The final season of The Pretender has finally made it to DVD.  After a mediocre third season this fourth one picks up a bit, but only a bit.  Learning a bit from the previous year's show, this time around they move the spotlight back to Jarod and his adventures and deemphisise the dealings with the Centre, but only slightly.  The creators seemed to be running out of ideas too, borrowing from movies and even repeating plot elements from previous seasons.  After watching this season it's clear that the show had run its course, and was ripe for cancellation.

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 Jarod's trainer 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 family, the people he was stolen from decades ago.  The second plot line involves the events that take place at the Centre.  Ms. Parker is still searching for answers about her mother; who killed her, why she was killed, and what she was trying to do before she died.

The fourth season:

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

There was quite a cliff-hanger at the end of the third season.  Jarod had found his father at last, and the pair of them had rescued his adolescent clone from the Dr. Raines when a sweeper team from the Centre arrives.  Ms. Parker takes a bullet meant for her father in the back, Jarod is recaptured at last, and his father and clone seem to escape.

This show is good with coming up with cliffhanger season endings, but it's not so great at resolving them.  This season starts off with Jarod in the Centre, tortured by the despicable Mr. Lyle to break his spirit.  There wouldn't be much of a show with the star confined however, so by the time the first episode hits the half way mark he's out and about, helping people once more.  By the end of the first episode everything's been resolved and nothing has changed.  There's no team sent to look for Jarod's father and clone (not even Jarod is looking for them) and Ms. Parker's back at the Centre, not seeming too upset that someone there ordered her father killed.  The only real change is that Mr. Parker has taken off and is missing.

If that last plot point sounds familiar, that's because it is.  The second season started off with Mr. Parker MIA, and no one quite sure where he'd gone.  Deja Vu seems to be the catch phrase for this season, with a more than a couple of shows using recycled plots and taking ideas from movies.  That wouldn't be too bad if they were good shows, but these rehashed plots are some of the weaker episodes in the season.

There's the Blair Witch Project episode where Jarod stumbles across a video camera with a tape of home movies in it.  The movies show a mother and daughter on vacation and it ends with them being attacked by "the Corn Man" an old legend about a serial killer who lives in the desert.  Replaying the tape over and over, Jarod retraces the women's last steps but encounters a lot of resistance from the local police.  This was so obviously trying to cash in on Blair Witch that it wasn't even funny.  The home made video, the local legend, and interviewing people about the Corn Man was just too similar.  At one point someone even makes a little man out of corn husks and string, just like the stick men in Blair Witch.  The problem with the episode is that the plot doesn't hang together at all.  After everything has been resolved you realize that people's actions just didn't make sense.  A lot of people were just acting weird so that they would seem suspicious.

This season also pays homage to that classic film Kindergarten Cop.  Jarod has to become an elementary school teacher in order to discover which of his students is a witness in hiding, and he has to find him before the killer also on the child's track does.  A rather uninspired episodes that copies the Schwarzenegger film with only very minor changes.  Even the scene where all of the single mothers start hitting on the hunky new teacher is reproduced.

The thing that detracts the most from this season is all the time devoted to the machinations and plots at the Centre.  There is yet another mysterious evil person who is put in over Ms. Parker's head.  (As has happened a couple of times in the past.)  More mysteries about Catherine Parker's death are revealed, some secrets from Mr. Raines past come to light, and Sydney, Parker and Broots stumble across another code word that they spend a good amount of time trying to track down.  These are all things that we've seen before, and honestly they weren't that intriguing the first time around.

The problem with the events at the Centre is that though there are a lot of mysteries and enigmas, none of them are ever satisfactorily resolved.  It's like Mr. Parker's return in the second season.  After spending episodes wondering if he's alive and safe, he just turns up and tells his daughter not to worry that everything's under control.  End of mystery.  There is an episode that deals with Thomas, Ms. Parker's lover who was killed in season three, and pretends to wrap that story line up, but nothing remarkable is revealed.  Would anyone be surprised to learn that the Centre was behind his murder?  No, I didn't think so.

That's not to say all of the shows were bad or poor retreads.  There were some fun shows this season, more than the previous one.  Cold Dick brings Jarod back to Vegas where he teams up with Argyle, the inept goofball who's appeared in two previous episodes.  While Jarod's impersonation of a hard-boiled detective is funny (along with the frequent quotes from Raymond Chandler), the show is really stolen by Ms. Parker who starts up a hot and sweaty romance with.....Broots!

Another excellent show was Road Trip, in which Jarod comes across a woman being chased by her ex-boyfriend who happens to be a cop.  Or maybe she's lying and really on the lamb from the police.  A very fun episode that works well with Jarod impersonating a couple of people and impressing everyone he meets.

This is the last regular season of the show.  There are two made for TV movies that followed this season, (it's too bad they didn't include them with this set... hopefully they'll be released shortly) but the show pretty much ends with this season.  It seems apparent that the creators knew that their time was up and tried to wrap up some mysteries that had been hanging around for a while as well as boost ratings in a two-part season finale.  In this episode, viewers finally find out what actually happened to Catherine Parker.  Unfortunately after so much time the revelation, convoluted and rather stupid, was anticlimactic.  They also fall back onto that tried and true (for this show) plot device of having an unknown relative of a main character come to light.  This time someone finds out they have a brother they didn't know about.  By my count this is the fourth time they've used this twist in the series... it's gotten pretty old by now.  They also get a bit strange and give a character super-human abilities.  They've stayed away from that in this series up until this point, so when they revealed that someone was able to talk with the dead, it was very disappointing.

The worst aspect of the final episode is that it ends in a big cliff hanger.  That's not so bad, but the fact that they copied the conclusion of an earlier season was the final proof that the show had run its course and the creators were out of ideas.

20th Century Fox did a great job with the packaging of this show.  The season of 20 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, and Spanish.

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 of the show and executive producer/writer Tommy Thompson comment on the episodes Rules of Engagement with executive producer/writer Eathan Matthew Lawrence, and they are joined by actress Andrea Parker for the commentary of 'Till Death Do us Part.  The episode Cold Dick also had a commentary with Craig W. Van Sickle, co-producer, writer Juan Carlos Coto, and the star of the show, Michael T. Weiss.  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.

As with the other season sets, there is a making-of featurette runs about 27-minutes long and is broken into three parts.  The previous sets scattered these across the four DVDs which was inconvenient since they reveal plot points that may not have happened by the end of the disc that they were located on.  After complaining about it for three seasons, someone actually listened!  All three parts are located on side B of the last disc.  Good going Fox!  The first two parts were fun and interesting but the last section, dealing with playing poker on the set, was pretty dumb.  The one highlight of the final segment is that creator Craig W. Van Sickle hints that another installment of The Pretender might be on the horizon in the not too distant future.  He says that they've never given up trying to create more movies and that the time might be right now.

Final Thoughts:

This final eason was a little better than season three, but just by a bit.  There is still too much time spent on events at the Centre, and some of the shows had glaring plot holes.  They recycled a lot of plots and borrowed from movies more than they should.  Even with this, there are some shows in this set that are great and a lot of fun to watch, and surprisingly enough some of the mysteries do get solved, though most of the solutions aren't very satisfying.  The set is worth checking out, especially if you enjoyed the previous seasons.  It gets a light recommendation.