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The Pretender | ||||||||||||||||||||||
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orn with a keen intellect and a talent for learning, Jarod was separated from his parents at a young age and taken to a facility called The Centre to become a part of a top-secret project. There he was trained by a man named Sydney (Bauchau) to become a "pretender," someone with the ability to emulate anyone. But as he matured, Jarod came to realize that he was being lied to about the purposes of the scenarios he was studying and that people were dying because of his work.
After spending 30 years in captivity, Jarod escapes and sets out to use his abilities to avenge those who have suffered injustice. He travels around the country assuming different identities and professions, all the while looking for clues to his own history and evading the team sent to track him down and return him to The Centre.
Heading the retrieval team is the determined Miss Parker (Andrea Parker), the daughter of a high-placed executive at The Centre. As Miss Parker doggedly tracks the wayward genius with the help of Sydney and a computer expert named Broots (Gries), Jarod, who has ties to Miss Parker from his childhood at The Centre, always manages stay one step ahead of his pursuers. Even more frustrating, he seems to have previously undisclosed information regarding the connection between the alleged suicide of Miss Parker's mother and a high-placed figure at The Centre, the nefarious Mr. Raines.
As the mysteries surrounding The Centre unfold, other pretenders are revealed, including Jarod's brother, Kyle (Jeffrey Donovan), who was raised by Mr. Raines to be free of conscience, and the insane Angelo (Paul Dillon), still in captivity at The Centre. In the two-part season finale, Jarod reunites with Kyle and comes closer than ever to the other members of his family, only to have them pulled away from him again by the agents of The Centre. Jarod, hindered but not deterred, sets out once again in search of another link to his past.
A pretense of the definitive
The premise of The Pretender was a fresh idea, ideally suited to the conventions of television. Like Jarod, the show had the potential to become something new each episode, exploring the story from inside the world of doctors, police officers, lawyers, criminals and more. Though this would seem to imply a world of possibilities, the show became bogged down by a formula from which it strayed little in the first season.
Each episode, Jarod finds someone to avenge and takes the same form of revenge on the guilty parties: He forces them to experience what their victims went through, to become, in fact, pretenders themselves. There's also the inevitable moment during each story where he discovers a popular toy, food or cultural icon that he wasn't exposed to as a child. This is a whimsical device at first, but it becomes contrived as the season wears on. What keeps the episodes from becoming repetitive, however, is the slowly introduced mythology surrounding The Centre, which is intriguing but not overly complicated (as it became in later seasons).
The talent of the three core cast members (Weiss, Parker and Bauchau) is apparent from the first episode. Weiss, in particular, deftly manages the difficult task of balancing Jarod's dark, angry side with a childlike quality. Parker plays her namesake character with a steely toughness that masks a barely visible vulnerability. And Bauchau uses his honeyed voice to full effect as Sydney, whose complicated relationship with Jarod often puts him in an awkward position between his protege and The Centre.
The slim DVD package contains only four two-sided discs, a telling sign of the underwhelming contents therein. The extras are limited to a three-part making-of featurette (listed as separate on the packaging), the original television promos and two commentary tracks (which repeat much of the information in the featurettes) on the first and final episodes. Disappointingly, Gries is the only cast member to participate in the commentaries, with Weiss and Bauchau giving brief interviews for the featurette. Parker is notably absent.
The extras may be minimal, but then so is the price. Economically speaking, a full season of episodes for $40 (or less at some online outlets) is not such a bad deal. —Cindy
Also in this issue: The Lone Gunmen—The Complete Series DVD and A Tale of Two Sisters DVD
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