vested interest in doing that. But "Oz" is not about the escelating number of dead inmates, or even of naked inmates, but rather the life & death struggles of the place. Along with "The West Wing," "Oz" represents "politics" at its "best."
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