My first exposure to The Pretender was when the first season was released on DVD.  I enjoyed the first batch of show quite a bit and thought that the second season was even stronger.  Now, some programs come into their own and really start to pick up stream in their third season, while other series have pretty much run out of ideas and start to stall.  Unfortunately, The Pretender falls into to later category.  While there are still some good episodes in this set of shows, the overall plot seems to be meandering around and a lot of very stupid things start happening at The Centre.  While it's still not a bad show, this season isn't as engaging as the previous two.
 
Series recap:

There is a certain type of genius known as a "pretender."  These gifted people can put themselves into other people's shoes, actually becoming someone else.  They think, feel, and react the same way that the actual person would.  In 1963, a corporation known as The Centre (sic) found one of these geniuses, a small child named Jarod, and trained him.  They taught him to simulate events and solve problems.  Jarod could become Lee Harvey Oswald to discover whether he acted alone, or an astronaut on Apollo 13 to help them find a way back home.

Jarod spent his childhood and early adult years locked up in the Centre, having no friends or companions aside from his trainer, a psychologist named Sydney.  He spent his life running simulations; becoming another person so he could discover what they were feeling and thinking.  He's done literally thousands of these, being just about every type of person imaginable.  But when Jarod discovered that the information he was coming up with was being used to make weapons and to harm people, he escaped.

Now free for the first time in his life, Jarod travels the country using his special talents to right wrongs and get justice for the disenfranchised.  He is also searching for his parents, and trying to discover who he really is.  The Centre isn't happy that they've lost someone who was so valuable to them though, so they have assigned Miss Parker, their tough-as-nails former chief of intelligence and daughter of a high ranking executive, to track him down.  Along with Sydney, and assisted by Broots, a technical guru at the Centre, Ms. Parker plays a game of cat-and-mouse with Jarod; trying to catch him, but always arriving just a little too late.

The show isn't just stand alone episodes though.  There is an over ridding story, or two actually.  First Jarod is looking for his parents. The second related mystery has to do with Miss Parker's mother.  She killed herself in an elevator at The Centre when Ms. Parker was a child, but Miss Parker, thanks to clues from Jarod, is no longer certain that the fatal gunshot wound was self-inflicted.  She's trying to find out the truth about what has really been going on, while still chasing Jarod down.

The Third Season:

Spoiler warning: Though there are no major spoilers concerning the third season in this review, I do discuss the events that took place in the second season.  If you haven't seen all of season two yet, you might want to skip down to the technical section.

The second season ended with quite a nice cliffhanger: All of the major characters were in a sub-level of a Centre building, when a large bomb went off.   Walls of fire swept through the corridors heading towards Jarod, Miss Parker, and the rest.   How could they have possibly escaped?

Well that's this first disappointment in this season.  As the first episodes opens, we discover that just about everyone of fine.  No explanation as to how they escaped, just that everyone survived with nothing worse than a few scratches.  Yes, Sydney was harmed, but his disability only last two episodes, then he gets better.  What a cop-out.

Just as viewers come to terms with the fact that the writers took the easy way out on the cliffhanger, another absurdity is revealed:  Mr. Lyle (Jamie Denton) is back.  You remember him, he's  the Centre agent who went rouge, tried to kill Mr. Parker, murdered an office full of Centre employees, stole some of their secret data, and tried to sell it on the open market.  He then killed Jarod's brother and threatened Miss Parker, Sydney and Broots.  Well, apparently all is forgiven, because he's been given his old job back.  The only explanation is that the powers that be realize how efficient he is.  There's only so far you can suspend your disbelief, and though I like the character, I couldn't swallow the fact that he was given a position of power again.

While the second managed to create a good balance between the events at the Centre and Jarod's pretends, this time around the Centre takes prominence and that hurts the show.  In one episode Jarod only makes a brief appearance which is odd since the show is named after him.  The Centre just isn't as interesting or fun as what Jarod is doing, and the more that they show of this mysterious organization, the more ludicrous it seems.

Even though the Centre takes over the show, two of the most interesting characters from that place are hardly in this season.  Both Dr. Raines, the villain viewers love to hate, and Angelo another person who was stolen from his parents as a child, are pretty much absent from this season instead Lyle and his accomplice  Bridgitte (Pamela Gidley) are brought back (and the latter's return is even more implausabily than the former's.)

Just about every episode contained some really stupid part that made it hard for viewers to believe the show.  Form a man with a gunshot wound climbing around a mountain with no discomfort to the Centre spending a lot of time to fry an old man's brain instead of just killing him, there was something that was unbelievable.  This reaches an apex in the episode Betrayal, in which Broots witnesses an assassin kill everyone in a Centre office.  The powers that be think that Broots may be the killer, although they have a surveillance tape that shows he's innocent, so they declare him persona non grata.  When he calls saying that he's running from an assassin, they don't send out a sweeper team to bring him in.  They disconnect his phone.  Why wouldn't they want to bring him in if he's the killer, and if he's not wouldn't they want to protect him?

That's not to say that all of the episodes are bad, they aren't.  There are several good shows in the middle of the season when they get back to basics and have Jarod take on a new profession in order to help someone.  One of the better ones was End Game, part of a two-part cross-over with the show The Profiler.  In this show, Jarod plays a detective looking for a kidnaped chess prodigy and is aided by Dr. Sam Waters (Ally Walker).  Though the episode of The Profiler that this show ties in with isn't included, the show stands well on its own and is quite enjoyable.

The ending of this season, like the previous two, was very good too.  It is quite suspenseful and action filled, and it ends on a very good cliffhanger.  Hopefully that will be resolved with more care than was given to the resolution of last season's ending.

20th Century Fox did a great job with the packaging of this show.  The season of 21 hour long shows comes on four double sided DVDs.  The discs come in a pair of thinpacks, with two discs per case.  The thinpacks are enclosed in a slipcase and the whole package is slightly wider than a single Amaray.  With many people's DVD collections growing by leaps and bounds, space is becoming a problem for many people, myself included.  Making this season fit into such a compact space is a great advantage to me.

The menus for this set are fairly standard, but there is one aspect that I don't like.  There isn't a "Play All" feature on the discs.  After each episode is finished, the viewer is brought to the sub-menu for that episode.  They have to cursor back to the main menu and then go back to the episode selection menu, pick the episode and go to the episode sub-menu, then they can play the show.  This is unnecessarily complicated.

Audio:

This show has stereo surround audio track in the original English, as well as dubs in Spanish and French, also in stereo.  I viewed the show in English, and it sounded very good.  The dialog was clear and easy to understand, and the background music came through clearly.  There wasn't any hiss or dropouts, and the show had a fairly good dynamic range for a TV show.  A nice sounding disc.  There are optional subtitles in English, Spanish and French.

Video:

The show is presented with an anamorphically enhanced widescreen (1.78:1) image.  Since this is a recent show, it looks very good, with nice colors and sharp definition. The good news is that the edge enhancement that marred the first season is missing from this set, which makes the picture look much better.  There was a little aliasing, but this was minor.  Overall a very nice looking image.

Extras:

There are three commentary tracks included with this set.  Craig W. Van Sickle and Steven Long Mitchell the co-creators and executive producers to the show comment on the episodes Crazy, In the Hour of Our Death, and Wake Up.  Like the previous commentaries they were fun to listen to and had some interesting bits of information.  There were long gaps in the commentary where you just end up watching the show, but it was bearable.

The making of featurette runs about 25 minutes long and is spread across three discs.  I would have preferred that they put the whole thing on the last disc.  It was interesting, mainly consisting of the creators and actors talking about different aspects of the show.  The only problem is that they give away plot points before you reach them in the series.  I'd recommend watching these after all the episodes.
 
Final Thoughts:

The show really takes a turn for the worse in this season.  The set starts out particularly bad, but it slowly improves as the season progresses.  One of the problems is that more time is spent on the events at the Centre, most of which have nothing to do with catching Jarod.  There are a lot of silly things that happen too, people trusting individuals that they know are untrustworthy and the like, and some glaring plot holes.  The best shows in this set are very good, but there are just fewer of them than the previous seasons.  I was really disappointed in the overall quality of the writing on these episodes and really can't recommend the season.  Despite these flaws, hard core fans of the show will want to pick up this set for the several good episodes.  More casual viewers would be better off renting it.