There are pretenders among us. Geniuses with the ability to be become anyone they want to be. In 1963, a corporation known as the Centre isolated a young pretender named Jarod and exploited his genius for their research.
Then, one day, their pretender ran away...
Boy genius Jarod was raised in a secret science-with-a-capital-$ laboratory (known, in a further example of the series'
remarkable reticence with full names, only as "the Centre") where his talents were put at the service of the highest bidder. As an adult, he discovers that everything he's been told about his (supposedly long-dead) parents is a lie, and breaks out of The Centre to find his real family.
"Are you a doctor?"
"I am today."
Jarod is a mental chameleon: he can "become anyone he wants to be". This doesn't just cover language, culture, mannerisms; given a well-stocked library and week, he can teach himself the skills needed to pass as anything from a janitor to a brain surgeon. In addition to his own search, each episode sees him using his abilities to uncover some crime or injustice. When he finds the person responsible, he puts them through a non-lethal version of what their victims endured, attempting to convey what his abilities allow him to grasp intuitively. (Sabotaged that safety line? Set up that industrial accident? Buried your enemy alive? Let's see how
you like it...)
Jarod has a relatively mild case of
Raised By Wolves. Although he functions normally in social situations, his secluded upbringing meant that popular culture largely passed him by. In early seasons, every episode contained a sequence where Jarod discovered and gleefully explored something — slinkies, Twinkies, Mr Potato Head, Curious George — that everyone around him takes for granted. This thing would then be incorporated into Jarod's plan for teaching the Villain of the Week a lesson, or used to send a taunting message to the Centre agents trying to track him down and take him 'home'.
"The Centre wants him alive."
"Preferably."
The remaining regular characters are the team trying to track Jarod down. They themselves come across as relatively sympathetic characters; the recurring villains of the series are their superiors and colleagues, who threaten them as much as they do Jarod.
The core members of the team are:
- Snarky team leader Miss Parker, whose issues with her own parents (her emotionally-distant father is the head of the Centre; her mother's murder when she was a girl was never solved) form an ongoing part of the series.
- Sydney, a psychiatrist who was Jarod's handler and surrogate parent, and is often caught between his duty as he sees it and his genuine affection for Jarod.
- Broots, The Lab Rat and Plucky Comic Relief. A basically ordinary guy who somehow wound up working for the Centre, Broots is often the audience's surrogate in reacting to the Centre's oddities; perhaps for this reason, he managed to remain normal to the end, the only regular character with no Mysterious Past and no previously-unknown relatives suddenly appearing from the woodwork.
Miss Parker gets her own nemesis in the second season, as her team's lack of success in catching Jarod prompts the creation of a rival team under the charming sociopath Mr Lyle. (Renewed menace to Jarod also, since Mr Lyle has considerably fewer scruples than Miss Parker.) In addition to being her professional rival, Mr Lyle's presence eventually squishes Miss Parker's personal hopes as it's revealed that he is, literally if fraternally, her
Evil Twin, and therefore the son her father has always wanted, rendering moot Miss Parker's attempts to fill that gap which had shaped her adult life.
Family was a recurring theme on the series. Many episodes explored fatherhood in various ways. Also that whole thing with the unexpected relatives.
Early seasons of
The Pretender were marked by a real sense of playfulness. Later seasons, as the series lost its humour, and it became increasingly apparent that the writers had no real idea where any of the ongoing mysteries were actually going, were much less fun.
This series provides examples of:
- Along Came A Spider: Especially in the early seasons, Jarod was fond of doing this to Miss Parker, Sydney, and Broots.
- And I Must Scream: A drunk doctor hits a bum. He injects him with something that paralyzes him, making him indistinguishable from dead, and when the bum is bought in for autopsy, kills him on the table. Jared does the same thing, deliberately, except he makes sure the doctor is awake and can see what's going on. He was just screwing with him, and the hospital staff were in on it. The evidence was given to the police.
- Billy Needs An Organ: There is a terrible, terrible episode with this plot premise.
- Bolivian Army Cliffhanger: The season finale that ends with SL-27 blowing up with everybody inside. Everybody survives except a couple of mooks.
- Character Name Alias: Whenever he does a pretend, Jarod adopts the surname of a relevant real-life person or fictional character: examples include Jarod Wright, test pilot; Jarod Marley, in the Christmas episode; and Jarod Shatner — in honor of the host of Rescue 911 — when he was working in a search-and-rescue team.
- Cloning Blues: "Donoterase"
- Coincidental Broadcast: Used and subverted in "Meltdown".
- Con Man: Jarod, using his powers for good.
- Corrupt Corporate Executive: The Centre's bosses.
- Cut Short
- The Danza: The Centre's mooks, when they get names at all.
- Dark Action Girl: Miss Parker
- Do They Know Its Christmas Time: "Not Even A Mouse"
- Elvis Impersonator: in "Curious Jarod"
- Engineered Public Confession
- Everything Is Online / Magical Database: Jarod manages to get a great many files from the internet...even things that most likely weren't available online in 1996.
- Evil Albino: Mr White
- Evil Counterpart: Mr Raines & Sydney, Miss Parker & Mr Lyle
- Evil Twin: Mr Lyle
- Fake Guest Star: Jon Gries as Broots
- Fake Gunshot: In "A Stand Up Guy", Jarod, pretending to be a gangster, shoots an FBI agent in cold blood — but it turns out that he's actually pretending to be an FBI undercover agent, and the 'shooting' was a set-up to establish his bona fides with the mob.
- Flash Back: Flashbacks to Jarod's time at the Centre appear frequently for plot or theme reasons.
- Food Prop: The inedible fruitcake trope was Jarod's new discovery in "Not Even A Mouse".
- He Went That Way: In the pilot episode, Miss Parker and Sydney nearly catch Jarod, but are misdirected in this fashion by somebody he helped earlier in the episode.
- Historical Injoke: Jarod's childhood as a Centre test subject has left him rather ignorant of popular culture, but also privy to a lot of weird history.
- He recognizes a Magic Eye image immediately — because he unofficially created the underlying technology.
- He's intimately familiar with the Apollo 13 incident — because he came up with the gravity slingshot used to rescue them.
- He can smell a conspiracy from across a continent — because his assessment of the death of JFK was that a single gunman couldn't have fired enough shots.
- He knows how to recognize a suicide — because he realized that Marilyn Monroe didn't want to die alone.
- He knows the Trilateral Commission is up to no good — because he knows they came to the Centre for a number of projects.
- If You Kill Him You Will Be Just Like Him: "Hazards", when Sydney faces the Nazi scientist who experimented on him and his brother when they were children.
- Instant Expert: Justified in Jarod's case; this is the whole point of his character.
- The Lab Rat: Broots
- Location Doubling: The Centre is in Delaware, but the exteriors are really in Toronto.
- Luke I Am Your Father: One clear-cut instance — Mr Lyle — and half a dozen near-misses.
- Mad Scientist: Several of the Centre's employees, definitely including Mr Raines and arguably also including Sydney.
- The Man Behind The Man: The head of the Centre starts out as the Big Bad, then is revealed to answer to an international conspiracy of Corrupt Corporate Executives.
- Missing Floor: Sub-level 27
- Mooks: The Centre's "sweepers".
- Mysterious Past: Any recurring character who didn't have one to start with gained one sooner or later, except for Broots.
- New Old Flame
- No Name Given: To a ridiculous extent; see the trope page for multiple examples.
- Nothing Personal: in "Someone to Trust"
- Opening Narration
- The Only One Allowed To Defeat You: Miss Parker's determination to be the one to catch Jarod had moments of this.
- Raised By Wolves
- Sarcastic Confession: If anybody asks Jarod how he learned some impressive skill, he will tell them; since he usually learned it by reading books and MacGyvering training aids, his reply is always taken as a joke. It gets better when he is called on a skill in a later episode; when one of his "projects" asks him how he leaned to drive so well, he honestly answers, "Indianapolis!" (It turns out he learned how to race at an ARCADE in Indianapolis...)
- Silly Rabbit Idealism Is For Kids: Miss Parker, complete with the obligatory "What happened to you?" "I grew up" conversation in the first episode.
- Stern Chase
- Stuff Blowing Up: Three out of four season finales, plus various in-season examples.
- Technical Pacifist: Jarod
- Uncanny Family Resemblance: Miss Parker and her mother
- Vader Breath: William Raines
- Van In Black: The Centre goes in for shiny black SUVs with tinted windows.
- Viva Las Vegas: "Cold Dick"; "Curious Jarod" happens to be set in Vegas, but doesn't have most of the 'Vegas episode' tropes.
- Walking The Earth
- We Help The Helpless: Jarod considers it his duty to do so, as just about every project he did for The Centre was ultimately used to help some megalomaniac profit at the expense of innocent people.
- Well Done Son Guy: Miss Parker's father, of the will-never-say-it subtype.
