Hacker Cinema
The Pretender
1996 · TV series · 43 min episodes · 4 seasons
Created by Craig W. Van Sickle, Steven Long Mitchell
DramaMysteryScience FictionFantasy
Raised in a secret facility built for experimenting on children, Jarod is a genius who can master any profession and become anyone he has to be. When he realizes as an adult that he's actually a prisoner and his captors are not as benevolent as he's been told, he breaks out. While trying to find his real identity, Jarod helps those he encounters and tries to avoid the woman sent to retrieve him.
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6 comments on Hacker News
Always reminded me of the series the pretender. And there it did seems far fetched. Not sure why I never connected the dots in the movie. I guess being told it’s a true story is powerful
> There are only two plots: a man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town.
Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy regains girl?
I suppose the meets-loses-regains sequence can be considered a journey if you squint at it enough, but that doesn't feel quite right.
> Although if you really think about it, there's only one plot, because a man who goes on a journey is a stranger who comes to town in another town.
Ooh, that's an interesting observation, the difference between the two is in swapping the foreground and background.
In fact, hmm, now that I think of it, quite a lot of episodic drama deliberately uses that same swap or superposition to occasionally change things up for an episode. And a few are always about the same stranger on a journey coming to an endless series of towns (The Incredible Hulk, The Pretender, even The Littlest Hobo).
I'm pretty sure this is recency bias. Remember the TV show "The pretender"? (1996-2000). It was fairly formulaic and every single episode ended up with Jarod, the protagonist, finding out the bad guy and putting him in a convoluted setup of psychological torture (usually threatening their life or their family in the same way they had killed the innocent person) until they admitted the crime.
Demara reminds me of the 90s show The Pretender, I'm going to assume Demara was the inspiration. That show was lots of fun.
And there was an episode of M.A.S.H clearly inspired by Demara. Someone impersonating a surgeon, getting caught then changing identities to a chaplain.
I used to harbor similar fantasies (witness my username and the television series 'Pretender'). But you can't just put some supergenius 8-year-old in a special school and have 'em pop out with the diligence required to achieve great things early in adolescence.
There was a great line in the old TV show Pretender along the lines of "It's my observation that anybody who begins a sentence "with all due respect" typically doesn't have it"
I've always interpreted prefaces like that (along with its relatives "with all due respect" or the suffix "I'm just saying") as a way of turning the sentence into "This is an objective observation that should be made; don't blame the messenger". Used well it's a good way to strip subjectivity from some objective facts, used poorly it's a good way to project a subjective interpretation onto objective facts.