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Truly amazing episode, you wont be disappointed watching this short documentary.
Spoiler:
Dwight Worker decides to smuggle cocaine to America, concealed under a phony shoulder cast. But when he's busted in Mexico City and sent to the notorious "Black Palace" prison, his life becomes a living hell. After fighting off a gang of rapists, a near fatal stabbing in the stomach and a stint in the psychiatric ward, he vows to get out or die trying. Falling in love with a visitor gives him the opportunity he's been waiting for, and on his wedding day, he makes an audacious attempt to escape while dressed as a woman...
This is an astoundingly dramatic true-life story, and as a narrative just absurdly well-structured by happenstance, to the extent that we can trust it.
Spoiler:
And granting for a moment that all of it actually occurred as shown, something that really intrigues me is that Barbara woman. I mean the fact that she can exist in reality. If I met her in a work of fiction it would take a lot of hardcore narrative engineering to make her seem remotely plausible to me: a single mother in Mexico decides to visit some gringo prisoner with her friend, starts a correspondence with him, they fall in love, and though he'll be out in five years, Barbara's like, "Screw that, homie, we should totally break you out of this place where escapees are shot on sight and no one's busted out since 1912, and here's my ridiculously high-concept but actually very detailed and James-Bond-caliber plan."
How can this woman be real? I mean, she's alone with a kid, and that by itself is pretty draining, yet somehow a strange confluence of factors have granted her the awesome ambition and world-class skill to mount this kind of operation? It's just very weird. And very cool, if true.
And she's movie-star good-looking, too! Both of them, actually. HOW IS THIS REAL
pretty weird though, at the end i expected it to say something like "then he did X years in jail in the USA" but instead they just settled down and had a life. is it wise/normal to publicly speak about ur escaping of a prison when u are still technically an escapee? :s
although it was 35 years ago and a different country, still feels weird to me
Great ep, but I thought that his mountain climbing accident story was a bit much. To do something like that, having a good story isn't enough. You have to lie really well and answer questions without fear. Any hesitation or facial expression indicating deception can blow up the spot. The mountain climbing accident doesn't work because there are too many questions and the guy stuck out like a sore thumb. They look for drug smugglers and I'm sure he fit the profile which is how he got caught.
Plus, risking death by escaping when he could get out in 5 years was too risky imo. Better to serve it out and stay alive and forfeit his relationship than die stupidly. The guard almost smacked his ass on the way out...a few inches from getting caught. Looks awesome when it works, but really really dumb when it doesn't.
This is an astoundingly dramatic true-life story, and as a narrative just absurdly well-structured by happenstance, to the extent that we can trust it.
Spoiler:
And granting for a moment that all of it actually occurred as shown, something that really intrigues me is that Barbara woman. I mean the fact that she can exist in reality. If I met her in a work of fiction it would take a lot of hardcore narrative engineering to make her seem remotely plausible to me: a single mother in Mexico decides to visit some gringo prisoner with her friend, starts a correspondence with him, they fall in love, and though he'll be out in five years, Barbara's like, "Screw that, homie, we should totally break you out of this place where escapees are shot on sight and no one's busted out since 1912, and here's my ridiculously high-concept but actually very detailed and James-Bond-caliber plan."
How can this woman be real? I mean, she's alone with a kid, and that by itself is pretty draining, yet somehow a strange confluence of factors have granted her the awesome ambition and world-class skill to mount this kind of operation? It's just very weird. And very cool, if true.
And she's movie-star good-looking, too! Both of them, actually. HOW IS THIS REAL
This story is really hard to believe, but it is shown on National Geographic, so maybe it isn't a bowl of fudge after all.
As for the woman, she has my last name. If you web search it, you'd see just about all of them are pretty crazy people.
Why are they in Getty Images as well? That seems to make this story a little more true. Edit to add: Oh, I see why. They wrote a book about it back in the 70s also.
The guy's narration in this one is pretty interesting. He sounds mostly colloquial and just-a-guy-recounting-a-long-very-intense-story, but there are these turns of phrases and moments where he describes specific emotions, psychological states, and internal processes that border on the literary. (Also the structure and pacing are neat as hell given the spoken-word format, like he's prepped this material fairly well, which makes sense.)
I had seen a bunch of epps and thought they were too formulaic. They all went like this
After they got out and are now back home in freedom they tell the story of how they decided to do it in a way that sounds innocent like anyone could find them self in that situation and anyone could have ended up doing it.
Then they tell about their capture and hard time, this is the nightmare come true part.
Then they tell how they fortuitously got out early by royal pardon, extradition, fleeing while on bail or whatever.
But there was one epp that did it all like normal then as they are interviewing them (assumed to be back home in freedom like all the other epps) the camera zooms out and they are still in hell hole Mexican prison and resigned to rotting there for the next 15 years. It was a very powerful piece of TV the way they did it.
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