Donald Self
Donald "Don" Self, (played by Michael Rapaport), is an ICE Homeland Security Investigations (DHS) special agent introduced in the fourth season premiere. After their arrest, he recruits the protagonists and several other characters into a covert "A-Team" of sorts in a mission to take down "The Company" once and for all. The character plays a prominent role in the last season. Not much is known about him but he is stated as a hardworking Homeland Security Agent who tries to bring down The Company but has yet to be successful. He has worked for five years to bring down The Company with James Whistler and Aldo Burrows (Michael and Lincoln's father), the latter has also tried to locate Scylla. According to a background check made on the character by The Company in the episode "Five the Hard Way", Self studied law on Long Island, before spending the next 18 years moving around DOD and DOJ. He began working for Homeland Security in 2002. Agent Self later told Mahone that he had a wife that died while giving birth - his unborn infant died too. A picture of his wife is seen at his desk several times and he once played a message of her voice at his answering machine. The truth about his wife's fate is revealed near the end of the season. Self's character plays the role of supervisor and ally to the team in the first half of the season, but later becomes an antagonist. In "Scylla", he tasks Lincoln Burrows and Michael Scofield with the mission of bringing down The Company and finding "Scylla", a key card that stores a wealth of information about The Company. He promises them full exoneration if the brothers can obtain Scylla and hand it over to the government. As Sucre, Mahone, Bellick, Sara, and Roland Glenn, a computer hijacker, come along with them, Self points out that if they do it there is no coming back and that he is their boss. The partnership with Self is not without friction, however. Most notably in "Shut Down" were Self, under pressure from his boss, reluctantly tries to cancel the mission after it is discovered that Scylla is six key cards, not just one. Self agrees to let them find the rest of the Scylla cards after the team successfully identifies the other cardholders. In other episodes throughout the season, however, the character provides active assistance to the team, like in "Safe and Sound" where Self, although overtly pessimistic about their chances, agree to help by first contriving an excuse to enter a cardholder’s office and later in the episode by luring someone out of his office for lunch, leaving the team to get to a safe which contains a Scylla card. He also has his computer analysts identify the rest of the cardholders from the picture taken with Michael's cell phone.
When General Krantz, the leader of the Company, discovers Self had images of him enhanced, Wyatt confronts Self and tells him that the General "likes his privacy." Taking Mahone's advice; to get aggressive, Self meets the General face-to-face and blackmails him, threatening to reveal to the public missions he was involved in, thus making it harder for the Company to remain covert. As the season unfolds, Self's character begins to show tendencies of a more ruthless side. He often threatens to kill those who oppose him, and in "Blow Out", after Mahone becomes a liability to the mission by getting arrested by the police, Self wants to have Mahone killed, something Michael refuses to do. Instead the team rescue Mahone, without Self’s assistance. In "The Legend" the team grows a dislike for Self when he seems unwilling to hold up his end of the deal and send Bellick’s body home after he died in the previous episode. However, in "Quiet Riot", he is actively supportive of the mission and seems to genuinely want to bring down The Company. Self's character shows his true colours in the episode "Selfless," were he apparently works with the team as they finally manage to recover the Scylla, but ultimately betrays both them and his government superiors by stealing the recovered Scylla and keeping it for himself. His real character motivation is revealed to be finding a 'buyer' for Scylla, an apparently private interest. Realizing that the needs to find a new buyer after the first one is killed, Self murders his partner, federal agent Miriam Holtz, in cold blood in order to get to T-Bag, a prisoner she was guarding. From this point onwards, the character begins to share a more active role in the plot by being out in the field and appearing in more action-oriented scenes. In the next few episodes, he is an antagonist to Michael and the rest of the team. After faking his death and attempting to frame Michael's team for it in "Deal or No Deal", Self uses T-Bag to track down the family of Gretchen Morgan, a former Company operative that has gone rogue. Self threatens the life of her daughter to gain her co-operation and the two characters share the same plotline for the next few episodes, as they use Gretchen's contacts to find another buyer for Scylla. However, at the end of the episode, Self finds himself with a problem: the mistrust of Michael Scofield, who removed a part of the Scylla device. While his apprehension of T-Bag led to Gretchen and a buyer, he cannot sell Scylla while it is incomplete. Thus, the episode ends with him ultimately demanding the missing part of Scylla from Michael, who instead suggests he "Come and get it."
In the next episode, "Just Business" Self seemingly makes a deal with Michael to sell Scylla together, while both parties are actually plotting against each other. Self and Gretchen plants an x-ray device in the warehouse to try and find the missing piece of scylla while the team are planning to take the rest of Scylla back from Self. In the end it is Self who is successful, as he and Gretchen obtains the missing piece and head out to meet Gretchen’s contact, a conduit named Viking. Self’s character is again shown to be ruthless when, after asking Viking if the buyer of Scylla is coming, Self shoots Viking and his bodyguards and tosses their corpse into the sea so that he doesn’t have to share a cut of the money with them. Self is next seen waiting with Gretchen for the Scylla buyer. After getting a call from Gretchen's sister, Rita, Gretchen tells Self that the company has T-Bag and unfortunately he might have told the company where they are. So before Lincoln and Sucre could track them, Self and Gretchen destroy their cell phones and flee. They're next seen at a phone store and look injured with bloody scratches on their faces. They buy a new phone and tell the store owner not to tell anyone they were there. They head to the warehouse to wait for the buyer. The buyer arrives and Self and Gretchen hold the buyer at gunpoint. Gretchen forces Self to hand Scylla to the buyer or they will be in grave danger. Self hands over Scylla. They hear noise and Self and Gretchen go to investigate, but are betrayed by the buyer when he points his gun at them and they run for cover and a shootout occurs. The buyer shoots Self in the shoulder and flees with the money and Scylla. Later they are to work with Lincoln and T-Bag to recover Scylla. Self’s character plays a less prominent role in the season’s final episodes, where he works with his new team to find Scylla and track down the new buyer, which turns out to be Lincoln and Michael’s mother, Christina Rose Scofield. When the team fails in their assignment, the general decides to punish them by ordering the death of one of their family members and singles out Self's wife, who is actually alive and in a persistent vegetative state due to Self's drunk and reckless behavior. Self then escapes, but gets arrested when at the hospital, where one of Christina's men injects him with a serum that gradually leaves him in the same state his wife was in. He refuses to help federal agents with locating Burrows and Scofield because they failed at protecting him, and is left in his vegetative state for the rest of his life. In his final appearance in the epilogue of the Series Finale, set four years after the events of the rest of the episode, Self is revealed to be living at a rest facility, using a wheelchair, mute and drooling.
Read more about this topic: Prison Break Characters, Main Characters