My first exposure to the show The Pretender was when I popped the DVDs to the first season in my player.  I was pleasantly surprised at how entertaining and fun it was while also being mysterious and ironic.  [My review of season one.]  The second season is now available on DVD and it was worth the wait.  The show manages not to get stuck in a rut by altering the focus slightly, yet retaining the elements that made it such a good show in the first place.  This season sees the answer to several questions raised in the last eason as well as the beginning of this one, but still has enough mystery to make long for the third season.
 
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 a series of 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 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 second season:

As this season opens, Miss Parker's father is missing and a new person, Mr. Lyle (Jamie Denton), has taken over his office.  Mr. Lyle has his own personal sweeper Bridgitte (Pamela Gidley), who takes an immediate dislike to Miss Parker.  Lyle is upset with the lack of progress that Miss Parker has made in capturing Jarod, and really turns up the heat.  Parker is worried about her father, but she can't find any information about what's happened to him.  She's not even sure if he's alive or dead.

Adding to the stress in her life, Jarod starts working on Miss Parker to get more information about his origins.  He sends he clues and riddles, showing her things about her past and her mother's life that she didn't know.  There are several surprising revelations about Miss Parker and her mother through the course of these shows.

This season is different from the first in a lot of ways, and this generally improves the show.  First of all the program has a different feel in this season.  It is more dark and sinister.  The show always had its dark side, but that is more pronounce in the second season.  Things are more tense in general, and the events that happen are more unpleasant than in the first season.  I think this worked in the show's favor, making the program more engrossing.

There is a lot more continuity in this season too, and consequently the events at The Centre take up a larger amount of time in these episodes.  They had to trim the parts with Jarod as a consequence, and his "pretends" are a bit shorter this time around.  The section before the credits is now used to start the main story, as opposed to having Miss Parker and Sydney arriving at Jarod's hiding place, just having missed him.  I'm sorry that they cut those bits; they were one of my favorite parts of the show and were usually rather humorous.

The creators of the show are very adept as sidestepping traps that a lot of shows fall into and that becomes very clear in this set of shows.  For most of the first season The Pretender was a lot like The Fugitive.  Jarod would travel across the country righting wrongs and helping people while staying one step ahead of Miss Parker and Sydney.  This rather formalistic set-up would soon grow tiresome, so they altered the show just enough to make it feel fresh, without alienating the show's fans.  This season the emphasis isn't on catching Jarod, they focus on what the Centre did in the past, and what they are still doing.  They examine Miss Parker's and Sydney's background, and also have an episode about Miss Parker's father.  Jarod still uses his abilities to bring justice to those who seem beyond the law, but the events in The Center start becoming more prominent.  The biggest effect of these cuts is that there is less mystery in the 'Jarod' part of the show.  When he starts a "pretend" you pretty much know why soon after, and the villain isn't hard to deduce though they do manage to throw a curve at you every once in a while.

It is hard to talk about the whole season without giving anything away since there are a lot of subplots.  Suffice to say that the show does have a lot of continuity, and the various plots do advance.  Some of the mysteries are solved, including who shot Mr. Raines oxygen tank at the end of the last season, and the fate of Miss Parker's father.  This season also has some interesting revelations about Angelo.  There are a lot of surprises along the way and the narrative advances at a nice pace.

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 a Dolby stereo surround audio track in the original English, as well as dubs in Spanish and French, also in stereo surround.  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 two commentary tracks included with this set.  The episode Red Rock Jarod has comments by Craig W. Van Sickle and Steven Long Mitchell, the co-creators and executive producers to the show, along with director Fred K. Keller.  This trio is joined by Andrea Parker (Miss Parker) and Michael T. Weiss (Jarod) for the two-part season finale, Bloodlines.  I enjoyed listening to these tracks, even though they weren't that great.  There were some interesting tidbits that came to light, like the fact that Patrick Bauchau (Sidney) has played the lead role in movies filmed in six different languages, and that he's married to Bridget Bardot's sister, but none of it is really earth shaking.  I was hoping for a few more behind the scenes anecdotes.  There were also long gaps in the commentary where you just end up watching the show.

There is a 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.  I really enjoyed seeing Jon Gries (Broots) give his ideas about the relationship between Broots and Miss Parker.  Pretty funny stuff.  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 Pretender was changed a bit for the second season, but most of the changes were for the better.  This season is more mysterious and even a bit eerie in parts.  The focus is still on Jarod and his activities, but the goings on at The Centre become more prominent.  The program changes just enough to keep things interesting and new, but not so much that fans of the earlier episodes are turned off.  The show has grown and matured with this season making it even better. Highly Recommended.