- Title: The Pretender – Pilot
- wiki: link
“There are Pretenders among us. Geniuses with the ability to 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…”
Premiering in the Fall of 1996, The Pretender was a new take on the man-on-the-run premise with the wrongfully chased hero stopping along the way every week to help those in need. The show cast Michael T. Weiss as Jarod, a genius with the ability to adapt to any situation and in a short amount of time pick up the skills necessary to perform any profession he puts his mind to from doctor to race car driver. The “Pilot” episode finds a newly-escaped Jarod on the run from The Centre, a shadowy think tank which procured Jarod as a child through questionable means and use his genius for decades for equally questionable ends.
As Jarod searches for answers about his past and makes up for the simulations he ran since childhood, many of which he would later discover where used to take lives rather than save them, he does what he can by getting justice for others. In the “Pilot,” Jarod assumes the identity of a surgeon to get justice for a young boy who was wrongly injured in surgery by a drunk doctor (Stephen Tobolowsky) after the hospital administrator (Peter Michael Goetz) sweeps the entire incident under the rug. Staging an elaborate scene that The Mentalist would be proud of (given their similarities in their styles, I actually wonder if Patrick Jane was a fan of The Pretender) to force a confession and bring the circumstances to light, Jarod earns justice before moving on and leaving a souvenir for those hot on his trail (which will also become a running theme of the show).
Along with Jarod the show’s first episode also introduces Sydney (Patrick Bauchau and played in the flashback recordings of Jarod’s simulations by Alex Wexo), the scientist who raised Jarod in The Centre, and Miss Parker (Andrea Parker), the daughter of the head of The Centre brought in to lead the search to bring Jarod home. Several other characters tied to The Centre would be introduced over the next several episodes. Starting another of the show’s running themes involving Jarod’s fascination with various food and pop culture items denied him during his childhood, in the “Pilot” the lead character discovers ice cream for the first time although any discovery about his family would take far, far longer.
