The Pretender
Our Little Red Notebooks
In-Depth Recaps and Reviews
of the second season episodes

In this notebook are:
Crash
Stolen
Red Rock Jarod
Bank
Bloodlines


All written synposes and reviews contained in the LITTLE RED NOTEBOOKS sites are have been researched, compiled and written by Mare Hanson, Copyright 1997, 1998. The synposes and reviews may not be reprinted in whole or in part without the author's expressed permission. All images are the property of the original film makers, and are reproduced here, under the auspices of "fair use" to accentuate the reviews, promote "The Pretender" and entertain the fans of Michael T. Weiss. To contact Mare write to THE SHASTACLAN OBSERVATORYor THE JARODSTWIN ARCHIVE.

Jarod at the airport
EPISODE 17
: "Crash" (04-11-98)

Jarod is at a small airport, waiting for his flight, Arista Airlines Flight #105, to San Diego to get ready for boarding. While he waits, he sits and reads a book about Nebraska. A little girl, also a passenger waiting for Flight 105, sits across from him, and she and Jarod play a short game of peek-a-boo just before the boarding call is announced. A young man, Daniel Falk, walks up and plops down in a chair beside Jarod. He tells Jarod that the flight has been over-booked, and he's been "bumped" from it. The next flight won't be for another five hours, and if he has to wait that long, he won't be in time to sign up for his freshman classes at college that day. All of his required courses will be filled and closed before he can get to registration.

Jarod and Daniel had been talking on and off throughout their waiting period at the airport. Daniel had told Jarod about his basketball scholarship, about his hopes for the future, about his wonderful relationship with his folks... Feeling empathy for Daniel and his predicament, Jarod gives Daniel the ticket he's holding which will get Daniel onto Flight 105 in Jarod's place. Daniel is reluctant to accept the offer, but Jarod insists he's not in any hurry. "It's not like anybody's chasing me... today," Jarod jokes. Daniel gratefully accepts the ticket and rushes off to board the plane. As he exits the terminal he calls over his shoulder to Jarod, "Thanks, Jarod! You saved my life!" Jarod grins, and waves good-bye.

AT THE CENTRE, Sydney meets Miss Parker in a corridor and asks her what happened to her finger (which is in a metal bracing cast). She growls that she broke it "mud wrestling". Realizing that she doesn't want to talk about it, Sydney changes the subject and asks her what's she's doing at the office that day. She shows him Mr. Lyle's personnel file, and tells him that she's been looking for information on who his associates and allies in The Centre might be. Over the last 18 months, since Jarod's escape, Mr. Parker had lost ground with The Centre big-wigs. Now, he wants Miss Parker to find out what she can about Lyle, so he (Mr. Parker) can "lobby the Triumvirate" for Lyle's old position among their elite group. So far, Miss Parker says, she hasn't been able to find out anything. And since Mr. Parker directly opposed Mr. Lyle... and Miss Parker shot him (at Hillman Marine in Connecticut)... Lyle's allies were doing everything they could to bar Mr. Parker's promotion.{See the episode, "A Stand Up Guy" for details about the shooting of Mr. Lyle.}

As they're talking, Broots walks up and tells Miss Parker and Sydney that a delivery has come from Jarod. Miss Parker and Sydney follow Broots to the Tech Room where they find three full-sized gym lockers set up: one for Broots, one for Sydney, and one for Miss Parker. They open the lockers and find inside of them copies of a high school yearbook: 1983 Douglas High School, Townsend, Nebraska. They also find invitations to the high school's reunion, and name badges that identify them as Mr. Ricky Sanders (Broots), Professor Tom Greer (Sydney)... and MRS. Ricky Sanders (Miss Parker). Sydney is amused when Broots informs him that the Sanders were missionaries stationed with a Catholic charity in Africa; he can't quite see Miss Parker as the "missionary sort". Professor Greer, he learns from Broots, was a professor of obscure languages who had only taught at the high school for one semester so his students probably won't remember him at all.

Jarod has highlighted a page in the yearbook that refers to the "Camera Shy" people: those of the class of 1983 who had been unavailable for senior photographs. Broots says he checked on them and didn't find anything of special interest about them except for the fact that two of them were deceased.

Also in the yearbooks are sticky-notes from Jarod which read: ALWAYS STAY THE WAY YOU ARE. UNLESS YOU WANT TO SURVIVE. Sydney explains that this is Jarod's way of telling them they're in some kind of danger. Miss Parker is unimpressed and refuses to go to "Armpit, Oklahoma" until Broots finds out more about the high school and its importance. "It's Nebraska," Broots corrects her, and Miss Parker replies: "Hell is Hell, Broots."

AT THE AIRPORT Jarod is awakened from a light nap by the sounds of people wailing and sobbing around him. He goes to the airline attendant and asks what's happened; why so many people are so upset. The attendant tells him that Flight 105 crashed just outside of San Diego, and that there were fatalities. Even though he's not Daniel Falk's relative, Jarod demands to know if Daniel is all right. The attendant tells him, sadly, that Daniel's body was positively identified at the scene. He died on impact. Jarod is so overcome with grief, that he seems to have trouble breathing for a moment. Gasping, he finally backs up and collapses into a chair.

AT THE NTSB FIELD CENTER, San Diego, California, Jarod arrives at a hanger where the wreckage of Flight 105 is being reassembled by NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) investigators. He introduces himself to the chief investigator, Clark Thomas, as Jarod Lindsay, an investigator from Washington. Thomas is not thrilled to have Jarod there, but his assistant, investigator Diane Post, welcomes Jarod aboard. They show Jarod aerial photographs of the crash site and inform him that there is no evidence of mechanical problems on the plane so far. Both pilots survived the crash and are recuperating at Centennial Hospital; and both are under suspicion of having caused the crash themselves. Jarod asks where the cockpit voice recorder and the flight recorder (the plane's "black boxes") are, and Thomas tells him they're en route. Jarod demands to be advised when the boxes arrive, and excuses himself from the hanger.
Jarod hears the commotion of people sobbing over the crash

IN NEBRASKA, Broots, Miss Parker and Syndey meet at the Grand Palladium hotel where Jarod has NON-SMOKING rooms reserved for them. Other alumni are also staying at the hotel, and one of them "recognizes" Ricky Sanders (Broots). He comes up and says, "hi", compliments Ricky on his incredible weight loss -- (Ricky was terrifically over-weight in high school.) -- and then introduces himself to Ricky's "wife" (Miss Parker). Miss Parker responds to the man's touch on her arm by grabbing him in a judo hold that make it impossible for him to continue any contact. Cradling his injured hand, the man hurries off, and Broots tells Miss Parker: "Way to blend in."

AT CENTENNIAL HOSPITAL, Jarod and the other NTSB investigators go to talk to the pilot of Flight 105, a woman named Angela Wylie. Angela suffered "blunt force trauma to the frontal lobe" when the plane crashed, and has no memory of the events of the crash itself. She says she remembers getting ready for approach in San Diego, and she remembers her passengers screaming... but can't give Jarod or the other investigators any details at all. She explains to Jarod, "It's like somebody painted my mind black." Then breaking into angry self-depreciating tears, she tells him, "Eleven people died, but I lived... What makes me so special?"

AT THE NTSB HANGER Jarod enters to find investigators Thomas and Post looking over the already opened black boxes from Flight 105. Angry, Jarod tells them that he'd given them specific instructions to call him before the boxes were opened so he could be there when they were. Thomas blows him off by saying he was strapped for time, and couldn't wait for Jarod to get there. Post shows Jarod the information gleaned from the flight data recorder, which indicates that the airplane's elevator flaps were stuck at 0° instead of the 20° required for lift over the mountains just outside the airport where Flight 105 was supposed to land. Because there wasn't enough lift, the plane stalled and crashed into the mountains. Thomas then shows Jarod the cockpit voice recorder, and Jarod is surprised to find the record still in the "off" position. Apparently, Thomas tells him, the recorder jammed and never came on, so there is no verbal record from the pilots as to what took place in the cockpit before the crash. Jarod says he's never heard of anything like that happening before, and Thomas dismisses it as a "rare, but possible" occurrence.

All of the evidence seems to indicate that, aside from the cockpit recorder, everything mechanical on the plane was working fine. Thomas says the crash was caused because one of the two pilots on the plane didn't set the elevators to the proper position. Now, all they have to do is find out which of the two pilots was responsible for the error.

AT CENTENNIAL HOSPITAL, Jarod and Post visit the room of Flight 105's co-pilot, Brandon Larson. They find his father, Mr. Larson, the president of Arista Airlines, in the room with his son. Mr. Larson tells them he's glad his son survived the crash, and that he was looking forward to putting Brandon into a managerial position at the airlines. When Mr. Larson tries to stay in the room while Jarod and Post question Brandon, Jarod tells Mr. Larson he'll have to leave. Larson does so, reluctantly.

Jarod sets a small tape recorder up on the bed-tray in the room, and asks Brandon about the crash. Brandon says he's not sure what happened; that it must have been a mechanical malfunction. Post tells him they've already ruled out mechanical errors, and are focusing on pilot error. She tells him the elevators on the wings were set at the wrong pitch, and Brandon sighs deeply. He says he's sorry to have to say it because he and pilot Angela Wylie were good friends, but he'd told Angela to set the pitch of the elevators at 20° and then assumed that she had done it. Apparently, she hadn't.Watching Brandon, Jarod notices that the man is sweating excessively. He asks Brandon if the room seems warm to him, and Brandon tells him, no. His sweating is cause by fever which is a side-effect of the pain killing medication he's taking, he says. Jarod and Post thank Brandon for his time, and leave the room.

Post is ready to set blame on Angela Wylie for the crash, but Jarod isn't convinced. He tells Post that the pain relieving medications dispensed by the hospital were usually simple analgesics; and simple analgesics don't cause fever. Something else was causing Brandon Larson to sweat like that; guilt, maybe. Post tells him that Brandon might have simply been fretting over having to expose Angela as a bad pilot; they were friends, she reminds him. Maybe Brandon was just stressed out. "Is that what you really think, Diane?" Jarod asks, and walks away.


AT THE HANGER, Jarod goes in to look at the recovered fuselage of the plane. Most of it is still intact, which kept the fatalities down, but still: eleven people died in the crash... including the little girl with whom Jarod had played peek-a-boo. He finds her doll among the victims' possessions collected from the crash site. He also finds Daniel Falk's carry-on luggage, which includes a pair of basketball shoes and a graduation photograph of Daniel flanked by his parents. The sight of the things make Jarod's heart ache.

IN NEBRASKA, getting ready for the reunion, Miss Parker is smoking in their non-smoking room and complaining that the people at the gathering are "dead from the neck up and they don't even know it." Broots takes offense at this, and points out that one of the couples he'd talked to had been married for fourteen years, and another person coached Little League... They had real lives. Was her life so great, Broots asks her: she's forced to stay in The Centre until she can find a man who had been stolen from his family; she was haunted by the murder of her mother; she competed for her father's attention against a "ball headed lunatic" with an oxygen tank... Miss Parker snaps at him, "Careful!" Broots recoils a bit, but still says to her, "I'm just saying... I'd take a Sunday sermon or a Little League game over that any day..."

AT CENTENNIAL HOSPITAL, Jarod stands by while Thomas and Post inform pilot Angela Wylie that she's probably going to be charged with negligence in the crash of Flight 105. Wylie starts to cry, and Jarod tells her that because they don't have the cockpit voice recorder to work off of, they're just taking her co-pilot, Brandon Larson's, word for what happened before the crash. If she could remember anything, it would be helpful. Wylie stutters and wails, "I can't remember anything!"
Jarod looking at a photo of Daniel and his parents

IN NEBRASKA, at the reunion, Miss Parker is dressed in leather, smoking, and keeping herself separate from the rest of the guests by intimidating anyone who comes near her. Broots, on the other hand, is enjoying himself: laughing, carrying on conversations, and accepting compliments for his weight loss and his "trophy wife".

Miss Parker is ready to leave, when the emcee at the reunion announces he's going to pay a short tribute to those class members of 1983 who couldn't make it to the reunion because they had died. A photograph of a young woman is flashed up on a large movie screen, and her name is recited for the audience. Miss Parker pulls on Broots sleeve, nagging at him to go, when a second photograph is displayed: that of Bobby Bowman, who had been a member of the Farmers of Tomorrow Club, but died before graduation. Broots points at the picture, and Miss Parker looks at it. Her face floods with recognition. Bobby Bowman was Mr. Lyle.

IN SAN DIEGO, still unconvinced that Angela Wylie was responsible for the crash of Flight 105, Jarod runs some tests and checks some data by himself. He goes to the lab where blood tests were done on the pilots to check them for illegal substance abuse, and he discovers that the blood test for Brandon Larson had been tampered with. On an earlier FAA blood test, Brandon's macrostatic blood count was 15, but on the test done after the Flight 105 crash, the macrostatic blood count had dropped to 10. Macrostatic blood counts were never supposed to change at all; they were always a constant. So, Jarod surmises, the blood sample delivered under Brandon's name wasn't Brandon blood. He asks the lab technician who brought her the sample, and she tells him it was brought in by chief investigator Clark Thomas.

Jarod also checks out the cockpit voice recorder on his own, and discovers that it hadn't been "inactive" during the flight. It had recorded something, but its imprint cylinder had been demagnetized, so most of the recording was erased. There were still fragments of data left, but it would have to be pieced together. Jarod sets his laptop computer to the task.

Later, he follows Clark Thomas to the hanger where the wreckage of Flight 105 is being housed, and eaves-drops on a telephone conversation Thomas is having with Diane Post. Thomas tells Post to ignore Jarod's concerns and to hurry up, make a determination about the case, and close it as soon as possible. Then Jarod sees Thomas meet with Mr. Larson, Brandon's father, in the same hanger. Larson hands Thomas an envelope filled with cash, and walks off silently.

The next day, sleeping lightly in his lair, Jarod is disturbed by nightmares of Daniel Falk repeating to him, "Thanks, Jarod! You saved my life!" Jarod rouses himself, and depressed and exhausted, calls Sydney on his cell phone. He tells Sydney about the crash, about Daniel Falk, and says, "Now he's gone. And I'm still here." Sydney is sympathetic to Jarod's distress but tells him they could spend a life-time debating "fate" and blame. Sorrowful, Jarod sighs and says, "A life time... Is that how long this will hurt?" He disconnects the call, and lies back on his bed, staring mournfully at the ceiling.

IN NEBRASKA, Broots, Sydney and Miss Parker gather to discuss the Omaha Police report Broots had been able to find on the death of Bobby Bowman. Bobby had supposedly been murdered 16 years ago by his father. Bobby's decapitated body was found in the bed of his father's pick-up truck, and his father had been convicted and sent to prison. But if Bobby Bowman WAS Mr. Lyle, then he couldn't have died in 1982, Sydney reminds them. So, Bobby (Mr. Lyle) must have somehow faked his death and framed his father for it.

Miss Parker sends Broots back to The Centre to see if he can find out anything about Bobby Bowman or Mr. Lyle that isn't in Mr. Lyle's personnel file. And Miss Parker and Sydney go to find Martha Bowman, Bobby's mother.

Martha Bowman is still living on the farm where Bobby grew up. On the surface, the farm looks well-kept; the house clean; and Martha is fixing bowls of food for her two dogs. She tells Miss Parker and Sydney that Bobby had been adopted, and had been a beautiful and wonderful child until he was about 15 years old, when he suddenly "snapped" and became so aggressive and so violent that she and her husband didn't know what to do with him. Martha suddenly stops talking about Bobby, and shouts at her dogs to stop barking and come inside to eat their dinner... But... there is NO SOUND of barking dogs, and no sign of any dogs in or around the house at all.

Martha then continues on about Bobby, telling Miss Parker and Sydney that he was sweet one minute and then "mean as a snake, and violent" the next. His behaviors became so bad, that her husband, Lyle, had often resorted to locking Bobby outside in an 8-by-12 foot shed in the back yard. Noting that her husband's name was "Lyle", Sydney remarks on it, and Martha tells him that, yes, her husband's name WAS Lyle Bowman, but that he always made Bobby refer to him as "Mister." Martha then starts shouting at her non-existent dogs again...

Trying to keep Martha calm, Miss Parker and Sydney make no remarks about her odd behavior, and deflect her attention to a photograph of Bobby and another young man. The other boy was Bobby's friend, Jimmy Radloff, who had died shortly before Lyle Bowman killed Bobby, Martha tells them... while she brushes her finger with a tooth brush. Jimmy and Bobby had gone hiking in the woods, and Jimmy never came home. Miss Parker whispers to Sydney that Bobby had killed Jimmy, and used Jimmy's decapitated body to fake his own death.

Martha then takes Miss Parker and Sydney out back to the shed where Bobby was often kept during his fits of rage. The shed is small, cramped, and dirty inside. A heavy padlock hangs from the outside of the door. Miss Parker tells Sydney that if her father had ever put her into a place like that, she would've killed him. Martha goes on to tell them that after Jimmy Radloff's death, Bobby went berserk. He attacked Lyle Bowman with a shovel, and it was that incident, Martha says, that probably caused Lyle to kill Bobby. She thought the cutting off Bobby's head was a bit much, but otherwise had no comment about the murder.

Sydney asks where Lyle Bowman is now, and Martha tells him that her husband is in solitary confinement at Topeka Penitentiary in Topeka, Kansas. "Lyle rubs people the wrong way," she says, and them wanders off by herself. Sydney tells Miss Parker they should find Lyle Bowman and talk to him. When they look back at Martha, she's standing by the side of her house with her head resting against it: not moving, not speaking, not doing anything....

IN SAN DIEGO, Jarod goes to Angela Wylie's house after he learns that she's been released from the hospital. When he arrives, he finds her front door unlocked, and the lights off inside. He enters the livingroom, turns on a light, and find Angela sitting on the livingroom couch... with a hand gun beside her. She's going to kill herself. With the charge of "negligence" in regards to the crash of Flight 105, her career is ruined; she blames herself for the deaths of the passengers even though she can't remember what actually happened; and she can't face the victims' families. She wants to die. Jarod insists that he's doing everything he can to prove she's innocent, and begs her to re-think her decision. After some more talking and cajoling, he gets Angela to hand him the gun, and he promises her that he'll expose the truth about the crash.

Later, Jarod tracks down Mr. Larson at Arista Airlines, and tells him he's been hearing rumors that Larson's son, Brandon, was using illegal drugs before and possibly during the flight of Flight 105. He'll have to conduct a full investigation, he says. Larson panics, and when Jarod is gone, Larson calls Clark Thomas on his cell phone and demands that Thomas close the investigation of Flight 105 immediately. Thomas tells him he's working as fast as he can. What neither man knows is: Jarod had tapped their telephonic equipment, and heard everything they said.

In his lair, Jarod's computer has finished reconstructing the corrupted data from the cockpit voice recorder. When the data is enhanced and cleaned up, it translates into a vocal record of what happened during the seconds before the plane crashed. Angela Wylie's voice can be heard clearly reprimanding Brandon Larson for not obeying her order to set the elevators at the proper pitch. Brandon whines an apology. Angela shouts that she can't get any lift out of the plane; they're going to hit the mountains. Brandon screams, and there's the sound of an explosion. Then... nothing. Angela didn't cause the crash. Brandon did.

That evening, Jarod sneaks into Brandon Larson's hospital room, and, sitting in the dark, plays and replays the recording from the cockpit voice recorder over and over again, until Brandon wakes up from a fitful sleep. Jarod then turns on a light, lets Brandon know he's there, and shows him the tape recorder with the voice recorder tape on it. He's going to expose Brandon as the one responsible for the crash of Flight 105, he says, but first he wants an explanation from Brandon about why he lied about Angela Wylie. Brandon complains that it was all his father's idea. His father was a very controlling man who demanded perfection. "There's no room for error with my father," he says. And it was his father's constant demand for perfection, and his controlling nature that caused Brandon to seek comfort and solace in prescription medications -- which he had come to abuse. Brandon's father picked his schools, his career, even his girlfriends, Brandon says. When the plane crashed, and his father found out about Brandon's drug use, Mr. Larson had concocted a plot to exonerate Brandon and frame Angela Wylie for the accident... and Brandon went along because he couldn't say 'no' to his father. "No one says 'no' to my father..." Brandon repeats, and an unsympathetic Jarod tells him that it's about time someone did.

IN TOPEKA, KANSAS, Miss Parker and Sydney see Lyle Bowman in his cell at the Topeka Penitentiary. Bowman is stand-offish and worn. One wall of his 8-by-10 foot cell is covered with large cut-outs of padlocks (just like the padlock on the door of the shed at the Bowman farm). He tells Miss Parker and Sydney that, regarding Bobby, "I hated the little bastard, but I didn't kill him."

Bobby had actually been fine after the Bowman's adopted him, until he was about 15 years old, when a "counselor" from the adoption agency came to check up on him. The counselor spent a lot of time with Bobby, and it was during this period that Bobby's aggressive tendencies surfaced. When the dead body was found in Lyle Bowman's pick-up truck, Bowman hired a lawyer, who tried to find the counselor and talk to him about Bobby's sudden change of character. But the lawyer found that no one in the adoption agency knew who the counselor was, and the lawyer had never been able to find him. Lyle was convicted of Bobby's murder, even though a positive ID of the body in the truck was never made. The body was decapitated, and was so decomposed that by the time it found its way into the pick-up truck, investigators hadn't been able to get a good set of fingerprints off of it.

With this information it is abundantly clear to Sydney that Bobby (Mr. Lyle) had, indeed, killed his friend, faked his own death, and framed Lyle Bowman for the killing. Sydney then asks about the paper padlocks on the wall of the cell, and Bowman tells him that they come from an anonymous sender: one every month since the day of his conviction. He thinks they're annoying, but uses them as a sort of calendar to keep track of how long he'd been in the cell...

BACK IN SAN DIEGO Jarod sets a plan in motion to trap Mr. Larson and Clark Thomas. He sabotages the elevators on the wings of a small jump plane, installs a toggle switch device under the co-pilot's seat, and packs a parachute for himself. Then he calls Larson and Thomas to meet him at the plane first thing the next morning.

When Larson and Bowman arrive, Jarod tells them he's discovered some new and fascinating evidence at the Flight 105 crash site that they just have to see to believe. Believing they had defaced, corrupted, or destroyed all the evidence there was that pointed to Brandon Larson, Mr. Larson and Clark Thomas are very nervous about Jarod's claims of "new" evidence. Jarod nevertheless convinces them to fly to the crash site with him in the jump plane.

During the flight to the crash site, Jarod keeps the jump plane low to the ground to better "simulate the decent of Flight 105". When they're near the site... near the mountains... Jarod excuses himself from the pilot's seat and goes to the back of the plane. He tells Mr. Larson he can have the pilot's seat: the view of the site is better from there. Larson reluctantly moves into the pilot's chair beside Clark Thomas, who's in the co-pilot's chair. The two men whisper to one another about what evidence Jarod could possibly have found, and then look to the back of the plane to confront Jarod directly. But he's gone. He's used the parachute, and jumped out of the plane.

When he's safely on the ground, Jarod contacts the plane via radio, and tells Thomas and Larson he knows the truth about the crash of Flight 105. Brandon Larson was high on drugs, and didn't hear Angela Wylie's command to adjust the pitch of the elevators. By the time she discovered Brandon's error, it was too late to correct it... and eleven people died. Jarod also informs Thomas and Larson that the plane they're in now is also set to crash. The elevators won't work, and they'll see first hand just how the victims of Flight 105 felt just before they crashed into the mountain and died. Thomas tries to activate the elevators and find that they are, indeed, jammed. He begs Jarod to save him.

Jarod tells him that he knows how to fix the elevators, but won't do it until Thomas and Larson confess, aloud, for the cockpit voice recorder to hear and record, everything about their cover-up, their lies, the bribes, and the evidence they tampered with to save Brandon Larson's career. Thomas admits immediately to his misdeeds, and demands that Larson do the same. But Larson is reluctant to admit that he was wrong, and doesn't like the fact that someone else (Jarod) is controlling the situation. When he sees the mountains loom closer, though, Larson admits to his part in the cover-up, bribery and obstruction of justice, and begs Jarod to help them fix the plane.

Jarod tells them about the toggle switch under Thomas's co-pilot seat, and tells them to activate it. Thomas flips the switch, and regains control of the plane's elevators. He has just enough time to get them into the proper pitch before the plane stalls. Jarod then lets them know that they only have enough fuel to make it back to the airport... where the police will be waiting for them.

BACK AT THE CENTRE, Broots shows Miss Parker and Sydney the scant information he'd been able to find on Mr. Lyle: a date of employment, and a date of termination. That was all. But, he tells them, searching for information on Bobby Bowman in The Centre archives, he was able to find a copy of Bobby's adoption papers. The only reason why The Centre would have those, Sydney informs them, was because The Centre had arranged Bobby's adoption itself.

Even with all the information they've found, however, Miss Parker is reluctant to accept the fact that she didn't kill Lyle when she shot him in Connecticut. Sydney tells her again that they now KNOW for a fact that Bobby Bowman/ Mr. Lyle had already faked his death once, by using a headless corpse as a decoy; and that the body pulled out of the river after the shooting in Connecticut had been headless, too. Miss Parker tells Sydney and Broots that she'll have the body exhumed to prove to them that it is Mr. Lyle's body. Broots informs her that she can't exhume the body because there isn't one. The Centre had the body cremated...

IN TOPEKA, KANSAS, Lyle Bowman receives another paper padlock in the mail and sticks it to the wall of his prison cell.

IN SAN DIEGO, Jarod meets with Angela Wylie who is entirely grateful to him for his efforts to find out the truth about the crash. "Thank you, Jarod. You really saved my life," she says.

Later, Jarod goes to the home of Mr. and Mrs. Falk, Daniel Falk's parents, and returns to them Daniel's personal effects. When they seen Daniel's carry-on luggage, the parents collapse against each other and start to cry. His voice breaking with emotion, Jarod explains to them the circumstances of Daniel's death, and hands over the carry-on luggage to them. Jarod apologizes for having been partly responsible, he says, for Daniel being on the plane, and tells the Falks that he'll leave if they want him to. Mrs. Falk composes herself and gives Jarod a comforting look. She invites him to come inside and sit with them, and asks him to tell them about his short time with their son. Jarod smiles wanely, accepts her invitation, and enters the house. The door closes softly behind him.
Jarod of the NTSB

BEST LINE(S): Sydney to Miss Parker when she finds out she's to portray Broots' wife at the reunion, "I always thought you'd make a nice couple." To which Miss Parker replied: "Yeah... when monkeys fly."// When Miss Parker finds out she's going to have to share room 305 with Broots, she grumbles: "There had better be booze in the courtesy bar, or somebody is going to pay."

OUR REVIEW: As Miss Parker said: we thought her family was screwed up, until we heard about and saw some aspects of Mr. Lyle's family life. What a sad, messed up bunch of people The Centre has created.

We got all the hints about over-bearing and manipulative fathers... but also liked the fact that the writers were careful not to place sole blame on the fathers for the misbehavior of their children. We got the idea that the writers were saying: Verbal and physical abuse of children is unacceptable... but it doesn't excuse the victims of that abuse to be spineless whiners or violent offenders later on in life. Yes, Brandon Larson's father was a manipulative jerk, and that explained why Brandon was a whiner and a drug abuser, but it didn't excuse his spineless cowardice. Jarod wouldn't let it excuse him. And, yes, Lyle Bowman's action of locking his violent teenage son in a tool shed was unconscionable, but that action didn't justify what Bobby/Mr. Lyle did to him (or to Jimmy) afterwards, or what he became later in life. Everyone is responsible for their own behavior, no matter what "nature"/"nurture" stuff they got (or didn't get) as children, the story seems to say.

We wonder if the writers will eventually be this hard on Jarod himself....



Jarod as George Harper
EPISODE 18
: "Stolen" (05-02-98)

AT THE OCEANSIDE HOSPITAL in Sunnyvale, California, Jarod is just finishing up a pretend in which -- as Dr. Jarod Pearce -- he was able to expose Dr. Charles Mitchell as the murderer of a hospital administrator. At first, the death of the administrator was thought to be caused by an accidental overdose of Panalex, but Jarod was able to discover and expose the truth. He clears out his locker in the hospital, has "transfer papers" in hand, and is ready to leave, when a patient is wheeled in to the ER by paramedics. The patient is a man who was struck by a sports utility vehicle (SUV) when he tried to run across a road to a phone booth. The man is suffering from cranial injuries and is only barely conscious. He keeps repeating the name "Patrick". Jarod retains his doctor persona and stays to oversee the man's admission into the hospital. He searches through the man's pockets trying to find some ID, and instead finds a passle of car keys, Polaroid photograph of a young boy, and a ransom note which reads: I HAVE YOUR SON. WAIT FOR CALL, MYRTLE AND LIME. 4:00 PM.

Jarod looks up at the clock; it's five minutes to 4:00. He turns the man's case over to another doctor, takes the keys, photo and note, and runs out of the hospital to the corner of Myrtle and Lime where a phone booth is. The phone rings just as he arrives there. Jarod answers the phone, and the kidnapper on the other end of the line says he's surprised to see what "Mr. Harper" looks like without his beard. Jarod realizes that the kidnapper can see him -- but he can't see the kidnapper. Jarod tells the kidnapper that he's worried about the boy, begs the kidnapper not to harm Patrick, and asks him what he wants. The kidnapper (who has mistaken Jarod for the real Mr. Harper) tells him to look for the cell phone taped to the phone book in the booth; Jarod finds it. The kidnapper then tells him he wants $2 million for Patrick, and that he'll call Jarod in 24 hours on the cell phone to give him directions for the drop-off of the money. The kidnapper warns Jarod not to notify the media or the police. If anyone comes looking for him, he'll kill the boy. Then the kidnapper abruptly hangs up.

Before Jarod leaves the phone booth, he's stopped by a barrage of flashback images from his childhood... the night when he was kidnapped from his home by Centre operatives. The images confuse and frighten Jarod, and it takes him a moment to regain his composure. When he leaves the phone booth, he uses the security beeper on Mr. Harper's keychain to locate Mr. Harper's automobile. Using the keys then to enter the car, Jarod sits behind the steering wheel and looks through the car to find more information about the man who he's now pretending to be. He finds an orange baseball cap on the front seat with an "SF" (San Francisco) logo on it, and a briefcase. In the briefcase is a wallet with a driver's license that identifies the injured man in the hospital as George Harper of Woodside, California... a reclusive billionaire who had disappeared for ten years, and who was now just re-emerging into the public light with a new break-through computer language system. Patrick is his dyslexic son, who goes to the Hayvenhurst School.

Jarod puts on the orange baseball cap, looks at himself in the rearview mirror and names himself: George Harper. He then closes his eyes, trying to feel how George Harper might feel sitting behind the wheel of the vehicle. Jarod is stunned, however, when a man walks up, aims a gun at Jarod's chest through the open driver's side window, and demands to know who Jarod is. Jarod tells the man he's George Harper, and the man says, "Tell that to someone who isn't the head of Mr. Harper's security. Who are you?"

AT THE CENTRE, Broots shows a computer-generated image of Jarod to Miss Parker and Sydney and tells them he's found out that Jarod was at Clarkston Pharmaceuticals about three weeks ago. Jarod was there researching information on the company's version of the Panalex drug. Broots also tells them that one of the major stock holders of Clarkston Pharmaceuticals is none other than Mr. Raines. "Everyone needs a nest egg," Raines wheezes as he enters the room.

Sydney tells Mr. Raines that the discovery of Jarod's research at the company means nothing unless they can figure out why he wanted the information he got. Raines complains, "Jarod's purpose is to harass The Centre. He's after my stock." Sydney counters that assertion with: "If he were after your stock, you'd be broke."

AT THE OCEANSIDE HOSPITAL, Jarod is in George Parker's hospital room talking to Mr. Alambar, the security chief who accosted Jarod outside in Harper's automobile. Alambar -- who thinks Jarod is really Dr. Jarod Pearce -- apologizes to Jarod for pointing a gun at him earlier, and thanks him for helping with the telephone call to the kidnapper. Jarod's intervention gave Patrick another 24 hours of life. Alambar wants Jarod to relinquish the kidnapper's cell phone to him, but Jarod insists on keeping it, reminding Alambar that the kidnapper thinks HE (Jarod) is Mr. Harper, and will now speak to no one else but him. Alambar reluctantly agrees.

Jarod asks him to tell him about Patrick's kidnapping. Alambar says that a limo driver took Patrick to school and picked him up every day. This day, Patrick had stayed late, taking special reading classes to help him with his dyslexia. When the limo driver arrived to pick him up, all the driver found was the boy's emptied backpack, the photo, and the ransom note. The driver took it to Mr. Harper, and Mr. Harper was scrambling across the street to get to the phone booth before 4:00 PM when he was struck by a car...and subsequently brought to the hospital.

Alambar says he thinks of Patrick as his own child, and is very worried about him. Alambar was a former FBI agent, and had worked some kidnapping cases. In those cases the children were badly abused or murdered. He's worried that the kidnapper will kill Patrick just so Patrick won't be able to ID him later. Jarod says, "He's a professional... He wants us to feel a total lack of control, so he can fulfill his fantasy of power." Alambar says Jarod is talking like someone who knows a lot about this particular type of crime, and Jarod admits to Alambar that he himself had been kidnapped as a child.

Flashback images burst in on Jarod again, and he recalls receiving the gift of a "Bonanza" lunchbox from his mother the night before his own kidnapping. She was excited about him being able to go into a special school for gifted children, and wanted to celebrate his admittance... Jarod then recalls images of himself walking into the school with his new lunchbox the next morning, and noticing two men in a dark sedan across the street from his school... They were wearing dark glasses... They were watching him... The images stop as quickly as they started, leaving Jarod slightly disoriented for a moment. He has to shake himself to focus on the here-and-now.

Jarod goes to the Hayvenhurst School -- a private, very exclusive, and very expensive-looking establishment -- and looks around the area for clues about Patrick's kidnapping. While he's there -- now posing as George Harper -- he meets a female teacher named Judith Peck who says she's surprised to see him (as Mr. Harper is such a recluse), but is grateful for the scholarship funding he provides for the special needs children in the school. She tells him that Patrick usually waited right out where they were standing now, by some stone benches, for the limousine that would take him home. He'd been kept late the day of the kidnapping because he was in special classes. Jarod nods; he knows that already. But empathizing with Patrick -- and reiterating his own feelings when he was a child -- Jarod remarks, "He doesn't want to be singled out. He hates being 'special'." Ms. Peck says that's just what Patrick often said to her; he wanted to be like the other kids, and often brought comic books to class to read just so he'd feel less "different" from the others.

Jarod also meets Martin Benton, the man who is the head of the security department at the school. Benton apologizes to Jarod for the lack of security on the day Patrick was abducted, and promises to offer whatever aid he can. Jarod asks Peck and Benton to do NOTHING. If they interfere, he says, Patrick might suffer the consequences.

After Peck and Benton depart, Jarod sits alone on the bench where Patrick was last seen. He calls Sydney on his own cell phone, and tells him that he's seeing images of his own kidnapping. Sydney tells him it's not unusual for repressed memories to resurface when one is faced with traumatic events. For Jarod, however, it's not just "memories"; he's suffering from post traumatic shock and is physically reliving the terror of his abduction. Trembling, he tells Sydney: "It's all coming back to me, Sydney... It's like a nightmare. It keeps coming back in pieces. First the fear... Then the panic shooting through your nerves that night..." Jarod starts shaking more seriously. "I'm a child again. It's dark... I'm alone... All I can think about is seeing my family again... I want my world to be like it was!"

Sydney tries to comfort Jarod by telling him there was certainly no excuse for what happened to him as a child, but that what Jarod was doing now "in the wide world" certainly seemed to indicate that something good came out of his confinement. Jarod responds to this sophistry with rage. He tells Sydney that something "right" coming out of something that was initially "very, very wrong" could never justify what The Centre did to him. Jarod growls, "How do you live with what happened to me?!"

BACK AT THE CENTRE, later that afternoon, Sydney arrives in the Tech Room to find Broots, Miss Parker, Willie the Sweeper, and Mr. Raines all waiting for him. Raines has Broots play back an audio recording of Sydney's telephone conversation with Jarod, and then tells Sydney he's tired of Sydney mollycoddling Jarod and helping to keep him away from The Centre. Sydney tells Raines that his telephone conversations with Jarod are nothing new, and that they keep The Centre in contact with Jarod. If the phone calls stop, Jarod will be lost to The Centre completely. Raines disagrees, and says that if Sydney would remove himself from the pursuit, The Centre would have a better chance of capturing Jarod... and Miss Parker agrees. She tells Sydney he's too emotionally involved with Jarod to be objective anymore. Sydney gives her a cold look, and walks away.

AT OCEANSIDE HOSPITAL that evening, Jarod is in George Harper's hospital room along with Mr. Alambar. Alambar is dozing, and Jarod sits in one of the other chairs in the room to rest himself. When he closes his eyes, he's once more inundated with images of his own kidnapping. He's a child, lying in bed at night when men come in through his bedroom window. They grab him, tie his hands together and muffle his screams by clamping a hand over his mouth. In his struggle, his Bonanza lunchbox falls off the nightstand beside his bed. A hood is put over his head, and he's bodily hurled across the room and out the window by one of the men.

Jarod's whole body jerks and he opens his eyes. He's an adult again, back in the hospital room. Alambar is sleeping in the nearby chair, but sitting on the little table against the wall is Jarod's Bonanza lunchbox. Jarod frowns at the thing, not understanding how it could be there. Then he hears sounds of people approaching. He's frozen with fear. Men come up from behind him, grab him, stifle his cries with gloved hands, and pull a hood over his head.
Jarod relives his kidnapping in his nightmares

Once again, Jarod's whole body jerks, he flails at the air, and opens his eyes. He's in the hospital room once more. The lunchbox is gone and so is Alambar. Jarod puts his shaking hand over his eyes realizing that he's been having nightmares, and tries to calm himself down. He's aided by the fact that Alambar returns from his break... and George Harper regains consciousness. Alambar and Jarod tell Harper what's going on.

AT THE CENTRE the next morning, Miss Parker tells Sydney she wants him to go with to California to track down the Clarkston Pharmaceuticals lead on Jarod. Sam the Sweeper will precede them there. Sydney is still angry with her for siding with Raines the day before, and doesn't really want to talk to her. Miss Parker apologizes to him for siding with "the creep", but reiterates her belief that Sydney is too close to Jarod emotionally. Sydney tells her that he wants Jarod returned to The Centre as much as she does; he just doesn't want Jarod hurt or killed in the process.

BACK IN SUNNYVALE, at The Hayvenhurst School, Jarod has several hours before his next 4:00 PM appointment at the phonebooth with the kidnappers, so he tries again to find clues to Patrick's abduction. He puts himself into the persona of Patrick and tries to figure out what the boy was doing and feeling the afternoon before he was kidnapped.

He looks across the street from the school, where a magazine shop has racks of comic books standing just outside its doors. Believing the comic books would have attracted Patrick, Jarod walks across the street and looks around the racks for clues. He finds a kooshball toy, like the ones Patrick often played with, lying on the sidewalk behind the rack. He then opens up a nearby garbage bin, and find Patrick's school books shoved down inside of it.

Alambar arrives and wants to know why Jarod isn't at the hospital with George Harper, waiting for the cellphone call from the kidnapper. Jarod tells him they still have two hours, and that he was looking for clues, and found them. Patrick wasn't taken from in front of the school, Jarod tells Alambar, he was taken from here in front of magazine store. The kidnapper then emptied Patrick's backpack into the trash, and put the photo and ransom note inside of it, and walked it back to the bench across the street so the limo driver would find it when he arrived.

Jarod looks over the front of the magazine store, and spots a video surveillance camera mounted just outside the door. He points it out to Alambar.

Jarod and Alambar go to Jarod's lair -- a small apartment in a moderately priced building -- and watch the video tape taken by the store's security camera, in the hopes of seeing Patrick's kidnapping. The camera is at such an angle that it only covers the immediate area around the comic book racks and the curb, but Jarod and Alambar are able to spot the kidnapper when he arrives in a unmarked van. Unfortunately, the kidnapper is wearing a ski mask that covers his face, and the van has no license plate on it, so it can't be traced.

At 4:00 PM, Jarod and Alambar are leaving Jarod's lair when Alambar gets a call on his private cell phone that disturbs him. Standing behind Jarod, he tells him that he was almost fooled by his excellent performance. Jarod turns to face Alambar and finds that Alambar has a gun leveled at him. Alambar tells Jarod that the phone call he just got was from his office; they'd run a trace on "Dr. Jarod Pearce" and discovered that Dr. Pearce had died in 1979. Alambar demands to know who Jarod really is. Before Jarod can explain himself, the kidnapper's call comes through on his cell phone. Jarod tells Alambar that he's really NOT involved in the kidnapping and begs Alambar to let him answer the call. Alambar reluctantly allows Jarod to proceed.

Jarod answers the call and the kidnapper tells him he has ten minutes to get to the phone booth on Myrtle and Lime again for further instructions. Jarod and Alambar rush into Alambar's SUV and drive to the phone booth... unaware that they've been spotted by Sam the Sweeper, who follows them in his own sedan with another Centre Sweeper.

Alambar parks his car about a block away from the phone booth and tells Jarod to proceed to the booth on foot. He also warns Jarod that if Jarod does anything that looks even slightly suspicious, he'll shoot him. Jarod says he understands, picks up the briefcase with the $2 million in ransom money in it, and runs to the phonebooth just as the phone there starts to ring. He answers it with, "I'm here... I'm here..."

The kidnapper tells Jarod to take the $2 million and put it in the trashcan across the street from the booth. Before Jarod can respond, however, the kidnapper starts growling, "Harper, I said no law!" Jarod says he doesn't understand what the kidnapper is talking about, and looks around the phone booth for any sign of policemen. He sees, not police officers, but Sam the Sweeper and another Sweeper closing in on the phone booth from one direction... and Miss Parker and Sydney closing in from another. The kidnapper thinks they're plain-clothes cops and is furious. He tells Jarod the deal is off and that boy will die. Still watching his on-coming pursuers, Jarod begs the kidnapper to reconsider, and tells him to ask for anything he wants. The kidnapper takes a few seconds to think, and tells Jarod he has three hours to get $4 million or Patrick will be dead. The kidnapper then hangs up... and Jarod bolts from the phonebooth.

Jarod is running so fast that Miss Parker and Sydney can't keep up with him, but the Sweepers are closer and chase Jarod down the middle of the street. Alambar sees them, starts up his vehicle, and races after them. He's able to intercept Jarod before the Sweepers can grab him, and drives off, leaving the Sweepers in the street.Alambar asks who the Sweepers were, and Jarod tells him, "I don't know. They must have been some of the kidnappers."

Back at the hospital, George Harper is frantic that the pay-off scenario went so badly, but promises to give Jarod the $4 million he needs to get Patrick back. While they talk, Jarod remembers something the kidnapper said during their telephone conversation: the kidnapper knew that Patrick was in special classes at school... he knew Patrick would be out on the bench alone the day of kidnapping... But how would he know that unless he had an "in" with the school itself?

Jarod goes back to his lair and looks over the surveillance video from the magazine store again. He discovers that seconds after the kidnapper drove away, another man stepped out of the shadows by the comic book racks into camera range, and walked across the street back toward the school. The man was Martin Benton, the head of the school's security.

Jarod goes back to the school and attacks Benton in the parking lot as Benton's getting ready to go home. Wearing a skimask, Jarod grabs Benton from behind, shoves him into a van, and binds his hands together. Then he puts a hood over Benton's head and informs him that he's being kidnapped. Benton is immediately terrified and begs to be released. Jarod terrorizes Benton with threats of torture and murder, and demands to know where Patrick is being held. Believing that Jarod is totally serious, Benton tells him where Patrick is... and Jarod leaves him, bound and gagged, in the back of the van to be picked up by the authorities later.

From Jarod's lair, Alambar calls Jarod on his cell phone and asks him where he is. Jarod tells him that he's at the school, but that he now knows where Patrick is. He'll meet Alambar at his lair, then they can both go and rescue Patrick. Alambar agrees to the plan, and Jarod hurries back to the lair.

Jarod walks down the hall in the apartment building to his apartment, and opens the door to his lair. He's stunned to find Alambar sitting hand-cuffed to a chair in the front room. Alambar looks up at him and shouts, "Run, Jarod! Run!" Jarod takes his cue immediately, and turns to run up the hallway out of the building, but finds his path blocked by Miss Parker and Sydney. Jarod tries running the other way down the hall, but finds that exit blocked by Sam the Sweeper. Frustrated, Jarod leans his back to the hallway wall and repeats, "No... No. No!"

Sam grabs Jarod and, man-handling him, bangs him against the wall and then holds him by the throat at gun-point as Miss Parker and Sydney walk up to him. The kidnapper's cell phone in Jarod's pocket starts to ring, and Jarod shouts to Miss Parker to let him go. He has to answer the phone or a kidnapped boy will die. Miss Parker yanks the cell phone out of Jarod's pocket and smashes it on the floor saying she's not buying his stories anymore.

Sam then starts dragging Jarod the hall, and Jarod struggles against him and starts yelling at Sydney. Jarod shouts to Sydney that taking him to The Centre against his will now is just the same as when the Centre operatives took him from his home against his will when he was a child. It's all happening again, he says, and he begs Sydney to intervene this time. Before Sydney can take any kind of action, however, Willie the Sweeper shows up. He tells Sam, Miss Parker and Sydney that HE'S going to take custody of Jarod on Mr. Raines' behalf. Miss Parker won't hear of that and tells Willie to get lost.

As Willie crosses in front of Jarod and Sam, he makes a grab for Jarod. Sam tries to stop him, and in the altercation, Jarod gets in a good kick that sends Willie across the hall and crashing into the wall. Willie pulls out his gun and attempts to shoot Jarod, but Sydney grabs Willie by the wrists and deflects the shot. The bullet hits Sam in the leg, and he goes down, pulling Jarod down with him. Miss Parker steps in to give Willie a punch in the head for interfering with her capture of Jarod and for shooting her sweeper, and with both Sweepers incapacitated, Jarod makes a run for a window at the end of the hallway. Miss Parker pulls out her gun and aims it at Jarod's back. Before she can shoot him, however, Syndey intervenes. He puts himself directly in front of Miss Parker's gun, giving Jarod time to break the window and jump out of the building.

Jarod races on foot toward the warehouse where Benton said Patrick was being held. He arrives just as the kidnapper is about to shoot Patrick. Jarod grapples with the kidnapper and is knocked onto his back. The kidnapper jumps on top of him, calls him Mr. Harper, and tells him he's going to kill Patrick in front of him. Growling like an animal, Jarod informs the kidnapper, "I'm not Mr. Harper!", and gathers up all of his fury and strength to force the kidnapper off of him.

Driven by a desire to get back at the men who had kidnapped him as a child, Jarod takes all of his rage out on Patrick's kidnapper: he kicks him, beats him, throws him across the room, and punches him in the head over and over and over again until the man is almost unconscious. Then Jarod starts to strangle him, squeezing the life out of him. The only thing that stops him is the sound of his mother's voice in the back of mind saying, "I'm so proud of you, Jarod... I'm the proudest mommy in the world." Unable to kill, Jarod releases his grip on the kidnapper's throat and stumbles off to find Patrick. He finds the boy in a back room, unties him, and embraces him. "It's over, Patrick," he says. And to himself, he repeats, "It's over... It's over..."

At the Oceanside Hospital, Jarod reunites Patrick with his father, and watches as the two of them interact: the father cradling his son's head, kissing him, laughing and crying over him. Harper looks up, tears in his eyes, and mouths the words, "thank you," to Jarod. Jarod smiles, and nods in reply.

A FEW DAYS LATER, BACK AT THE CENTRE Mr. Raines is livid over the fact that Jarod managed to escape capture again. He tells Miss Parker and Sydney that it's all their fault, but Sydney counters Raines' assertion by telling him that Miss Parker had captured Jarod at his lair. It was the interference of Raines' sweeper, Willie, that allowed Jarod the opportunity to escape. "That's how my report is going read," Sydney tells Raines, and Raines walks off with an angry glance, and a grumbled, "This isn't over yet." Miss Parker mocks Raines with a flippant, "You can bet your bald head on that."

AT THE HOSPITAL, Jarod is saying his good-byes to Patrick, Mr. Harper, and Mr. Alambar. Alambar tells Jarod that he realizes that whoever Miss Parker, Sydney and Sweepers were, they obviously thought Jarod was very valuable to them. But Jarod's secret was safe with him, Alambar promises. "As far as I'm concerned, you died in 1979." Jarod thanks him, and gives Patrick a final good-bye. As Jarod is leaving, Mr. Harper tells him, "You'll make a great father some day."

Jarod at Havenhurt (or Hayvenhurst)
DISCOVERIES
: Kooshballs and 3-D Puzzles

TRIVIA: When Jarod went to the comicbook rack, the first thing he pulled out was a Spiderman comic book.// George Harper's driver's license number was V8174010, and he lived at 470 Bayview Lane, Woodside, California.

AN ERROR IN THIS EPISODE: How many of you noticed it? The bumper sticker on George Harper's car changed from Hayvenhurst (with a "Y") to Havenhurst (no "Y") and back again throughout the episode.

OUR REVIEW: This was an excellent, well-paced episode with believable situations and a superb supporting cast. The suspense was maintained throughout, and we were really able to tie into Jarod's post-trauma fear over his kidnapping. The double-dream sequence in the hospital was done especially well, thanks to some wonderful on-the-money acting by Michael T. Weiss, and first rate editing. The timing was just right.

We didn't learn much of anything new about Jarod's background in this episode, but we were made aware that he still very much blames Sydney for what happened to him as a child, and is insisting that Sydney suffer the burden of remorse and guilt for his kidnapping. The scene during which Jarod begs Sydney to intervene on his behalf against his re-capture and transport by Sam the Sweeper was especially effective: it was a man's voice making the plea, but a child's fear that prompted it. Again, this moment was again a testimony to Weiss's ability as an actor.

And we didn't miss the parting comment by Harper about Jarod having the makings of a "great father some day". Is this a hint from the writers that an off-spring of Jarod's will soon surface?


Mr Lyle has Jarod
EPISODE 19
: "Red Rock Jarod" (05-02-98)

We see a man, at night, digging a deep hole in the desert floor. We see a glimpse of a tube-like canister about the size of an adult human. And we see the flash of the strobe on a Polaroid camera. One photograph develops before our eyes, and we can see the image of a young woman with duct tape pasted over her mouth.

IN MISS PARKER'S HOUSE Miss Parker is having nightmares about her last altercation with Mr. Lyle. She shoots him, and he plunges into a river. The alarm clock by her bed goes off, and she's startled awake from her dreams.

IN JAROD'S NEW LAIR, Jarod is calmly going through a newspaper looking for articles to cut out when the laptop computer on the table beside him announces that he has received an e-mail transmission. Jarod stops what he's doing with the newspaper and looks at the computer. There are two messages: an outdated unopened one with the subject "Hey" on it, and a new one with the subject line: REFUGE. The Refugeindicator is flashing. Jarod opens this electronic letter immediately and reads it: HAVE URGENT INFORMATION CONCERNING YOUR PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE. PLEASE MEET ME IN DRY RIVER, ARIZONA. SYDNEY. Jarod goes through the almanac on his computer and locates Dry River, Arizona.

IN DRY RIVER, Jarod -- posing as Jarod Barber(*) -- arrives to find the town a small one on the edge of the desert with little street traffic. He parks his car, and walks up to a house where there is a room-for-rent sign. Two men are playing a board game on the front porch, but when Jarod addresses them, neither of them respond to him. He tells them he doesn't mean to interrupt their game, but he would appreciate it if they'd at least acknowledge that he's there. Still the men don't answer him. "They can't hear you," says a female voice from behind him. Jarod turns to find Deputy Miller there. She tells Jarod that the brothers on the porch are stone deaf; they're not being rude, they just can't hear him. Jarod thanks her for the explanation, then tells her that he's looking for a "distinguished looking" man named Sydney, and asks if she's seen him. In response to this request, Deputy Miller pulls out her gun and tells Jarod he has to come with her. Jarod asks what she'll do if he doesn't cooperate with her, and she says she'll kill him if he doesn't.

SOMEWHERE IN DELAWARE, Miss Parker, Broots, Sydney and Sam the Sweeper are combing a back alley for clues. Broots had received an anonymous tip that information they were looking for was there somewhere. As they go through the area, all of them are unaware of the fact that they're being photographed by a person who keeps to the shadows. Sam finds a manila envelope tacked to the back of an old traffic sign, and alerts Miss Parker to it. Miss Parker removes the envelope, opens it, and finds inside her mother's old security pass. The expiration date on the pass has been obliterated, and replaced with the date of Catherine Parker's death. Miss Parker is not amused.

IN DRY RIVER, Jarod tells the deputy that if he's being arrested, he has the right to make at least one phone call. She tells him he's not officially under arrest; she's just brought him in for questioning. When he asks for more information, she tells him to just "go with the flow" and not fight it. As she escorts Jarod, who is hand-cuffed, to his jail cell, the deputy is interrupted by a young boy who runs into the sheriff's office to tell her that her son, "J.R.", passed out at a nearby church and his friends can't revive him. Jarod tells the deputy that he has some medical training and asks if he can be of assistance.

At the church, Deputy Miller and Jarod (still hand-cuffed) find JR on the floor with a group of friends around him. JR is cyanotic, going into shock, and only barely conscious. Deputy Miller informs Jarod that the boy is hypoglycemic, and the boy's friends inform Jarod that JR hasn't had anything to eat since lunchtime. To get JR's blood sugar back up to par, Jarod reaches into his shirt pocket, fishes out a PEZ dispenser, and puts some of the candy into JR's mouth. As the candy dissolves, JR's blood sugar level out, and he slowly regains consciousness.

Despite Jarod's help with her son, Deputy Miller returns Jarod to the sheriff's office and locks him in a holding cell. He talks to her, through the bars, about JR and says he knows that the boy is showing classic symptoms of a congenital heart defect. "Why hasn't he had a transplant?" Jarod asks. Deputy Miller tells him that her son is on a waiting list, but that it's been difficult to find a matching donor heart because JR has a rare blood-type, AB-Negative. Jarod says AB-Negative blood occurs in only one in three-hundred-thousand people; he knows, he has the same blood type. Before the conversation can get much further, Jarod is interrupted by the arrival of Sheriff Delmont. Delmont looks in the cell at Jarod and asks his deputy, "This is the guy?"

AT THE CENTRE, Sydney shows Broots and Miss Parker an e-mail transmission he's received from Jarod. It distresses him because it seems to be in response to a message Sydney never sent. The message reads: RE: REFUGE. MESSAGE RECEIVED. WILL MEET IN DRY RIVER AS REQUESTED. HOPE REMAINS HIGH. JAROD. Miss Parker asks where Dry River is, and Sydney and Broots tell her it's in Arizona. She says she'll go there herself to check out Jarod's message, and that, in the meanwhile, she wants Broots and Sydney to give her mother's security pass to Angelo and see if he can "empath" anything from it.

After Miss Parker leaves, Broots and Sydney supply Angelo with the badge and other items they had found at the alleyway earlier. Angelo goes through the pieces carefully, then affects the aspect of a person with no thumb. Broots and Sydney understand that Angelo is emulating Mr. Lyle, and call Miss Parker immediately to warn her. Miss Parker is still in denial about Mr. Lyle being alive. She had, afterall, shot him at point blank range when she caught him at Hillman Marine. Sydney is emphatic, however, telling her she must be careful.

Jarod in the compound

IN DRY RIVER, the sheriff removes Jarod (hand-cuffed again) from his jail cell at shotgun point, and then drives him to the edge of town where a ramshackle compound has been built up around an abandoned warehouse and a dilapidated house trailer. The compound is protected by a vicious attack dog and Jarod doesn't want to cross the dog's path, but the sheriff forces him to, and then directs him inside the house trailer.

Inside the trailer, Jarod can see that the place is a mess: mismatched and peeling furniture, heaps of junk, and bloody bandages lying in a pile on top of a stove that may or may not work. Jarod turns to the sheriff and says that he can tell, by the way he's being treated, that something terrible has happened. He wants the sheriff to tell him what's going on. The sheriff says he can't tell Jarod anything, and Jarod asks him why. "Because I won't let him," comes a voice from another part of the trailer.

Jarod looks to the where the voice came from and is alarmed to find Mr. Lyle standing there. Lyle is dirty and disheveled, and the hand that lost its thumb to the yakuza is wrapped in filthy bandages. (See the episode "Past Sim".) Lyle walks up casually to Jarod, picks up a crowbar, and bashes Jarod in the head with it. Jarod tries to deflect the blow, but can't defend himself while his hands are cuffed together. The blow catches him in the temple, and he crashes to the floor unconscious. Looking bored and distracted, Mr. Lyle walks to a nearby mirror, checks himself out in it (seemingly unaware of the fact that he looks terrible) and says, "And so... it begins."

After a few hours, Jarod regains consciousness and find himself in the warehouse section of the compound. He's seated in a chair, but his hands are cuffed behind him and over his head. He's disoriented at first, and it takes him a moment to realize that Mr. Lyle is walking around him taking pictures of him with a Polaroid camera. Jarod scowls at Lyle as one picture is snapped, and Lyle remarks, "Oh, that'll be a good one."

Jarod says he understands now that the e-mail message attributed to Sydney that brought Jarod to Dry River had actually come from Mr. Lyle. Lyle mocks Jarod with feigned surprise and says, "You are a genius." Jarod asks Lyle how he knew about "Refuge", and Lyle tells him, "Before I found myself thumbless in the desert, I was head rat at the cheese factory." Although Jarod had escaped from The Centre with a load of DSA's, Lyle says, he still had access to every foot of surveillance tape ever generated there and had gone over Jarod's and Sydney's conversations carefully before making his move against Jarod.

Jarod then says he's noticed that Lyle had been able to compel the local authorities to work with him, and Jarod wonders how Lyle accomplished that. Lyle brags that before he set his trap for Jarod, he extorted help from the local sheriff by kidnapping the sheriff's pregnant wife. Lyle has buried the woman alive somewhere in the desert, and supplied her with oxygen produced by a gas-powered generator. Unfortunately, the generator has only about 7 hours of gasoline left in it. When it runs out of gas, the oxygen will stop flowing, and the woman and her unborn child will suffocate to death. "You're insane," Jarod says. Lyle rolls his eyes, gives Jarod an apathetic glance, and reminds him, "Psychiatric diagnosis can be really subjective."

IN PHOENIX, Miss Parker leave the airport in Phoenix and drives to Dry River. She doesn't realize it, but she's being followed by a helmeted man on a motorcycle.

IN THE WAREHOUSE, Lyle tries to "pretty" himself up by putting a shabby necktie on over his worn and dirtied shirt. Without his thumb, though, he has trouble with the knot. He tells Jarod that he's going back to The Centre to meet with the Triumvirate. They were going to meet soon to finalize their decision on his permanent replacement, and he wanted to get to them before they had to make that decision. Jarod tells him the Triumvirate won't just let him stroll back into The Centre after everything that's happened, and Lyle says, "I bring back their Golden Boy... it's business as usual."

Lyle says once he's been reinstated at The Centre, he'll see to it that changes are made there. He'll eliminate Miss Parker, Sydney, and others whom he considers to be a threat to him. He then sidles up to Jarod and says that if Jarod will join him, they could run the place together. "I can be your friend, Jarod," Lyle promises. Jarod's eyes flash at Lyle and he says, "Like you were my friend when you tried to stop my heart?! Why did you try to kill me?" (See the episode "Back From the Dead Again") Lyle just smiles at him and doesn't answer.

The sheriff arrives at the warehouse and tells Mr. Lyle that there's a tall brunette woman in town who's asking questions about someone named "Jarod" and a guy with no thumb. Lyle understands that the brunette is Miss Parker, and he tells the sheriff that if he ever wants to see his wife alive again, he'll see to it that Miss Parker departs from Dry River. Reluctantly, the sheriff leaves to do as he's told.

BACK IN TOWN, Miss Parker is showing photographs of Mr. Lyle and Jarod to Deputy Miller when the sheriff returns. Miss Parker tells them that she's working security for a large corporation, and that Mr. Lye is being tracked down because he murdered an office full of the corporation's personnel. Deputy Miller asks about the photo of Jarod, and Miss Parker tells her that Jarod is a man who is mentally unstable. She trying to find him so she can return him to his family, she says. The deputy and the sheriff look at one another, then tell Miss Parker they haven't seen either of the men. Miss Parker isn't entirely convinced by their performance, but understands that she'll get no information out of them, so she leaves the office.

When Miss Parker is gone, Deputy Miller turns to the sheriff and tells him that things are getting out of hand; he has to go to the FBI or something. The sheriff says he can't do that; if he brings anyone else into the case, Mr. Lyle will never tell him where his wife is, and she'll die. He hates being a pawn in Lyle's game, but there's nothing he can do to stop it right now.

The sheriff then leaves the office, gets into his car, and drives back to the compound to tell Lyle he's gotten rid of Miss Parker. What he doesn't know is: Miss Parker is following him to the compound. And what she doesn't know is: the helmeted man on the motorcycle is following her.

AT THE WAREHOUSE, Lyle returns to his sprucing up, and Jarod mentions to him that he's getting a little tired of Mr. Lyle's "back from the dead" routine. He tells Lyle that he knows about his step-father (who's in prison for s murder Lyle committed) and had once visited Lyle's step-mother. "She seemed a touch confused," Jarod says. "...Kept trying to feed a couple of dogs that didn't actually exist." (See the "Crash" episode.) Lyle attacks Jarod with the crowbar again, pressing it lengthwise across Jarod's throat, trying to crush his larynx. Although it's difficult to talk or breathe, Jarod hisses out a reminder to Lyle that if Lyle kills him, Lyle will have nothing to offer the Triumvirate. Lyle casts the crowbar aside, and walks around behind Jarod as Jarod struggles to catch his breath.

Lyle walks over to a makeshift work table nearby, and opens up a metallic case. Inside the case is a bottle of liquid sedative, a syringe, and a set of scalpels. Jarod sees the stuff and tells Lyle that it's against the law for him to impersonate a doctor, and Lyle smiles vaguely and says, "That's really funny." Lyle then informs Jarod that along with the photographs he's taken of Jarod, he's going to offer the Triumvirate physical proof that he has Jarod in custody. He tells Jarod not to worry, though, "You'll be asleep when I cut off your thumb." Lyle then injects Jarod with a syringe-full of the liquid sedative.

As the sedative starts to take effect on Jarod, Lyle is interrupted by the return of Sheriff Delmont. Delmont tells Lyle that he's tired of Lyle's game; he wants his wife returned to him immediately. Lyle meets the sheriff's fear and agitation with an attitude of impassiveness and boredom, and asks him he knows what it feel like to die of suffocation? Lyle tells the sheriff he can arrest him if he wants to -- and never see his wife alive again -- or the sheriff can go away and leave him alone.

Before their conversation is finished, Mr. Lyle sees Miss Parker's car pull up near the compound. The sheriff panics and tells Lyle he didn't know she was following him there. Lyle again looks dully annoyed, and tells the sheriff to just get rid of her. The sheriff leaves Lyle, and goes after Miss Parker. He arrests her for trespassing on private property and takes her back to the station where he puts her in a holding cell.

BACK IN THE WAREHOUSE Jarod is slipping into unconsciousness, under the influence of the sedative. He fights the medication and tries to stay awake. His speech slurred and his eyes almost closing, Jarod implores Lyle not to maim him. Lyle ignores his pleas, and prepares to cut off Jarod's left thumb with one of scalpels from his kit.

In a drugged blur, Jarod sees Lyle suddenly jerk and collapse to the floor in a heap. A man walks up to him, and Jarod looks up to see a foggy image of his brother, Kyle. (See the "Dragon House" episode.) "They said you were dead," Jarod mutters before losing consciousness. Kyle smiles at him and says, "Not hardly, big brother."

AT THE CENTRE, Broots brings Sydney a packet of photographs that were just received in the mail. The photographs are of them at the alleyway, and of Miss Parker getting ready to leave for Arizona. They show Angelo the photographs, and he takes them into his hands and starts to say, "I decide who lives or dies... I decide who lives or dies..." Broots and Sydney both realize that the photographs must have come from Kyle. Broots is astonished and remarks, "Man, this is turning into Night of the Living Dead!"

Sydney then decides that he and Broots should get to Arizona so they can inform Miss Parker first hand about Kyle's re-emergence. They'll take a Centre jet to Phoenix and then a Centre helicopter to Dry River.
Jarod hears about the kidnapped woman

AT THE COMPOUND, Jarod awakens to find himself on the decrepit couch in the house trailer. He's still a little groggy from the medication, but recognizes Kyle immediately when his brother walks in saying, "I thought you'd never wake up." Jarod gets to his feet and throws his arms around Kyle, but is still a little unstable because of the drugs, and falls back to the couch again. He tells Kyle he thought Kyle had died in the van fire, and Kyle tells him -- in a somewhat flat and emotionally detached fashion -- that that was the idea. (See the "Dragon House" episode) After Jarod and Harriet Tashman had escaped from the overturned van, Kyle says, he had managed to crawl out. To keep the pursuing FBI agents from getting to close, he fired off a shot into the van's fuel tank -- which caused the explosion Jarod and Harriet saw. The explosion and subsequent fire caused enough of a distraction so that Kyle was able to crawl up to the main highway and hitched a ride out of town. Since then, he'd been stalking Broots and Miss Parker, hoping that they would eventually lead him back to Jarod... which they did.

Expressing a suddenly soft and vulnerable aspect, Kyle asks Jarod if he'd been able to find out anything else about their parent since the last time they saw each other. Jarod shows Kyle the GENE note Sydney's brother, Jacob, wrote before he died. "Is that our father's name?" Kyle asks. Jarod tells him he doesn't know. Kyle's mood changes again, and he's detached and expressionless once more. In a few more seconds, Kyle's mood blackens considerably, and he talks to Jarod about wanting to kill everyone in the Centre who ever hurt them. "We'll start with Lyle," Kyle says, and then they'll go on from there. Although he completely understands Kyle's rage, Jarod is distressed about his brother's display and keeps himself quiet for a time.

When Jarod's able to move around more effectively, he and Kyle go back to the warehouse in search of Lyle. Jarod finds Mr. Lyle standing up against a wooden bracing pillar in the warehouse: his hands cuffed over his head and his ankles in shackles. Mr. Lyle's face has been battered, and Jarod asks Kyle what happened to him. Kyle smiles slyly and says Lyle fell down and bumped his head. Kyle then displays an enormous knife and threatens to kill Lyle with it, but Jarod intervenes saying they need Lyle alive so they can find out where the sheriff's wife is buried. Jarod begs Kyle to keep a hold of his temper; to let Jarod teach him how wonderful it feels to save a life rather than taking one. Kyle agrees to help Jarod find the sheriff's wife, but he still goes after Lyle with the knife . "Don't worry, big brother. This is what I do," Kyle says, and uses the knife to torture Lyle into telling the brothers what they need to know.

AT THE SHERIFF'S STATION Miss Parker talks Deputy Miller into letting her go, so she can find Lyle and hopefully find the sheriff's wife before it's too late.

OUT IN THE DESERT, Jarod and Kyle arrive on three-wheel all-terrain vehicles (ATVs) to the spot indicated to them by Mr. Lyle. They shut off the ATVs' engines and can hear the sound of a small gasoline generator sputtering as it starts to go dry and shut off. The brothers run to the spot where the generator is sitting and follow the out-flow tube to the spot where Sheriff Delmont's wife is buried underground. Working feverishly together, Jarod and Kyle manage to dig up the canister in which Linda Delmont is being held. Kyle uses his knife to break the seal on the canister, and the brothers force the lid off. Kyle reaches into the canister, and pulls out Mrs. Delmont and removes her gag. Her arms, wrists and ankles are bound with duct tape, so she can't embrace him, but she falls against Kyle and weeps against his chest, thanking him for rescuing her. Kyle at first looks startled by the woman's reaction, but eventually he lets her lean on him and tries to comfort her. Jarod smiles as he watches his younger brother soothe and gently caress the crying woman.

AT THE COMPOUND, Miss Parker arrives to find the warehouse empty. She sees the bracing post with the hand cuffs and shackles attached to it, but can't find anyone around. When Mr. Lyle walks in from another part of the warehouse, the two startle each other. Miss Parker attacks Lyle, pistol whipping him, but is distracted when Lyle's attack dog starts barking. Lyle then gets the upper hand and throws Miss Parker against the wall, wrenching her gun from her hand. "Gee, you're beautiful when you're angry," he quips.

AT THE SHERIFF'S STATION, Jarod and Kyle return Mrs. Delmont to Deputy Miller and the sheriff. Miller is overjoyed, and squeals in delight to see that Mrs. Delmont is all right, and Mr. Delmont embraces his wife, kisses her and cries over her return. Jarod observes Kyle as Kyle watches the emotional exchange between these people who obviously care so much about one another. Kyle seems strangely fascinated by the display of affection, but also seems to have trouble understanding or empathizing with it.

Jarod then tells the sheriff to take his wife to a hospital to make sure she an her baby are really okay, and promises that he and Kyle will take care of Mr. Lyle. The sheriff offers Jarod his shotgun, but Jarod refuses to take it. Kyle, on the other hand, reaches past Jarod and accepts the weapon with a broad smile. Jarod gives Kyle a worried glance as the sheriff tells them to be careful. Kyle says, "Don't worry, sheriff. I'm no hero."

AT THE COMPOUND, Jarod and Kyle arrive to discover that Mr. Lyle has somehow escaped from his shackles. They look around the warehouse and trailer, but can't find him. They then walk out to the grounds surrounding the warehouse and search there. Lyle appears out of the shadows, holding Miss Parker by the throat and threatening her with a gun. "Shoot him, you moron!" Miss Parker shouts to Kyle. Kyle raises his shotgun and aims it at Mr. Lyle, but Mr. Lyle turns his gun toward Jarod and tells Kyle that if he doesn't put the shotgun down, Lyle will kill his brother. Kyle keeps the shotgun poised, aimed directly at Lyle's chest. He tells Lyle that The Centre had stolen their lives and freedom from them, and that threats of death don't frighten them anymore. Lyle insists he's going to shoot Jarod. Kyle tells him to go ahead, "And then I'll shoot you."

For a moment, everyone is distracted by the arrival a small black Centre helicopter, which is carrying Broots, Syndey and a handful of Sweepers. The helicopter circles the compound, casting its lights on the scene below.

Kyle looks to Miss Parker, but says to Mr. Lyle, "How's your knife wound?" Miss Parker picks up on the cue, and elbows Lyle in one of the spots where Kyle had tortured him with the knife earlier. Lyle screams and doubles over, and Miss Parker scrambles away from him. As soon as Lyle is in the clear, Kyle shoots him in the shoulder with the shotgun. The force of the blast twirls Lyle around and he collapses to the ground. But then he forces himself up again briefly, and aims his pistol point-blank at Jarod. Lyle pulls the trigger -- and Kyle steps in front of Jarod and gets Lyle's bullet in his back. Kyle stumbles forward against Jarod who, shocked and anguished, grabs his younger brother, holds him for a moment, then lowers him to the ground.

The Centre helicopter lands, and Broots, Sydney and the sweepers rush out of it, but Miss Parker waves them off, keeping them away from Jarod and Kyle for the moment. On his knees, Jarod holds Kyle's hand and begs his brother to stay with him. He tells Kyle he'll get him to a hospital, and that they'll then be able to spend time together, learning new things and learning how to be happy. Kyle tells Jarod it's too late for that; he's dying and won't be coming back this time. Jarod leans over Kyle and insists that Kyle hang on, but Kyle has no more strength. With his last breath he says, "I'm sorry, Jarod..." Jarod asks, "For what?" And Kyle responds, "For everything." Kyle's hand then slips outs of Jarod's and he stops breathing.

Jarod looks up imploringly to Sydney, as though silently asking him to save his brother's life even though he knows Kyle is beyond saving. Miss Parker says to him, "It's time to come home now, Jarod," but Jarod ignores her, gets to his feet, and says between his teeth, "Where's Lyle?"
Everyone looks around, but Mr. Lyle is nowhere to be seen.

Miss Parker and the sweepers start to move in on Jarod, but they're intercepted by Sheriff Delmont who says to Jarod, "I don't know who you are, but I figure I owe you at least one Get Out of Jail Free card." He levels a shotgun at Miss Parker, and tells her and the others to back off and leave Jarod alone.

Rather than fleeing, Jarod uses the opportunity to turn his attention back to Kyle. He lowers himself on his knees next to Kyle's body, picks up his brother's lifeless hand, leans over Kyle and starts to sob. When he's a bit more composed, he carries Kyle's body to the Centre helicopter and loads it on board. Sydney asks where Jarod is taking Kyle, and Jarod answers that he's taking him someplace where he can do some good. Jarod climbs into the pilot's seat of the helicopter and flies off, leaving Sydney, Broots, Miss Parker and the others behind.

The episode ends with Jarod on a Trail South cross-country bus. He's looking through a red notebook, and we can see a newspaper article pasted into the book with a headline that reads: ANONYMOUS MAN DONATES HEART TO DYING BOY. With the article is a photograph of Deputy Miller's son JR. "Good for you, little brother," Jarod says, looking out the bus window. "Good for you."
Jarod asks, WE?

TRIVIA: The signature letters on the side of the Centre helicopter were: N500MV

BEST LINE: When Miss Parker discovers that both Lyle and Kyle are alive, she says, "Doesn't anybody ever really die anymore?!"

OUR REVIEW: Although much of this episode was rather contrived, we were treated to some moments of excellent acting. Jamie Denton is wonderful as the outwardly congenial but totally insane Mr. Lyle, and Jeffrey Donovan was perfect as the emotionally detached sociopathic Kyle. (The scene in which Jarod embraced Kyle, and Kyle didn't react, spoke volumes about the depth of Kyle's emotional and psychological confusion without Donovan having had to utter a single word.)

We knew from the "Crash" episode that Mr. Lyle wasn't dead, so his reappearance wasn't much of a surprise (although his level of physical deterioration certainly was). We also knew from the "Nip and Tuck" episode that Kyle wasn't dead, so his reappearance wasn't a surprise either; at least not to us. Jarod's reaction to his brother's return from the dead seemed genuine, though... as did his reaction to Kyle's (second) death. Jarod has been through so much at the hands of Centre operatives, it's amazing he doesn't turn as "psycho" as Kyle did.

From a purely "depraved" perspective, of course, our favorite part of this episode was being able to see Jarod (Michael T. Weiss) display his praiseworthy biceps while he was handcuffed in the warehouse.



Jarod hands over the letters
EPISODE 20
: "Bank" (05-09-98)

MISS PARKER'S HOME: we see Miss Parker on the telephone to Broots (who's at The Centre). She wants a list from him of the names of all of the people who were on the last bus Jarod took, but Broots tells her the bus company is refusing to divulge that information, saying that it's confidential. Miss Parker is about to give Broots what-for, when the front doorbell rings. Carrying the phone with her, she opens the door and is astonished to find Mr. Parker standing on the front porch. She says, "Daddy?" and hangs up on Broots.

Miss Parker lets Mr. Parker into her house and he walks in remarking about what a wonderful job she's done furnishing and decorating the place (insinuating to viewers that he hadn't been in her house for ages). He sees an exquisite painting hanging on the wall and asks her if it's new. She tells him it was a present she received when she graduated from college... and that it had come from him. Willfully ignoring his own mistake, Mr. Parker then tells her how lovely she was when she was a child, and tells her he always loved it when she'd play Fleur-de-lis for him on the piano. She tells him, she always played the Minuet in G. Again, he ignores his error, and goes on to an unrelated tangent about her mother. He complains, "I wish people would remember your mother the way she really was. Not taint her memory with lies... The kind Jarod perpetuates about her, about me..."

Although it seems obvious that Mr. Parker is "fishing" for something (information or some other response from Miss Parker) Miss Parker seems oblivious to this tactic and asks him with a smile why he's come to visit her. He says only that he had bad dreams the night before, and had been unable to sleep. After a little more of this bizarre conversation, Mr. Parker excuses himself and leaves.

AT THE CENTRE, Miss Parker walks in on Broots and Sydney as they're taking a break, eating sandwiches and drinking coffee. Sydney tells her that he heard her father had visited her earlier in the morning, and he asks if she wants to talk about it. Miss Parker gives him a heated stare and says, "Do I look like I want to talk about it?" Broots then intervenes and hands Miss Parker an Express Mail envelope that had been sent to her that morning.

Miss Parker opens the envelope and finds an advertising flier inside of it for the Dover Town Bank (the same bank where her mother, Catherine, had had an account). In the flier is a picture of Jarod and the notation: "SOMETHING OF INTEREST TODAY AT 11:00 -- THE SECRETS TO YOUR PAST. JAROD" Also included in the envelope is another, smaller envelope addressed "To My Daughter". It's in Catherine Parker's handwriting, and Miss Parker recognizes it as such immediately. She walks off to another part of the room, so Sydney and Broots can't read over her shoulder, and opens the smaller envelope. Inside is a hand-written note from Catherine that reads: "March 20, 1970. I'm counting the days until our trip to Europe. How excited I am at the prospect of showing you the world. For now, though, my friend and I must amend some of the ugliness that exists around us. But I promise, you and I will put all of this behind us on April 14th. All my love, Mom." (Catherine Parker was murdered on April 13, 1970.)

AT DOVER TOWN BANK, Dover, Delaware, Miss Parker arrives at the bank shortly before 11 o'clock. There are many customers in the bank, and a man walking around in a rabbit suit. He's advertising the bank's Easter Annuities program and its 401K plans. Miss Parker calls him "Bugs" and tells him to get lost. She walks up to the desk of the assistant manager, Frank Isaac, and asks if he has anything for her. He tells her she'll have to go through one of the tellers. She walks up to one of the bank tellers, and the teller informs Miss Parker that there are other customers ahead of her; she'll have to wait in line. Aggravated, Miss Parker walks to the end of the line and stands behind a man dressed in black.

The man says, "Patience was never one of your virtues, was it?", and she recognizes him as Jarod. Surprised to see him, and angry over the fact that he'd lured her there and was so blatantly out in the open, she tries to confront him, and he warns her not to pull a gun on him while they're in a bank. Miss Parker stifles her urge to assault him, and instead demands to know where he got the letter from her mother. Rather than telling her immediately, Jarod reaches into his leather jacket and pulls out two more notes, which he gives to her. She tells him he could have just mailed them to her with the other note, and asks why he lured her to the bank. He tells her if she hadn't come to the bank, she'd miss seeing someone: he points to a frail-looking elderly man who just came into the bank and is being waited on by another teller. The teller greets him as "Mr. Fenigor". (See the "FX" episode.)

Miss Parker is stunned to find out that Mr. Fenigor is still alive and that he's a regular visitor to the bank. He comes to the bank every Friday to draw money from his trust fund account. Believing Mr. Fenigor knows who Jarod's parents are, and who killed Catherine Parker, both Jarod and Miss Parker are eager to approach him and talk to him. But their first attempt at contact with him is interrupted when two other customers in the bank brandish guns, shoot out the security cameras, and announce that they're robbing the bank.

Miss Parker and Jarod get down on the floor, as do the other customers, and Miss Parker reaches behind her to pull her gun out of her back-mounted holster. Jarod tells her not to display or use the weapon. The sooner the robbers get everything they want, the sooner they'll leave, Jarod tells her. And when the robbers are gone, he and Miss Parker will have a chance to talk to Fenigor again. Miss Parker reluctantly leaves her gun where it is.

The assistant manager, however, interrupts the robbery by pressing an alarm button under his desk. The shrill alarm screams throughout the building, alerting the security guard (inside) and the police department (outside). The security guard arrives in the bank lobby, his gun drawn, and threatens the robbers (a pair of brothers, Jude and Clavel aka "Clave"). Clave aims his gun at the guard's face and tells him he's going to count to three, and then start shooting. Not wanting to be shot, and not wanting any of the customers to be injured, the guard starts to put his own weapon onto the floor. At that moment, the man in the rabbit suit accidentally drops his basket of candy goodies, and the noise startles Clave. Clave half-turns to see what caused the noise, and in that moment, the security guard takes aim at Clave. Before the guard can get off a shot, however, Clave sees him, and shoots him point blank in the chest. The security guard crashes to the floor and dies.

Jarod jumps up and starts to run toward the guard, but Clave steps in his way, threatens Jarod with the gun, and tells him to get back on the floor. Jarod hesitantly gets back down on his stomach and lies on the floor at Clave's feet.

Jude then informs Clave that police cars have arrived. There are four of them directly in front of the bank; and a SWAT team van is arriving as well. Clave tells all of his hostages to get up and move to the area directly behind the manager's desk. The area is more confined there, and Clave and Jude can keep a better eye on everyone. Jarod and Miss Parker are herded into this small area along with everyone else, and take seats next to each other. Before he sits down, however, Jarod reaches over onto one of the tellers' desks and steals an exploding dye pack (used to "mark" money when it's stolen from the bank; the packs explode when pressure is applied to them, and spew colored dye all over anything they come in contact with. Even if the dye's color is washed off, it's still "viewable" by special sensitized equipment.) Jarod is able to hide one of the packs in his jacket without the robbers seeing him do it.

Jarod sits down next to Miss Parker, and an uneasy, somewhat antagonistic conversation between them commences. She acknowledges that her father never told her that Mr. Fenigor was still alive, or that he was still so near to where The Centre was located. Miss Parker then says that her father had never told her about the notes from her mother that Jarod had given to her, and asserts that her father probably didn't know they existed. Jarod tells her that's a ridiculous assumption considering the fact that he had stolen the notes directly from the strong box in Mr. Parker's house. Miss Parker tells Jarod he's lying about the theft, but Jarod simply dares her to ask her father about "the little gift" he left for Mr. Parker (a Spiderman PEZ dispenser) after the burglary. Miss Parker asks Jarod when this alleged robbery took place, and he tells her it was just last night.

Miss Parker recalls the visit from her father earlier that morning, when he told her he'd been awake all night because he'd had bad dreams. He'd never mentioned a robbery... Jarod... the PEZ dispenser... or anything else. She doesn't quite know who to believe: Jarod or her father.

Meanwhile, Mr. Fenigor looks over from where he's sitting and sees Miss Parker. Her uncanny resemblance to her mother, Catherine, disturbs him and he looks at her as though he's seeing a ghost. He gives Jarod a confused and worried frown and then looks away.

Miss Parker, Jarod, and the bank robbers are then startled when Miss Parker's cell-phone starts to ring. Clave steps up to her and confiscates the phone, throwing it into a trash bag with the other loot his brother Jude is stealing from the customers. Before the phone is taken, however, Miss Parker sees to it that it's left "ON", so the phone keeps giving out a signal. Miss Parker then tries to pull her gun on Clave, and he confiscates that, too, asking her if she had intended to shoot his little brother (Jude) with it. She indicates the dead body of the bank guard, and then tells Clave that she'll leave such "executions" to him. Clave leans in and tries to stroke Miss Parker on the face. When she bats his hand away, Clave balls his fist and threatens to punch her, but Jarod intervenes. With a loud and angry, "Hey!", he gets Clave's attention, and then warns Clave to leave Miss Parker alone.

Clave levels his gun at Jarod and tells him to get to his feet. Jarod wants to argue, but does as he's told. Clave then forces Jarod to go outside, in front of the bank, with him and uses Jarod as a shield while he (Clave) makes his demands to the squads of policemen waiting outside. Clave wants a helicopter to pick him and his brother up at the bank, and then take them to the nearby airport, where Clave wants a plane waiting for him at his disposal. The images of Clave using Jarod as a human shield are photographed and video taped up by local media types, and broadcast over television.

IN THE CENTRE, Broots and Sydney were able to use the signal from Miss Parker's cell phone to triangulate on her location at the Dover Town Bank. Broots then called the police, who said they were already aware of the robbery, and who then advised Broots that there was footage about the robbery being shown on television. Broots and Sydney are watching the TV when the images of Jarod are broadcast. Unfortunately, in another part of The Centre, Mr. Raines, Mr. Parker, and a room full of Sweepers are all watching the very same broadcast.

INSIDE THE BANK, Miss Parker reads the second of the three notes Jarod gave to her from her mother, Catherine. The second note is dated the day of Catherine's death at 2:00 am. In it, Catherine expresses her grief over the fact that she was unable to save Timmy (see the "FX" episode). As Miss Parker is finishing this note, Jarod is returned to the group of hostages by Clave. He takes his seat next to Miss Parker again, and tells her that he understands how hard it must be for her to read her mother's notes. She tells him it wasn't unusual for her mother to write to her in this fashion. She often received notes of this kind on her birthdays or on holidays...

Clave returns to the hostage area and demands that the assistant manager give him the keys to the outer door of the vault. After Clave threatens the manager's daughter, the manager turns over the keys. Clave vanishes into the vault area, leaving his brother Jude to watch over the hostages. Clave returns within second, however, and demands to know what the combination is for the vault itself. The assistant manager tells him that only the Senior Manager has the combination, and he wasn't there right now. Again, Clave threatens to shoot the manager's daughter if the manager doesn't cooperate. Miss Parker gets to her feet, and snaps at Clave to pick on somebody his own size. Clave raises his gun and is going to shoot Miss Parker, when, once more, Jarod intervenes saying he can crack open the safe.

In the vault area, Jarod sits on the floor and figures out the lock's combination by listening to the sound of the tumblers rolling and clicking inside the vault door as her turns the lock. While he's working at this, he tells Clave that the robbery can end peacefully and without more bloodshed, if Clave and Jude will just leave through the vent in the main office. Clave asks Jarod what he's talking about, and Jarod tells him that the vent there leads to a sewer main under the building. They can escape through there. Clave asks him how he knows that, and Jarod tells him that he studied plans of the building before he came there that day. "You're not the only one who's on the run," Jarod admits. He then pushes gently against the lock on the vault door, and the vault opens.

Clave returns Jarod to the area behind the manager's desk, and Jarod takes a seat, this time, directly next to Mr. Fenigor. He introduces himself to Mr. Fenigor as "Jarod", and asks Mr. Fenigor if he remembers him. Mr. Fenigor doesn't respond. Jarod then tells him that he was stolen from his family when he was a child, and that he believes Mr. Fenigor knows who his parents were. Mr. Fenigor says he doesn't know what Jarod is talking about. Jarod says that he understands that Mr. Fenigor is presently feeling trapped and under the control of other people, but, "I lived my whole life like that." Jarod then begs Fenigor to help him, to tell him who his parents were, to tell him who he (Jarod) really is. Mr. Fenigor nearly starts to cry and says, "You don't understand what you're asking me to do." Jarod tells him that he's asking him to revere the memory of Catherine Parker by telling him the truth about his past. More emotional, frightened and upset, Mr. Fenigor insists that he can't tell Jarod anything, and in a moment of panic, he jumps up and tries to run away.

Clave sees Mr. Fenigor heading toward the front door, immediately raises his gun, and shoots Mr. Fenigor in the back. Mr. Fenigor hits the floor, face first, and just lies there, unmoving.

Jarod convinces Jude to let him and Miss Parker see to Mr. Fenigor. Jude allows them to, while Clave goes to one of the tellers' stations and tunes in a local television station on a small set there so he can see what's being broadcast about the robbery. The television reports acknowledge that "another gunshot" was just heard from inside the bank.
Jarod and Miss Parker as hostages

Working with Miss Parker and one of the tellers, Jarod is able to get Mr. Fenigor stabilized. The bullet punctured one of Fenigor's lungs, and he was taking air in through the exit wound. Using soap and paper towels, Jarod cleaned the wound, and then sealed it with masking tape and a plastic bag. While they work to save Fenigor, Jarod and Miss Parker also start to argue with one another. When she realizes her hands are covered with Fenigor's blood she looks at them and snarls angrily, "Nice!" Jarod snaps, "- Fitting." Jarod then blames Miss Parker and her father for making his life miserable, and asks her if his freedom is the price she's willing to pay to get her father's validation. She snaps back at Jarod telling him that that if he'd stayed at The Centre where he belonged, they wouldn't be "hunted" now. Jarod shuts her up by openly suggesting that Mr. Parker was the one who'd had her mother executed.

When Clave sees on the television feed that snipers are moving into the area, he gathers up all the hostages again, and locks them in the vault area of the bank. Disliking confined spaces, Jarod isn't at all happy about this turn of events. Nevertheless, he keeps his composure and sees to it that Mr. Fenigor is as comfortable as they can make him. Miss Parker asks one of the tellers if she knows anything about Mr. Fenigor, and the teller says that he was regular customer. He came in every Friday to draw money from his trust account. Jarod asks if she ever saw him making a deposit into the account, and the teller discloses that Fenigor's account was fed from an outside source, "some company in Blue Cove". Both Miss Parker and Jarod immediately understand that this means that Mr. Fenigor was receiving regular "hush money" payments from The Centre to keep quiet... But who in The Centre was paying him? And what was he supposed to keep a secret?

OUTSIDE THE BANK, Broots and Sydney arrive. They see that Miss Parker's sweeper, Sam, is also there, as are several of Mr. Raines' flunkies, including Gar and another sweeper. Worried that they're there to harm Jarod, Sydney is anxious to have them followed. He goes after Sam, and tells Broots to go after Gar. Broots doesn't like the idea, but does as he's told anyway.

INSIDE THE BANK, Miss Parker reads the third note she'd gotten from Jarod. It too is from her mother, and is also dated on the day of Catherine's death. This one mentions a time frame of 7:00 am, however, and discloses Catherine Parker's concern that she was no longer able to trust the people around her.

Jarod sees Miss Parker reading the note, and he again apologizes for whatever upset the notes might be causing her. He'd broken into her father's house, he said, hoping to find clues to his own past. Instead, he found clues to hers. "Your mother deserved a better fate than what she got," he tells Miss Parker. She tells him he's damn right about that.

OUTSIDE THE BANK, Broots follows one of Mr. Raines' sweepers into a building across the street from the bank. He climbs a flight of stairs, and then comes a cross a small deserted office. Broots can see a man, either dead or unconscious, lying on the floor with nothing on but his underwear. He then sees another man -- the Sweeper -- donning a SWAT team member's uniform (taken from the man on the floor). The Sweeper adjusts his cap, and then reaches for a rifle beside the window, which overlooks the street out in front of the bank. Terrified, Broots exits the building and goes to look for Sydney.

INSIDE THE BANK, Miss Parker pleads with Clave and Jude to let her and the assistant manager's daughter, Kaylie, go to the ladies room. Clave lets them go, but keeps them under surveillance. While Miss Parker is away, Mr. Fenigor regains consciousness, and thanks Jarod for helping him. Jarod tells him he was just doing what was necessary at the moment. "I'm sorry..." Mr. Fenigor says. "I'm sorry I took you from your family... I do want to let you know how... how sorry I am." Jarod once again asks Mr. Fenigor to tell him who his parents are, but Fenigor is weak and having trouble breathing, and finds it difficult to talk. Instead, he reaches into his pocket and withdraws a small silver key: the one to his safe deposit box.

Miss Parker arrives just in time to see Jarod receive the key from Mr. Fenigor and tells him that if it's the key to Fenigor's safe deposit box, she wants to see whatever Jarod gets to see. Jarod promises her that if there's anything in the box that relates to her mother, he'll let her have it. He didn't bring her all this way just to abandon her now, he says. Dissatisfied with Jarod's promises, Miss Parker turns her attention to Mr. Fenigor, and demands that he tells her who was responsible for her mother's murder. Fenigor tries to answer, then starts to go into convulsions as blood fills up his chest cavity and starts to crush his lungs.

Jarod understands immediately what's happening and says he needs a straw or tubing of some sort to drain the accumulation of blood from Fenigor's chest cavity. Kaylie tells him she has a sports bottle on her father's desk and he's welcome to use that. Miss Parker walks to the front of the vault area, and calls for Jude. She tells him that Fenigor is dying, and to get the sports bottle for her. Knowing that if Fenigor dies, he'll have a double murder rap hanging over his head (as well as robbery charges), Jude does as he's asked. He brings the sports bottle to the vault, and opens the door so he can pass the bottle to Jarod. Jarod takes the bottle and immediately starts to use it to drain the blood from around Mr. Fenigor's lungs.

In the meanwhile, Miss Parker grabs hold of the vault door, and smashes it into Jude's face. While he's stunned, she grabs him and threatens to shoot him with his own gun. Clave hears the ruckus, however, and arrives almost instantly. He puts the muzzle of his own gun against the throat of the assistant manager and tells Miss Parker that if she doesn't let Jude go, he'll shoot the manager. Not wanting the manager to be shot in front of his daughter, Kaylie, Miss Parker lets Jude go. Clave locks everyone up in the vault again, and then pounds Jude against the wall. He tells his brother that if Jude ever makes a stupid mistake like that again, he (Clave) will shoot him himself. Shaken, Jude nods, and then helps Clave find the exit through the vent and sewer that Jarod had told him about.

OUTSIDE THE BANK, Broots finds Sydney and tells him about the Centre sniper in the SWAT team member's clothes. Sydney is worried that the sniper will shoot Jarod, and decides to go after him. Broots doesn't want to have to face the shooter, so Sydney tells him to stand guard in the alley outside the building while Sydney goes in after the sniper himself. Broots doesn't like that idea, either, but promises to do his best.

Sydney walks down the alley behind the building where the sniper is, and tries to enter the building, but he's stopped by Gar. Gar tosses Sydney's gun into a nearby trashbin, then forces Sydney to go with him to meet with Mr. Raines (who has a car parked nearby). Broots sees all of this, and when Gar is out of sight, Broots hurries over to the trashbin. He retrieves Sydney's gun and bravely goes into the building where the sniper is himself.

Gar takes Sydney to Mr. Raines' car and puts him in the back seat with Raines himself. Raines is furious that Sydney is at the bank without a directive from The Centre. Sydney counters that the Centre won't be too happy when they find out that Raines has a sniper there ready to kill Jarod without the Tower's permission. Mr. Raines gives Sydney a sideways glance, tells him, "You're in over your head, Sydney," and then leaves the car. Before he goes, Mr. Raines tells Gar to shoot Sydney if Sydney tries to get out of the car.

When Raines is gone, Sydney asks Gar if he'll really kill him if he tries to exit the automobile, and Gar tells him quite frankly, "Yes." Both Gar and Sydney are then startled by the appearance of a police officer who bangs on the car and tells Gar he's going to have to move it because it's blocking police traffic. With the officer there, Sydney uses the opportunity to get out of the back seat of the car. He thanks Gar for his "assistance" and politely tells him to move the vehicle. Unable to assault Sydney while the policeman is there, Gar can do nothing as Sydney walks away.

INSIDE THE VAULT, Kaylie tells Miss Parker how worried she is about the whole situation. When Miss Parker tries to console the girl, Kaylie's father tells her to get away from his daughter. He says Miss Parker's actions are going to get them all killed, and he doesn't want her anywhere near him or his daughter. Miss Parker gives him a verbal dressing down, and tells him to pay less attention to his own feelings and agendas, and more attention to his daughter.

When she returns to Jarod and Fenigor, Miss Parker finds Jarod smiling at her.
JAROD: "Miss Parker reached out to help someone..."
MISS P: "Spare me."
JAROD: "Your mother would've been very proud of you."
MISS P [softening a little]: "You put on quite a show today. Sydney taught you well."
JAROD: "Sydney taught me to believe that you can be anything you want to be."

Jarod then dangles Mr. Fenigor's safe deposit box key in front of Miss Parker and offers to open the box with her. It's in the same part of the vault room where all of the hostages are now being kept, so Jarod and Miss Parker only have to walk a few steps to get to it. Jarod opens the box, and Miss Parker reaches in a pulls out a stack of white computer paper: print-outs of the deposits made to Fenigor's account for the last 28 years. He'd been receiving $10,000 per month, every month since April 1970 (when Catherine Parker died). Jarod asks Miss Parker if she recognizes the account number from which the payments to Mr. Fenigor's account are coming. She says, no, and Jarod tells her it's her father's personal account. She asks Jarod how he knows that, and he tells her cryptically, "You'd be surprised what I know about him."

We get a glimpse of some loose money inside the box, and a pocket watch... Jarod then closes the box. "Is that all?" Miss Parker asks. Jarod tells her, yes, that was everything. What he kept from her, though, is the fact that while she wasn't looking, he pilfered from the box a small manila envelope with the word JAROD written on it. The envelope was unopened; and he hid it in his jacket pocket.

Miss Parker and Jarod return to Mr. Fenigor to see how he's doing, and he seems more lucid. Jarod asks him about the envelope in the box, and Mr. Fenigor tells him, "It's about PRODIGY. This is where you came from... Get me out of here and I'll tell you everything... both of you."

Shortly thereafter, Clave arrives with Jude at the vault, opens the vault door, and announces to everyone that thanks to Jarod's escape plan, all of the hostages will be able to remain alive today. Clave grabs some last minute items from the vault, and exits, telling Jude to come with him and lock the door. On his way out, Jude sees that Jarod has a candy Easter egg (that he got from the man in the rabbit suit). Hungry, Jude snatches the egg from Jarod and starts to unwrap it. What Jude doesn't know is: Jarod had filled the hollow egg with the exploding dye pack he'd stolen from the teller's desk earlier that morning. Jude tries to break off a piece of the candy egg so he can eat it. Instead, the pressure from his fingers sets off the dye pack and it explodes in his face. The dye blasts up into Jude's eyes and he can't see; the concussion from the blast and the pain have also startled him and he falls to the floor of the vault. Clave rushes in to see what's happened, and Jarod grabs him, and throws him to the floor. The two of them start fighting, while Miss Parker rushes to Jude and disarms him. She then sees to it that all of the hostages, including Mr. Fenigor, are able to escape from the vault and into the lobby.

She arrives back at the vault as Jarod and Clave are scuffling over Clave's gun. It's on the floor, and both men are trying to reach for it while they grapple with one another. Miss Parker walks up, crushes Clave's hand with the heel of her high-heeled shoe, and picks the gun up herself. Jarod then rises over Clave, tells him furiously, "I don't like being locked up in little rooms!", and punches Clave in the face, knocking him unconscious. Both Jarod and Miss Parker then exit the vault and lock Clave and Jude inside of it.

OUTSIDE THE BANK, the hostages all walk out of the bank, as policemen and paramedics move in. Mr. Fenigor is seen to by medics, and put on a gurney and wheeled out to a waiting ambulance. Miss Parker and Jarod walk with him.

IN THE BUILDING ACROSS THE STREET, the Centre sniper aims his rifle at the front of the bank. He gets Miss Parker in his sights, but doesn't shoot at her. He then gets Jarod in his sights, and follows him for a while... but doesn't shoot Jarod either. The sniper then finds Mr. Fenigor in the cross-hairs of his rifle, and prepares to pull the trigger.

Just as the sniper is ready to squeeze off the shot, he's distracted by a loud shout of, "Freeze!" from Broots, who's standing behind him in the otherwise deserted room. The sniper's shot hits Fenigor, but not fatally.

ON THE STREET the police realize there's a sniper in the building across from the bank and send one of their own SWAT team members to investigate. Meanwhile, Jarod disappears in the crowd, and Miss Parker is left alone with Fenigor. Before the ambulance takes him away, Mr. Fenigor mentions that the information she and Jarod are looking for is in the "Red files... PRODIGY Red Files..."

IN THE DESERTED OFFICE, the sniper turns to find Broots behind him. Broots has Sydney's gun, but doesn't know how to operate it and inadvertently presses the release that drops the magazine of bullets out of the butt of the gun. Unarmed, Broots finds himself at the mercy of the sniper -- who has no mercy. The sniper takes aim at Broots, and Broots shuts his eyes. Broots hears a shot, and jumps at the sound of it. But when he opens his eyes, he realizes that he hasn't been injured. Instead, he looks behind him, to find a SWAT officer there, smiling at him, and lowering the rifle he'd just fired. The sniper is dead on the floor at Broots' feet.

OUTSIDE THE BANK, Mr. Parker meets with Mr. Raines in a nearby alley and asks him if they were able to get Fenigor. Raines says that Fenigor is wounded but still alive; but that he'll take care of things. Mr. Parker asks if Fenigor told Miss Parker anything, and Raines reassures him with, "Nothing that can't be denied."

Sydney and Broots meet up with Miss Parker on the street as the ambulance carrying Fenigor is readying to leave. They ask her if she's okay, and she says in sarcastic tones, "Perfect." Mr. Parker walks up and asks Miss Parker where Jarod is. When Miss Parker informs him that Jarod escaped, Mr. Parker growls, "Another failure." Miss Parker looks up to her father, waiting for something else from him. When she doesn't get it, she tells him, angry and tired, "I'm fine, daddy," and walks away.

AT HER HOME later that evening, Miss Parker is re-reading the notes from her mother, when the door bell rings. She goes to find her father standing on the front porch with a bouquet of flowers. (Lilies -- most of which aren't open -- and some "shrubbery"-looking stuff that gives the whole bouquet an unfinished, weedy look.) He says he's glad she's all right, and apologizes for not mentioning that earlier. She's not as easy to please as she usually is, however, and takes his words with a large grain of salt. He tells her he doesn't want secrets between them, and admits that he lied to her about his visit the day before. He hadn't had nightmares that kept him awake the night before, he says; his house had been burglarized. He doesn't say the burglar was Jarod, however. Miss Parker asks if anything valuable was stolen, and Mr. Parker says, no... but doesn't tell her what was stolen.

She asks him why the Centre sniper shot "the old man" in front of the bank, and Mr. Parker tells her is was just a tragic accident. He asks her if she knew who the old man was, and Miss Parker tells him, "-- Not a clue." With those half-truths, secrets and lies between them, Mr. Parker leaves.

Miss Parker takes his bouquet over to a basin and throws it down. She then looks up at the mirror in front of the basin, but has trouble facing herself: knowing the lies she's just told. Her telephone rings, and she walks over to answer it. It's Jarod. He apologizes for not saying good-bye before (when he left her at the bank), and tells her he had made his escape from the area through the bank's vent and into the sewer system. He asks her about Fenigor, and she tells him the old man is wounded but not dead. She tells him her father was just there... and that she lied to him. "Like father, like daughter," she admits sadly. Fighting back tears, she then expresses her anguish to Jarod over the fact that they had both been so close that day to finding out the truth about their pasts. She is exhausted and frustrated. He consoles her by telling her softly, "You'll figure it out... and so will I. The question is: what becomes of us when we have all our answers." Miss Parker agrees, and hangs up the phone. Tears run down her cheek.

Jarod in the bank
TRIVIA
: Mr. Parker's personal account number was #839001.

MAYBE AN ERROR IN THIS EPISODE: At the end of the episode, Jarod complained about having to go through the sewers under the bank to escape capture by Centre operatives, and said he hoped his next pretend wasn't as a sewer worker. In the first season of "The Pretender", however, Jarod worked as a sewer worker and, according to his coworker, had become an "expert at excrement", a "real fecal aficionado".Oops, the continuity people on the show must've been asleep that day

.

BEST LINE: Miss Parker to Jarod when she first sees him in the bank, "You've got quite a set, showing up here."

OUR REVIEW: This episode and the previous two ("Stolen" and "Red Rock Jarod") were the best episodes of the season thusfar. The characters are developing nicely, and their lifelines are progressing along (sometimes at a tragic pace). And it's always fun to see the tit-for-tat exchanges between Jarod and Miss Parker.

Mr. Parker showed us again how much of a heel he can be; sometimes we get the impression that there's more than one Mr. Parker (the one who cares about his daughter, and the one who hasn't a clue as to who she is). Knowing The Centre, a Parker doppelgänger wouldn't be a complete surprise.

Mr. Fenigor was something of a disappointment; although, we don't really what know what we were expecting from him. (It was sort of like looking under Darth Vader's helmet and find a pasty-looking dough-boy underneath.) We're looking forward to hearing more about him, PRODIGY, and the "Red Files"... which is just what the actors and the series' creators want us to do, so we know (and they know) that they're all doing their jobs well.



Jarod at NuGensis with the blocksEPISODE 21/ Season Finale
: "Bloodlines" (05-16-98)

Miss Parker is at home in bed having nightmares about the burning of the shackle-laden birthing tables in SL-27 at The Centre... Jarod is in his lair, in bed, having nightmares about Mr. Fenigor and the meaning of PRODIGY.

Jarod gets up and goes to the envelope he'd taken from Mr. Fenigor's safe deposit box (see the Bank episode). Inside it is a small silver key, a burnt business card to the NuGenesis Family Group facility on Atlanta, Georgia, and a telegram. The business card has a ten-digit keycode written on the back of it: 12-072463-01. The telegram is partially in code, too, and reads:

From: (CIV2) To: (XASF)
PRODIGY
THE BOY.
240 RTE 1, CHARLEVOIX, MICHIGAN

Using the telegram as his guide, Jarod travels to Michigan and discovers that the Rural Route address was that of his parents, Margaret and Charles, and the home in which he had lived as a small boy before his abduction. The house that once stood on the property was burned down to its foundations, and there's little left but some framing, plumbing fixtures, and a burnt toy airplane. The real estate agent who's showing the property to Jarod tells him the property had a tragic past: the family's son had been kidnapped, and on the night of the kidnapping the parents disappeared and the house was destroyed by fire. The property now belonged to a company out of Blue Cove, Delaware (The Centre). The real estate agent asks Jarod if he's interested in buying the property, and he tells her, no. He's late for work.
Jarod in Georgia

IN ATLANTA., GEORGIA, Jarod appears at the NuGenesis facility as Dr. Jarod Spock and is hired as the new head of Inseminology. (No jokes, please.) At the facility, Jarod is introduced to Dr. Nicholas Haring (the program director), Dr. DeWitt (a female staffer), and Jeremy (the head of NuGenesis' Lab and Records Department). Dr. Haring tells Jarod that NuGenesis prides itself on its care for its patients, its confidentiality standards, and the fact that it has always been on the cutting edge of reproductive technology. NuGenesis was established by Dr. Nicholas Haring and his brother, Boris. Boris was now dead, but his work was being assumed by his daughter, Dr. DeWitt.

At the facility, Jarod also meets Mr. and Mrs. Brewster, a young couple who are having difficulty conceiving a child, and hope that the technological advances at NuGenesis can provide them with the pregnancy they're longing for. Jarod sees them as a loving couple, deserving of parenthood, and he pledges to do his best to help them.

IN THE CENTRE: Miss Parker discovers that Mr. Fenigor has been returned to The Centre (after the shooting at Dover Town Bank), and is in the SL-14 Infirmary AB-9. She tries to see him and talk to him, but finds he is under heavy sedation. When she tries to get him to regain consciousness, she's interrupted by a nurse over-seeing his care, who tells Miss Parker the Infirmary is off-limits to her.

Miss Parker leaves the infirmary and is later intercepted by Broots, who tells her that Mr. Raines is cleaning out his office and is seemingly readying to leave The Centre. She says she's not surprised by anything "that half-burnt wheezing ghoul" does, and wonders what Raines is really up to. In the meanwhile, she says, she wants Broots and Sydney to search for information on PRODIGY and the "Red Files". Broots says he'll get right on it, but that Sydney might be delayed because he's "occupied".

Miss Parker and Broots track down Sydney, and find that he is in the middle of a neuro-regenerative therapy on Angelo. The therapy, created by Jarod, mixed ocular nerve stimulation and a regulated regime of doses of specially formulated serotonin to repair the synapses in Angelo's brain that had been damaged by the shock therapy he'd been given by Raines as a child. If the new therapy works, Angelo's real personality (that of Timmy) will re-emerge. If the treatment is interrupted at any stage, however, the neuro-pathways that are being repaired by the therapy will collapse again, and Angelo will lose his true self forever.

Angelo only has four more shots of the serotonin serum to go and his therapy will be finished. As the therapy progresses, he regains his ability to speak... and looks up at Sydney and says: "Thank you... Sydney."
Sneaking around NuGenesis

AT NUGENESIS: Jarod sneaks into the Records Lab at the facility and tries to access the data related to the keycode 12-072463-01. He's startled, however, when Jeremy arrives, asks him what he's doing and throws him out of the lab. If Jarod wants any records, he's told, he'll have to go directly through Jeremy.

Later that evening, Jarod is walking through the NuGenesis facility and comes across Corridor Seven, which leads to special teaching rooms and a nurse's station. In one of the rooms, he sees a woman with a young girl. The woman pokes the little girl's finger with a specially fabricated needle, and draws a small sample of blood from the girl. In flashbacks, Jarod remembers being in a similar room and having a similar blood test done on him before he was kidnapped by The Centre. Jarod tries to get closer to the room, but he's stopped by the janitor who tells him that Corridor Seven is a restricted area. If Jarod doesn't have a pass, the janitor says, he'll have to leave. Jarod tells him he's learning that are a LOT of rooms in NuGenesis where he's not allowed to go.

AT THE CENTRE: Broots enters Mr. Raines office and finds packing boxes littering the room. He's going through one of them, and finds a folder filled with 20 duplicate photographs of a 3rd Grade Elementary School class. Before he can figure out what the photographs signify, Broots is interrupted by the return of Mr. Raines to the office. Broots hides under the desk, and remain hidden for over an hour. While he's in there, he's subjected to view of Mr. Raines having to change his pants.

BACK AT NUGENESIS: Jarod is in his office, looking at DSAs of himself as a child, on the day he met Sydney at The Centre. Jarod had just had another blood sample taken from him, and Sydney gently puts a bandage on the finger.

Dissatisfied with not being able to see more of the rooms in Corridor Seven, Jarod against sneaks down to that part of the facility and manages to enter the room where the woman and young girl had been earlier. In the room he finds all sorts of teaching equipment, including a set of blocks with mathematical symbols all over them. In another flashback, he remembers a time when, as a child, he solved a complex mathematical problem by spelling the answer out with similar blocks.

BACK AT THE CENTRE: Angelo's therapy is continuing and he seems to be progressing with remarkable speed. Miss Parker walks in on him while's he's sipping tea out of a delicate China cup, and she and Sydney listen while Angelo plays a version of "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" on the piano.

Broots enters the lab, and shows Miss Parker and Sydney one of the photographs of the grade school class that he'd pilfered from Mr. Raines' office. Angelo leaves his piano, to get up and look at the photograph over Miss Parker's shoulder. When he sees it, he grabs the photograph from her and cries, "Red Files! ...He can't be doing it again! Not again!" Angelo then rushes out of the room. Startled by his cries, no one chases him right away. Miss Parker looks at Broots, agog, and says, "He said 'Red Files'." Broots tells her that Angelo must know a good deal about the Red Files to be so upset; and Miss Parker wonders if he knows something about her mother's death, too. Broots, Miss Parker and Sydney then run off to try to track Angelo down.

In a panic, Angelo rushes into his space, writes the word PRODIGY on the bottom of the school photograph, and stuff the photograph into a digital scanner. He then e-mails the image to Jarod.
Jarod learns a little bit about his past

AT NUGENESIS, Jarod is in his room working, when his lap-top computer announces that he has an e-mail transmission. He opens it to find the image sent to him by Angelo. Jarod realizes the photograph's significance immediately: "Oh my god, they're doing it again," he says to himself. "The Centre's going to make another Pretender."

Furious, Jarod calls Sydney on his cell phone and demands to know what's going on. When Sydney is unable to provide him with much information, Jarod insists that he knows The Centre is about to kidnap another child -- one from the class of grade schoolers in the photograph. "Are you just going to sit by and let it happen again?!" he shouts at Sydney. Sydney tells him he doesn't have any more information to give him at the moment; that it was Angelo who seemed to have the best idea of what was going on, but wasn't "verbal" enough yet to express himself clearly.

Jarod calms down slightly, and asks if the therapy he created for Angelo is working. Sydney tells him it's working wonders. Angelo seemed to be progressing wonderfully until he saw the picture of the school children. "He saw something that seemed to trigger a bad memory," Sydney tells Jarod. Jarod growls, "I know how he feels," and abruptly hangs up on Sydney.

Later that evening, while Jarod is out of his office, the janitor walks in and starts poking around Jarod's desk. He finds a file in Jarod's "IN" basket that has the scanned photograph of the grade school class... and he also finds a photograph of Jarod's mother, Margaret.

AT THE CENTRE, Miss Parker, Broots and Sydney finally find Angelo, curled up in a fetal position in SL-26, near an entrance to SL-27. They try to comfort Angelo and ask him to return to the lab for his therapy, but he refuses to go. "Answers below," he tells them, and points to SL-27.

Broots, Miss Parker, Sydney and Angelo all go down into SL-27 and find themselves in a room with another birthing table in it. The word INCEPTION is written on the small window on the door of the room, and Sydney says it must have been a delivery room. When Sydney peeks through the small in the door, he can see workman in the corridor outside. They are rebuilding SL-27! [That's why Raines was moving his things out of his office; he was planning to start up his projects in SL-27 again.] "Answers here!" Angelo insists, but Sydney and the others feel uncomfortable staying in the place with the workmen just on the other side of the door. Sydney convinces Angelo to return to the levels above so his therapy can continue, and Angelo agrees to go.

AT NUGENESIS the next day, Jarod once again tries to sneak into the Records Lab. This time he's grabbed by the janitor who tells him that if he keeps trying to break into restricted areas the in place, he's going to get caught. He then tells Jarod, "If you want help, I'll help you." Jarod asks the janitor why he should trust him, and the janitor says, "Because your mother did." He produces the photograph of Jarod's mother and hands it to him.

Jarod and the janitor go outside the facility to talk, and the janitor tells Jarod that he had been with NuGenesis in its earliest years when it was both a fertility clinic and an adoptions agency. He had met Jarod's mother when she and her husband Charles came to NuGenesis trying to get a baby of their own. Margaret had always treated the janitor with respect, and he came to like her a great deal. He could remember the look on her face when he first saw her with her new baby son -- the gleam of happiness in her eyes -- and he also remembered the utter look of sadness in her face when he saw her briefly again after her son had been kidnapped.

"Part of your pain is because of me," the janitor tells Jarod. He knew that weird things were going on in NuGenesis, thanks to the experiments and tests headed by the facility's co-founder Dr. Boris Haring. Dr. Boris paid the janitor to keep his mouth shut, though, so the janitor never informed the authorities about what he saw there. After Dr. Boris died, the "weird stuff" stopped for a while. It only recently resumed... when Dr. Boris's daughter, Dr. DeWitt, took up her father's position in NuGenesis.

AT THE CENTRE, Angelo is going berserk. His memories are coming back to him in a jumbled flood and he can hardly stand it. Miss Parker tells Sydney to stop the treatment until Angelo settles down, but Sydney reiterates that if the therapy is interrupted at any stage, Angelo will irreversibly revert back to his former state... and they'll never find out what information is trapped inside his head. Unbeknownst to Sydney and Miss Parker, Sweeper Willie has overhead everything they've said, and he immediately calls Mr. Raines on his cell phone.

AT NUGENESIS the janitor takes Jarod down to the basement where all of Dr. Boris's old files and films were stored. They come across a safe, and the janitor asks Jarod if he's a safe cracker. Jarod produces the key from the envelope he'd gotten from Mr. Fenigor and says, "Maybe today I don't have to be." Jarod tries the key in the lock on the front of the safe and pulls at the latch. The safe opens without any problem. Inside of it are red-colored file folders and spools of 8mm film. Each file and spool is coded with a 10-digit number. (There are no names mentioned; numbers are used for identification purposes.) Jarod matches the code on one file and one spool of film to the code given to him by Mr. Fenigor and seems astonished. "You find something?" the janitor asks him. Jarod answers with an almost tearful, "Yes, me... and the Red Files."

While the janitor sets up the spool of film in a reel-to-reel movie projector also found in the basement, Jarod goes through the Red File that's about himself. There's nothing personal in it, however. Only medical information such as blood type, height, weight, coloring... that sort of thing. There is a "destination" listed at the bottom of one sheet of paper in the file, but it's been blacked-out and Jarod can't read it. The janitor starts up the 8mm film, and Jarod stands beside him to watch it. On the film Jarod sees Dr. Boris... and HIMSELF as a child at the NuGenesis facility, in a room similar to the one he'd seen in Corridor Seven. Dr. Boris gives Jarod a complex mathematical problem to solve, and Jarod solves it within seconds using blocks with mathematical symbols on them. Jarod understands that before his kidnapping by The Centre, Jarod had been tested by Dr. Boris at NuGenesis.

Since there is no other information about his family in either the film clip or the Red File Jarod becomes somewhat despondent. He tells the janitor, "I feel like I found the treasure chest and inside there's only dust." The janitor boosts his spirits a little by showing him a small calling card inside the file with a notation on it that reads: OAKVIEW 555-6507. The phone number was to the Oakview Lodge in Stone Mountain, a short drive from NuGenesis. The janitor said Margaret and Charles had stayed there while they were involved with NuGenesis. "It might be treasure. I might be dust," the janitor says, but Jarod takes the card and gratefully thanks him anyway.

AT THE CENTRE Broots gathers Miss Parker and Sydney together and shows them a bit of security video he'd found in the main frame under the code name CATHERINE PARKER. The video was of the Inception Room in SL-27 on the day Miss Parker was born. Viewing the video, Broots, Sydney and Miss Parker see Catherine Parker giving birth, and being attended by nurses and (then) Dr. Raines. Seeing Raines handling the delivery, Miss Parker remarks, "Eeew... this is too weird... I think I'm gonna puke... I can't believe he saw me nude." Miss Parker is born without complications, but then on the video Dr. Raines remarks that there's some trouble with "the other one". A boy child is born immediately after Miss Parker, but makes no sound. Dr. Raines says the boy is stillborn and removes him from the room immediately, after giving nurses orders to see to the girl baby and to Catherine. The video then cuts off in a blur of static.

In the Centre with Broots and Sydney, Miss Parker is flabbergasted. She had a twin brother... and no one ever told her about it. She asks where the rest of the video was, and Broots tells her she saw everything that was on file. The video had ended abruptly because the camera failed, or because someone had purposely removed a part of it.

Miss Parker goes to Mr. Parker's office and demands to know why she was never told about her twin. Mr. Parker tells her her brother had been stillborn; that there was a little marker dedicated to him in Area 66 of The Centre grounds. He'd take her there to see it if she wanted him to. Miss Parker tells him, no, she'll try to find it herself. She accepts that the child was dead, but is still hurt that no one ever mentioned him to her. Mr. Parker tells her that they just never saw the point of telling her about it; no one wanted to upset her.
Jarod finds the 8mm film about himself

IN STONE MOUNTAIN, GEORGIA that evening, Jarod arrives at the Oakview Lodge and is immediately accosted by Lewis, the caretaker, who at first mistakes Jarod (who's dressed in black) as a burglar. Jarod tells him he'd like to rent one of the cottages connected to the Lodge, and he'd like to know if anyone on the property had been there in the late 50's. Lewis says he'd been there since he was a child. Jarod pulls out the photograph of Margaret, shows it to Lewis, and asks him if he remembers seeing someone like her. Lewis looks at the photograph and grins, "Oh my lord, you must be Baby Jarod!"

Walking the grounds to the cottage where Margaret and Charles had stayed in the 50's, Lewis tells Jarod that he remembered them as a loving and gentle couple who stayed there for about six months while they did business with NuGenesis in Atlanta. "Funny thing is," Lewis says, "You don't look like either one of your folks." Charles was an Air Force pilot whom Lewis referred to as "Major Charles", and had once saved Lewis's life when Lewis fell through the ice on the lake one winter. Lewis shows Jarod the cottage where they stayed, and allows him to stay there himself if he wants to. "You're sort of like family," Lewis tells him.

AT THE CENTRE that same evening, Angelo gathers up the last of the serum he needs to take, along with some hypodermic needles, and runs away. In his wake, he leaves a note which reads: IN FINDING TIMMY YOU SET ANGELO FREE. THANK YOU SYDNEY. When Miss Parker discovers this the next morning, she's absolutely furious... and so is Mr. Raines.

AT OAKVIEW, Jarod is seated on the porch of the cottage and watches the sun rise while her peruses the photograph of Margaret and the one of the elementary school class.

Later that same morning, he arrives at the Elementary School under the guise of Mr. Jarod Kotter, their substitute teacher for the day. While the children recite the Pledge of Allegiance, Jarod looks through the attendance roster and finds that listed beside each child's name is the name of their physician (in case of an emergency). Jarod finds that in his class there are three children who physician of reference is Dr. Nicholas Haring at NuGenesis. The three children are Ari Thompson (a girl), Albert Williams, and Davy Simpkins.

After the pledge, Jarod divides the class up into small groups and has each group work on a different project: some get to drawing on the chalkboard, some get to make play dinosaurs, etc. He makes sure that Ari, Davy, and Albert are in a group together, and assigns them the task of solving a mathematical problem. To assist them in their answer he provides them with a set of blocks that have mathematical symbols on them. The children study the problem and start manipulating the blocks. But before they finish, Jarod is distracted by the site of Jeremy, the lab technician at NuGenesis, approaching the school from the parking lot. Jarod excuses himself from the classroom for a moment, so he can see what Jeremy is up to. He watches Jeremy enter the school, go to another classroom down the hall from Jarod's classroom... and hand a lunch box over to his daughter who is a student at the school. The girl gives Jeremy a hug, and Jeremy leaves with a smile.
Jarod Kotter

Relieved, Jarod returns to his classroom to find that the mathematical equation he gave to the NuGenesis group of children is already completed with the correct answer spelled out in the blocks. Jarod asks which one of the children solved the equation, and all three giggle and point at one another. They gleefully refuse to tell him who solved it and run off to play with their other classmates.

AT THE CENTRE that evening, Mr. Raines and his Cleaner Gar and Sweeper Willie go to see Mr. Parker. Raines says he's ready to re-establish the PRODIGY project and wants Mr. Parker's blessing. Mr. Parker gives it, and Willie and Gar set off to get the test-subject child. Raines alsothows SEVEN RED FILES onto Mr. Parker's desk and says Willie found them hidden in Agnelo's space.

AT OAKVIEW that evening, Jarod is startled to hear a knock at the cottage door. He calls, "Lewis?", but there's no answer. He goes to the door and opens it slowly, then grins and opens the door wide when he sees that on the front porch is Angelo. Angelo steps into the cottage, gives Jarod a tight embrace then tells him, "I got here as quick as I could." Overwhelmed by Angelo's appearance at the cottage, and by Angelo's new-found capacity to speak so clearly, Jarod at first can only smile and stare.
Letting Angelo in

After the two settle down for a while, Angelo looks at himself in a floor-length mirror in the cottage's livingroom. He says of his reflection in the mirror, "This is Timmy now... It's good to be me. Thank you, Jarod." Timmy then says that he heard that Kyle was dead, "It feels sad to know that." Jarod says, yes, it did feel sad... and then he looks at Timmy more closely. Jarod grabs up the bag of blocks the children had used in his class earlier that day and walks them over to Timmy.

He asks Timmy to touch the block to find out if Timmy can "empath" anything from them. If Timmy can tell Jarod which of the children solved the mathematical equation with the blocks, then Jarod will know which of the children The Centre is after. Timmy tries and tries to "feel" something from the blocks, but then has to admit sadly to Jarod, "Timmy feels nothing." Jarod gives Timmy an consoling pat and says he understands. Timmy then goes to the small upright piano in the cottage and plays a more confident and sophisticated version of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" for Jarod.

A cookoo clock goes off inside the cabin, reminding Timmy that he needs to give himself his next injection of serum. Jarod watches as Timmy administers the injection to himself, and something occurs to him. "We're all special because of what's in our blood," he says. If he can get blood samples of the three NuGenesis children and run a scan of them, he'll be able to see which of their samples contains the same "anomaly" in it as his does... as Kyle's did... as Timmy's does... then he'll know for certain what child The Centre is after.

AT NUGENESIS the next morning, the janitor tells Jarod that each of the children connected to NuGenesis has several blood samples on file in the lab. He gets a sample for each of the three children Jarod specified: Ari, Albert and Davy, and gives the samples to Jarod. Jarod then takes the three samples to Dr. Haring, and tells him he has three color-coded blood samples of people who might make excellent egg donors for the Brewsters (the couple he'd met on his first day at NuGenesis). Considering Mrs. Brewster's cycle, he says, he'd like to get a work-up done on the sample as soon as possible. Dr. Haring agrees, and turns the samples over to Jeremy, telling to do a work-up on the samples ASAP. Jeremy does as he's told.
Dr. Spock

While Jeremy is in the lab working on the samples, he sees something in one of them that sparks his interest immediately, He calls Dr. DeWitt, and tells her he has something she needs to see right away. What Jeremy doesn't know is: Jarod has been spying on him, knows that Jeremy is excited about the anomaly found in one of the samples, and knows that Jeremy has contacted Dr. DeWitt.

When, later that same morning, Dr. DeWitt rushes up to Jarod outside the NuGenesis facility and wants to talk to him, Jarod is not surprised. Dr. DeWitt tells him that she needs to know the name associated with the color-coded blood sample Jarod had provided to the lab. The blood seems perfect for a test she's doing she says, and she's anxious to find out who the blood came from. Jarod tells her he'll try to get a release of information for her as quickly as possible, and asks to see the color-code of the donor she's interested in. She hands him the code, thanks him for his assistance, and hurries back to her lab. Jarod matches the color code on the sample Dr. DeWitt was so excited about, with the blood sample derived from... DAVY SIMPKINS. Davy is the one with the special anomaly in his blood; he's the one The Centre wants to make into a new pretender.

Rather than revealing the truth about the blood sample to Dr. DeWitt, Jarod leaves NuGenesis and drives with Timmy over to the house where Davy Simpkins is supposed to be living. Jarod is somewhat confused, however, when he finds out that the name on the mailbox reads: Watanabe. Jarod and Timmy go to the front door of the Watanabe house and ring the doorbell. Mrs. Watanabe -- a delicate looking Asian woman -- answers the door, and Jarod asks her if this is the house were Davy Simpkins lives. Mrs. Watanabe tells him that she and her husband were Davy's foster parents, but that Davy had just left a few minutes ago. A man from Children's Services had arrived earlier and took Davy away, saying he'd been able to find Davy a permanent placement. Smiling, Mrs. Watanabe says that Davy called the man "the Snowman" because of his pure white hair. Jarod knows that Raines' Cleaner Gar has pure white hair, and he asks if Mrs. Watanabe knows where the Snowman was taking Davy. She said she heard him say something about the local airstrip. Jarod thanks her and he and Timmy speed off to the small local airport.

When they arrive at the airport they see Gar loading a happy Davy onto a small plane. Davy is oblivious to the danger he's in, and goes with Gar willingly. Both Jarod and Timmy jump the fence surrounding the airfield, but can't get tot he plane before it lifts off and flies away. Furious and desperate, Jarod punches at the air and hangs his head in frustration.
Jarod isn't surprised when DeWitt approaches him

AT THE CENTRE, Broots surprises Miss Parker and Sydney with another new discovery. Going through Raines' packing boxes again, he found a DSA that had more the security video of SL-27 and the birth of Miss Parker. Miss Parker is astonished at Broots' "bravery", and is anxious to see the DSA. When Broots plays it, however, Miss Parker gets a shock she's not really ready to handle.

The video shows the same birth sequences as the other piece of video they'd all viewed earlier. Miss Parker is born, then the twin is born and is silent, and Dr. Raines carries it out of the delivery room. But Raines' DSA version goes on to show Dr. Raines in the hallway outside the delivery room. He hands the newborn twin over to a nurse, and activates a wall telephone. While Raines is waiting for a response on the telephone, the nurse rocks the newborn and pulls the blankets away from its face. The baby boy's eyes are wide open; it coos at her, and moves its fingers. Miss Parker's male twin WASN'T stillborn; he was ALIVE when Raines took him away from Catherine. Raines talks into the receiver of the wallphone and says, "The male baby's ready for transport to NuGenesis," and the DSA goes dark.

FROM OAKVIEW, Jarod calls Sydney, tells him he knows The Centre has kidnapped Davy Simpkins, and demands to know where the boy has been taken. Sydney doesn't know, but assumes The Centre would put the boy in a safe-house for a short time before delivering him to The Centre. He promises Jarod he'll try to find out where that safe-house is.

Jarod at Oakview
AT THE CENTRE
, Miss Parker bursts into Mr. Parker's office with a portable DSA viewer. While her father sits there staring at her, she shoves things on his desk aside, turns the DSA viewer to face him, and shouts that she wants to know about her twin brother. He tells her he's already gone over that with her; her brother was stillborn. Miss Parker shouts that her brother was alive when he was stolen from Catherine, and to prove it she shows her father the DSA she herself had viewed earlier.

Mr. Parker watches the DSA recording... and then starts to tremble all over. He suddenly has difficulty breathing, clutches at his chest and then holds his left arm as though he's having a heart attack. Miss Parker says, "You didn't know about this!", and rushes around the desk to help him. He composes himself, and shakes off her comforting touch. Growling, he tells her he knew nothing about the child being alive. He yanks the DSA out of the player and puts it into his coat pocket, then rises to leave the room. Before he goes, he softens a little and says, "In some ways... It's like a gift." Miss Parker asks, "A gift?" Her father responds with a wistful and affectionate, "I have a son."

Being someone who has fought all her life to gain acceptance and validation from Mr. Parker, Miss Parker is stunned by his comment and the tone of his voice. All her twin had to do was be a "son" to get an immediate display of affection from Mr. Parker. She understands that if her twin is still alive she'll be in direct and immediate competition with him for Mr. Parker's attention.

She's distracted from her privates thoughts, however, by the sight of the Red Files on her father's desk. Without his permission, she takes the to Broots and Sydney, and they try to figure out what all the medical information means and who it concerns.

AT OAKVIEW, Timmy is lying in a hammock, sunning himself, while Jarod sits nearby. Jarod tells him that when he first escaped from The Centre one of his favorite things to do was to take long walks in the sunshine. Feeling the sun on his face made him feel free.

The two go back into the cottage where Timmy spends some time at the piano, playing ever more elaborate tunes, and gives himself another injection of the serum. He has only one more treatment to go, and he'll be whole again. While the current dosage is working on his brain, Timmy tries to remember, for Jarod, if he'd been taken anywhere special before he was transported to The Centre when he was a child. Jarod has no recollection of a safe-house himself, and hopes that if Timmy had been taken to one, it might be the same one where Davy is now. Timmy tries hard to remember, and recalls fragmented images of a huge glass mansion with a bronze statue of an angel outside on the front lawn. Pushing himself harder to remember more details, Timmy recalls seeing a marker that read: ANGEL MANOR.

AT THE CENTRE, Miss Parker goes over their copies of the Red Files with Broots and Sydney, but they're having difficulty getting any information out of them because they don't know what the key is to all of the code numbers being used. Sydney says the only person who might be able to help them is Mr. Fenigor. Sydney and Broots go to see Mr. Fenigor in the infirmary and ask him about the files. Slipping in an out of consciousness, Fenigor is able to tell them little, but he does mention a blue box in SL-27. "Blue box... Inception..." he says, and indicates that there is more information there linked to an EIGHTH Red File. Sydney also asks Fenigor about Centre safe houses, and Fenigor mutters something about "Charleston".

Sydney calls Jarod on his cell phone and tells him about the "Charleston" reference, not knowing if it will help or not. Jarod puts that reference together with Timmy's memory of Angel Manor, and thanks Sydney for his help.

AT ANGEL MANOR, Mr. Raines is walking through the mansion with Gar, and Gar asks him what it is exactly he's doing to Davy. Raines explains to him that he's going to flush Davy's mind, and then hyper-stimulate those areas of the brain that we wants to develop. Gar asks him if this was the same thing Raines did to Angelo, and Raines wheezes, "Angelo was a mistake; trial and error." With the new technology he has, he says, he can be more precise about which parts of the brain he wants to attack. Gar asks him if he did the same thing to Jarod when Jarod was a child, and Raines tells him, "No. Jarod was a natural pretender. I'm merely trying to re-create him."

Both men hear a loud disturbance outside the front of the mansion, and Raines has Willie, Gar and some other Sweepers go out to see what's happening outside. Raines follows them, his oxygen tank in tow. Outside, there are crushed boxes of Cracker Jacks on the lawn. Gar follows a trial of the caramel-corn, and is startled when Timmy jumps down from a tree and starts scrambling across the lawn in front of the mansion. All of the Sweepers, and Mr. Raines, try to follow him, but Timmy is very quick. He's able to duck into a storm drain, out of reach, before anyone can catch him.

In the meanwhile, Jarod has gotten inside Angel Manor and shuts off all the power to place. Lights, security alarms, cameras... everything goes black. Inside the mansion, Dr. DeWitt calls for someone to re-activate the generator. When no one does, she rushes outside to inform Mr. Raines of an intruder. Jarod gets to the upstairs room where Davy has been put. The boy is lying on a gurney with electrodes taped to his chest and chest. He's alive, but he's not moving. Jarod gently but quickly removes all of the electrodes, lifts Davy off the gurney and carries him out.

Outside the manor, Dr. DeWitt shouts to Mr.Raines that the power's gone off in the building, and Raines understands immediately what's happening. His eyes go wide and he tells everyone to get back inside and see to Davy. By the time everyone gets into Davy's room, the boy is gone... and so are Jarod and Timmy. Raines looks at the empty gurney and simply growls, "Jarod."

Driving back to the Oakview Lodge, Jarod glances into the back seat of his car where Timmy is sitting with Davy in his lap. Jarod asks if Davy is all right, and Timmy cries, "They hurt him like they did me. -- Like they did me!"

The serum gone, Jarod looks to Angelo
AT OAKVIEW
, Jarod gets on the telephone to Sydney, while Timmy tries to comfort and care for Davy. Davy is conscious, but he doesn't speak or react to anything. Jarod demands that Sydney tell him what Raines was doing to him. Sydney tries to explain Raines' methods as best he can, and tells Jarod that if he wants to reverse Davy's condition, he'll have to do it within three hours, or the damage to the boy's brain will become irreversible and he'll remain in that semi-vegetative state.

Jarod tells Sydney that he has one ray of hope: his therapy on Timmy seems to be working well, and if he can do the same thing for Davy, Davy should recover, too. Syndey is pleased to know that Timmy is with Jarod, is safe, and is progressing so well. He then tells Jarod that he's seen copies of the Red Files (the one Miss Parker pilfered from her father's desk), and he believes they indicate that Jarod and Miss Parker may be related.

AT THE CENTRE, following the clues given to them by Mr. Fenigor, Sydney and Broots return to SL-27 to try to find the "blue box" and the "8th Red File" Fenigor mentioned. Broots finds the blue box among a mess of electrical wires in a junk room in SL-27, and while he's working to disconnect it, Sydney walks off to look at how the reconstruction is coming along. The workmen have apparently retired for the night, so Sydney is alone when he walks the hallways. He come across a clear plastic conduit that leads to a station box on the wall at the end of one of the hallways. It's a bank of three old "pneumatic tube" carries. In one of the tubes, the cylinder used to transport information through the tubes is still intact. Syndey picks up the cylinder, looks at it carefully, and then replaces it when Broots comes up to him, announcing that he's been able to retrieve the blue box without damaging the information inside of it.

AT NUGENESIS, that same evening, Jarod is working in the lab trying to synthesize a dose of the serotonin serum for Davy, as the janitor stands guard. Jarod is so involved in his work, that he's unaware that Miss Parker has entered the building and is looking through his offices and files. She finds on his desk the card with the Oakview telephone number on it. As she lights up a cigarette, she dials the number and waits for an answer. When she hears "Oakview Lodge", she smiles, deposits her still burning cigarette in a small ashtray on Jarod's desk, and leaves the facility.

Several minutes later, Jarod finishes making Davy's serum, and seals it in a small glass vial. He then prepares to leave the facility himself. The janitor goes with him as far as the lobby, and Jarod thanks him for all of his help. As Jarod tries to exit the building, however, he's stopped by Dr. DeWitt, who walks into the lobby demanding to know where Davy is... and Gar who comes up behind Jarod with his gun drawn. When Gar tries to advance on Jarod, he's struck in the legs by a wheel-enhanced mop bucket, hurled at him from across the room by the janitor. Gar goes down and Jarod jumps him, knocking the gun from Gar's hand, but also dislodging the vial of serum from his coat pocket. Jarod sees the serum go flying across the room, and he immediately leaves Gar, makes a dive for the vial, and catches it just before it can hit the floor and break. Gar pulls a second gun out of his clothing and aims it at Jarod.

Jarod gets to his feet, but is surprised when he hears the cocking of a second gun. He and Gar look over to where the janitor is standing, and discover that the janitor had retrieved the first gun Gar dropped when the bucket hit him. The janitor tells Jarod to run. Jarod warns him that he doesn't know what he's getting himself into, but the janitor insists that he'll keep a bead on Gar so Jarod can escape. Jarod runs out of the building and across the front porch. He can see through the French doors there, however, the moment when the janitor glances over to look at him -- and Gar shoots the janitor directly in the chest. Jarod screams, "No!", as the janitor crumples to the lobby floor. He then sees Gar rushing toward the French doors. Gar starts shooting, but the bullets don't penetrate the heavy glass in the French doors until Jarod is out of range. Jarod escapes, and Gar swears loudly to himself.

AT THE CENTRE, pouring over the information in the blue box, Sydney and Broots discover some of the significance of the EIGHTH Red File, and realize that it can be used as a key to unlock some of the secrets of the other seven files.

AT OAKVIEW, Jarod drives up and rushes into the cottage to tell Timmy that he has the serum for Davy. Timmy is sitting on the couch, with Davy popped up against him in his arms. He looks across the room, and Jarod follows his gaze to where... Miss Parker is standing. Miss Parker grins and points a gun at Jarod. Jarod simply narrows his eyes at her and says, "Well, it's good to see you again.... SIS."

Miss Parker tries to pretend that she's not affected by what he's said, but he knows he has her attention. Ignoring the gun she has leveled at him, he tells her he's found copies of the PRODIGY Red Files, and understands what some of the information in them means. The key is the 8th file, he says, as he shows it to her. Still, Miss Parker tries to feign disinterest, but listens to everything Jarod tells her.

Jarod says NuGenesis was used in the 60's as a sort of "screening" facility for The Centre and the PRODIGY project. Children who were genetically predisposed to Pretender-quality genius were found and tested at NuGenesis, and then kidnapped by The Centre. At first everyone had thought there were only seven children who NuGenesis had screened and The Centre had isolated... but the most interesting file was the 8th one. Miss Parker tells Jarod to get to the point.

Jarod tells Miss Parker that the 8th file was about HER. She had been tested by NuGenesis, too, and had the same genetic predisposition in her blood as all the other children. What was more, Jarod tells her, one of the other seven children in the project was her twin brother. Miss Parker asks Jarod if HE is her twin.

Jarod pauses for a long while and smiles mischievously... Then he admits that, no, he is not her twin. But, he tells her, he's narrowed the possibility down to TWO of the remaining six files. Her twin is either Timmy (Angelo)... or Bobby (Mr. Lyle). Miss Parker just stares at him for a moment then says, "So, you're telling me my brother is either a psychopathic killer... or moosh head? I need a drink... a big one..."

With Miss Parker involved for the moment in her own thoughts, Jarod moves to deliver the serum he's created to Davy. Miss Parker focuses on him again, however, points her gun at him, and tells Jarod she's not going to let him do anything until she has the time to figure out what the hell is going on. Jarod tells her to shoot if she wants to, but he's going to help Davy. When Jarod takes another step toward the boy, Miss Parker aims her gun at the wall and pulls the trigger, firing a loud warning shot into the stone wall. The sound terrifies Davy and he starts to whimper and squirm in Timmy's arms. "False bravado..." Miss Parker says to Jarod. "Never liked that in a man." She walks up to him, pulls the vial of serum out of his hand and walks across the room out of his reach, near the front door.

Timmy immediately gets to his feet and yells at her, "Help us!" Miss Parker is startled by his outburst and turns her attention toward him. Then in a pleading, but slightly softer, voice Timmy says, "Your mom... maybe my mom, died trying to save children like Davy. Do it for her." Miss Parker thinks about this for a minute, then displaying anger over the fact that she been put into a moral dilemma again by her circumstances, she says to Jarod through her teeth, "Do it -- ", and she holds out the vial of serum to him.

Just as Jarod reaches for the serum, Lewis comes bursting through the front door with a shotgun, saying that he heard a gunshot, and wanted to know what was going on. As he enters, he accidentally hits Miss Parker in the back with the door. She's shoved forward and onto the floor, and the vial of serum flies out of her hand. As in the lobby at NuGenesis, Jarod makes a diving leap to catch the vial before it hits the floor, but this time, he's not successful. He just misses it, and it shatters on the floor in front of his open hand. Miss Parker jumps up from the floor, punches Lewis in the head, and grabs his shotgun away from him. Lewis falls to the floor unconscious, and Miss Parker steps over to where the vial is lying is fragments, and the serum is splashed out all over the floor. She asks Jarod what they can do now. Jarod gets to his feet slowly, and says, "Nothing... It's all over..."

"No, it's not," Timmy says. Jarod and Miss Parker look over to him and he reaches to a nearby table and lifts up the vial that contains his final dosage of serum. Knowing that if Timmy doesn't receive his last does, he'll deteriorate into Angelo again, and the regression will be permanent, Jarod tells Timmy he won't do it. But Timmy is insistent. He indicates Davy and tells Jarod, "He's a boy. Let him be a boy." Timmy then takes Jarod's hand, put the vial into Jarod's palm, and folds Jarod's fingers over it. Jarod walks over to the couch and sits next to Davy, as Timmy walk across the room to where the upright piano is. While Jarod prepares a hypodermic needle with the serum for Davy, Timmy plays a beautiful and elaborate version of "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" on the piano. Miss Parker collapses into a chair and starts to cry. Tears pour down her face as Jarod injects Davy with Timmy's serum, and Timmy finishes this tune on the piano.

Jarod and Davy
AT THE CENTRE
, Broots is venting to Sydney about how awful things are at The Centre: children being kidnapped, babies who are stillborn but aren't, genetics testing.... Sydney tells him he's going to put a stop to the PRODIGY project this time; he wasn't going to let The Centre continue with its experiments on small children. Broots reminds him that when Catherine Parker tried to stop it she was murdered... and when Mr. Fenigor tries to expose it, he ended up in the infirmary. Sydney says he already "feels dead" inside, so what difference does it make. He's going to stop PRODIGY. Broots asks him how, but Sydney doesn't answer. He simply leaves the room.

AT NUGENESIS, Gar has found Jarod's office... the card with the Oakview telephone number... and Miss Parker's cigarette butt. He calls up Mr. Raines, and tells him he knows where Jarod and Davy are, and he knows who's with them.

AT THE CENTRE, Sydney is in the hallway in SL-27 where the pneumatic tube relay was set up. He sticks a bomb with a digital timer into the cylinder inside one of the tube, and seals the relay box up tight. He then attaches a hose to the side of the relay box, and with a small electronic pump, pumps gasoline into the whole system. "In twelve hours," he says, "I'm putting you out of business."

AT OAKVIEW the next morning, Jarod is sitting on a bench on the front porch of the cottage with Davy sleeping beside him. Jarod listens to the birdsong and watches the sun rise. Lewis steps out of the cottage onto the porch and squats down next to the bench, as Miss Parker watches him from inside. Lewis tells Jarod jokingly, "That lady with the legs... she's got a wicked right hook." Lewis rubs his jaw, and Jarod smiles and nods his head. "It's difficult," he says, "to distinguish between her bite and her bark."

Lewis then hands Jarod a photograph. "It's a young one of you," he says. Jarod accepts it, and sees that it's a photograph of Margaret holding "baby Jarod" in her arms. She's standing on the same porch Jarod is sitting on right now; and Charles can be seen as a blurred reflection in the windows behind Margaret. Jarod thanks Lewis for the photograph, and asks him if he know whether Margaret and Charles were his natural parents or his adoptive parents. Lewis says he doesn't know that, but he does know that they loved one another, and they loved Jarod.

Davy stirs at Jarod's side, opens his eyes and looks around him. "Where am I?" he asks, and Jarod grins, thankful for his recovery, and tells him he's safe. Davy gives Jarod a closer look and asks, "Aren't you the substitute teacher?" Jarod chuckles and answers, "Yes, I am. Yes, I am."

Inside the cottage, Timmy is playing the piano, but the melody deteriorates as Timmy regresses and Angelo re-emerges. Miss Parker is nearby and tells him, "I wish I could have known you... the real you." Timmy looks over to her and says softly, "I wish I could have known the real you, too." He then says he wonders if he will ever find out who his parents are, and asks Miss Parker to tell him about Catherine. Smiling, Miss Parker comes close to him, and obliges him with short comments about Catherine's smile, her compassion, her love of children... Miss Parker says she wishes she could see her mother again, and Timmy reminds her that whenever she looks in a mirror she sees her mother "every day."

Miss Parker gives Timmy a grateful and loving look, and then her expression saddens as she realizes that he's deteriorating further and faster. She says she knows its hard for him, but before he reverts back into Angelo completely, she wants Timmy to try to remember whatever he can about Catherine's death. Timmy tries... but Angelo can only remember vague images of a "man in a dark suit" shooting at Catherine several times. He doesn't recall the man's the face, and doesn't know who the man was. Mr. Fenigor would know who the man was, though, he tells her.

Miss Parker thanks him, and Timmy/Angelo turns back to the piano again... but the music he plays is awkward, uncertain, and out of key. Nevertheless, Miss Parker listens to it, and tells Angelo that it's beautiful.

Within a short time, Jarod has Davy dressed and tells Miss Parker they have to leave before The Centre zeros in on them. Miss Parker tells him she can't let him leave, but before she can do anything to stop Jarod, she -- and everyone else in the cottage -- are surprised by the appearance of Gar, Willie, and several other Sweepers, who burst into the small cottage from all angles with their guns drawn. "Time to go home," Gar says to Jarod.

Jarod, Willie and Miss P at the air strip
AT THE LOCAL AIRSTRIP
, Miss Parker, Gar and Willie escort Jarod, Davy and Angelo to a Centre jet that is standing on the runway. Jarod tries to convince Miss Parker that this isn't something her mother would do, and she tells him to shut up. When they're a few feet away from the jet, Angelo starts convulsing, clutches his chest, and falls to his knees on the runway. Jarod asks him if he's all right, but Miss Parker won't let Jarod anywhere near Angelo. Willie goes to pick Angelo up and set him on his feet again, and Angelo stabs Willie in the calf with a hypodermic needle he'd been concealing in his clothes. Startled and in wild pain, Willie starts to stumble backwards, screaming. He bumps into Miss Parker, knocking her off balance. Angelo then jumps up and rams into both of them with his whole body, knocking them all down in a pile. Jarod attacks Gar and throws him over on top of Miss Parker, Willie and Angelo. He then grabs Davy around the waist and, carrying the boy under one arm like a football, runs to the jet.

Mid-run, Jarod kicks the pilot away from the jet's door and climbs up the stairwell. Miss Parker gets back onto her feet and aims her gun at the jet as Jarod, now inside, pulls the door closed. Before she can fire a shot, however, Angelo jumps up in front her, his arms out wide, and pleads, "Save Davy!" By the time Miss Parker can get Angelo out of the way, Jarod has the door of the door closed and lock, and is starting up the engine. The jet taxis down the runway as Gar and Willie both get to their feet. Willie is having trouble walking, but Gar rushes up next to Miss Parker just as the jet with Jarod and Davy in it gathers speed and takes off. Gar looks at Miss Parker and quips, "Guess your gun jammed, huh?" Miss Parker gives him a frigid look.

AT AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION, Davy is playing at the side of a large swimming pool with Mrs. Brewster, the woman whom Jarod had met on his first day at NuGenesis. Jarod is nearby talking to Mr. Brewster. He's given the Brewster's an envelope stuffed with cash so they can take Davy away and start a new life with him somewhere where The Centre will never find them. At first, Mr. Brewster is reluctant to take the money, but Jarod convinces him he'll need it. Creating a new identity isn't cheap, he says, and he knows it. "If you don't want to do this, I'll understand." Mr. Brewster says that if everything Jarod has told him about Davy's circumstance is the truth, then Davy will need all the love and protection they can give him. Jarod thanks them for seeing to Davy's future. Mr. Brewster sees the photograph of Margaret and "baby Jarod" that Jarod is holding, and asks Jarod if that's his family. Jarod answers, "It will be... some day."
Jarod and Mr. Brewster

AT THE CENTRE, Angelo's regression is complete -- and irreversible. He sits, quiet and distracted, only vaguely aware of the conversations and noises around him. Miss Parker stops in to see him, then excuses herself to the infirmary where she sneaks into AB-9 to see Mr. Fenigor again.

When he sees her, Mr. Fenigor smiles and says, "Catherine..." He's slipping in and out of consciousness and has trouble focusing, but Miss Parker informs him that she's Catherine's daughter. "Catherine isn't here," she says. From behind her Jarod's voice is heard saying, "She's here... in spirit."

Miss Parker turns to see Jarod standing behind her, and pulls her gun out to threaten him with it. She asks him how he got back into The Centre, and he tells her, "The same way I'll get out." She then asks him what he's doing there, and he says, "I want to know who I am, and I'd rather die trying than live not knowing." He steps up to Mr. Fenigor, and asks him who his parent are. Miss Parker, too, is persistent, and asks again how her mother died. Mr. Fenigor is groggy and somewhat confused, but he manages to say something about, "... The man in the dark suit... The man who killed your mother... Jarod's father..."
Interrogating Fenigor

Jarod's eyes go wide with shock and he's so stunned by the information that he has to take a step back. Miss Parker leans into Mr. Fenigor to try to get more information out of him, as Jarod runs from the room. Realizing that Jarod's escaping... and realizing that Jarod's parent was responsible for the death of her mother... Miss Parker rushes out of the infirmary shouting Jarod's name and shooting at him. He dodges bullets all the way out of SL-14, and manages to stay a few steps ahead of Miss Parker. She stumbles at one point, and has to stop to reload her weapon, but keeps up the chase, following Jarod all the way down into SL-27.

Jarod is stunned to learn that his father killed Catherine Parker

Security cameras operating in the refurbished portion of SL-27 alert The Centre to an intruder; alarms go off. Broots and Sydney react to the alarms, and patch into the security system so they can see who's down in SL-27. Sydney had believed that everyone had been removed from SL-27 for the time being, and is horrified to discover that Jarod is down there... with the bomb!

The security alarms also get Willie's attention, and he rushes to tell Mr. Raines and Mr. Parker that Jarod has been seen in SL-27. Everyone converges on that level.

Jarod runs through the main corridor of SL-27, but finds that all the access doors have been locked down, and he can't get through any of them. Miss Parker catches up with him, and tells him she's got all the information she needs now from Mr. Fenigor. She's going to shoot Jarod. Jarod asks her how she can be so certain Mr. Fenigor was telling them the truth; with all the lies and deceit they'd lived through throughout their lives, why would she accept anyone's word as "the truth" without verifying it first. Miss Parker is beside herself with anger, however, and doesn't want to listen to him. She's about to shoot him, when Mr. Raines and Mr. Parker appear, and tell Miss Parker that they want Jarod alive.

Suddenly, Broots and Sydney rush into the corridor. Sydney is shouting, "Jarod! Jarod! Get out! There's a bomb!" Further back in the sub-level, they can hear the initial explosion as the bomb in the pneumatic tube device goes off, fed by the gasoline. "Forgive me," Sydney says softly.

A huge wall of fire, contained in the narrow hallways of the sub-level, blasts its way down corridors and through locked doors. All along the way its fed with more gasoline from the pneumatic tubes that line the walls and ceilings of SL-27. At the end of the corridor where Jarod, Miss Parker, Syndey, Broots, Mr. Raines and Mr. Parker are all standing, the door to the Inception room is blown off as the fire-wall reaches it, and the fire streaks straight toward them.

The episode ends with a close-up on Jarod's face, illuminated by the bright orange glow of the wall of speeding flames....
Jarod sees the fire coming

BEST LINE(S): Miss Parker to Broots: "You look like you need to change your Pamper."// Miss Parker to Broots in regards to Angelo: "Cousin It woke up and remembered he was Libarace."// Broots in regards to Angelo's recovery: "This is the icing on a very freaky cake."// When Jarod is informed by little Ari in the 3rd grade class that they always their day with the Pledge of Allegiance, Jarod stutters, "Yes... I've... I've... I've heard of that." He then has Ari lead the class in the pledge, and is then somewhat at a loss when it finishes more quickly than he imagined it might.

TRIVIA: The lunch box that Jeremy brought to his little girl was a "Hello Kitty" lunchbox.// The ID code on the side of Gar's plane was: N3023V.// Spock: No, it's not Mr. Spock from Star Trek fame; it's a reference to the world-reknowned peditrician/ child therapist, Dr. Benjamin Spock.// Kotter: a reference to the old television series "Welcome Back Kotter" about a class for remedial students known endearingly as the "Sweathogs". One of the most famous Sweathogs: the actor, John Travolta.

SPECULATION: part of this code --"072463"-- may have been in reference to the day Jarod was stolen from his family in 1963, or the day he was processed through NuGenesis to The Centre.

OUR REVIEW: ... Wow.

Like the final episode of the first season, this season's finale was another one jam-packed with information, emotion, action sequences, and excellent work by all of the major character-actors in the series. (Even Gar is emerging as a distinct character, with a quirky sense of humor.)

We knew that Timmy/Angelo was going to somehow lose his last dosage, but the scene in which he gave up his own identity so that Davy could regain his was beautifully touching and beautifully acted without being maudlin. Michael T. Weiss, Andrea Parker and Paul Dillon all have to commended for their ensemble work in that scene.

We were happy to see Sydney get off his proverbial butt and try to DO something about the evil goings on at The Centre... even if the whole bomb thing smacked of "over-kill". And you have to feel a little sorry for Mr. Raines. He keeps getting blasted with hell-fire; you'd think that by now he would have gotten a job someplace else, if only to keep is skin intact for a little while.

So Jarod's father killed Catherine, hmmm...? Perhaps: but is that Charles they're talking about? Is Charles Jarod's natural father or adoptive father? Or is his father someone we haven't seen yet. Or...Was Mr. Fenigor, who was drifting in and out of consciousness, confused and mixing up his answers; inadvertantly laying a comment about Jarod's father (in answer to Jarod's persistant questions about his parents) next to a comment about Catherine Parker's death (in answer to Miss Parker's persistent questions about that)?

Hmmm and hmmmm... Can hardly wait for season three.

EXTRA IMAGES FROM THIS EPISODE CAN BEEN SEEN TEMPORARILY AT THE MrLyle Site @ Tripod.More images can also be found at the BLOODLINES lnk


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