Every television series begins with a promise.

Give us your time. Your attention. Your imagination. Invite these characters into your home, follow their lives, and return each week to see what happens next. In return, we'll tell you a story. And when it's over, we'll bring it to its proper end. We'll answer the questions, settle the conflicts, and give the characters—and the audience—a chance to say goodbye. Most series keep that promise. Some don't. Some disappear between seasons, leaving their characters suspended in place and their audiences waiting for a conclusion that never arrives.

Some endings are still missing.

These are their case files.

PART ONE: THE BOY WHO COULD BE ANYONE

There are extraordinary individuals among us known as Pretenders. That was the proposition THE PRETENDER offered NBC viewers on September 19, 1996. A Pretender could become almost anyone. Doctor. Lawyer. Pilot. Police officer. Whatever the situation required. Jarod could study a profession, absorb its necessary skills with astonishing speed and walk into a room convincingly performing a job that someone else might have spent half a lifetime learning.

There was just one person Jarod couldn't become. Himself. Because Jarod didn't know who he was. As a child, Jarod had been taken from his family and brought to a mysterious organization in Blue Cove, Delaware, called the Centre. There, under the supervision of a psychiatrist named Sydney, his extraordinary abilities were cultivated through elaborate simulations. Give Jarod a problem. Give him the available information. Let him crawl inside the mind of the person facing it.

Jarod would find the answer. For years, he believed those simulations were exercises. Then he discovered what the Centre was doing with them. People were dying. The theoretical problems Jarod had been solving could be applied to the real world, and the Centre had been exploiting his genius for purposes its human laboratory rat had never been permitted to understand. So Jarod ran. That's where THE PRETENDER begins. Not with an origin story about how Jarod escaped the Centre, but with the escape already accomplished and the Centre trying desperately to put him back in his cage.

They send Sydney after him. They send a computer specialist named Broots. And they send Miss Parker. Especially Miss Parker. She is one of the great complications in what initially looks like a very simple chase. Miss Parker grew up inside the Centre, too. Her father is one of its most powerful figures. Her mother died when she was young. She knew Jarod as a child, and the deeper the series digs into the histories of both characters, the more apparent it becomes that Jarod isn't the only person whose life has been manipulated by the organization pursuing him.

But in the beginning, her assignment is straightforward. Find Jarod. Bring him back. Jarod has another assignment. Find himself. That gives THE PRETENDER two television shows operating simultaneously. The first is wonderfully simple. Every week, Jarod discovers some injustice. Someone has been murdered, crippled, framed, abused or exploited. The people responsible have escaped consequences because they possess money, authority or the ability to manipulate the system.

Jarod becomes whatever he needs to become to get inside that system. Then he turns it against them. It's an enormously satisfying television engine. It gives the audience a new world every week and gives Michael T. Weiss permission to play a different variation of the same character inside it. There is also a delightful consequence of Jarod's upbringing. The Centre taught him almost everything except how to live. Jarod can master surgery but encounter ordinary food, toys and popular culture with the delight of a child. The man capable of outthinking almost everyone around him is simultaneously discovering pieces of everyday life that most people stopped noticing years ago.

But underneath that weekly formula is the second show. And that is the show that concerns this investigation. Jarod wants his family. The Centre had told him his parents were dead. Jarod no longer believes them. In the pilot, he confronts Sydney with evidence that the people identified to him as his parents could not actually have been his biological parents. A genetic anomaly in Jarod's blood isn't present in either of them. So Jarod asks the question that will drive THE PRETENDER far beyond its weekly collection of doctors, pilots, cops and con men: Who am I?

Was he adopted? Was he bought? Was he stolen? Where are his mother and father? Sydney cannot answer him. Or says he cannot. And suddenly the premise has a destination. Jarod isn't merely running away from the Centre. He's running toward something. Every stolen Centre file, every recovered memory, every old photograph and every piece of information about his childhood might bring him one step closer to the family taken from him.

Meanwhile, the Centre wants its Pretender back. Miss Parker wants to finish the assignment that has consumed her life. Sydney wants Jarod safe while remaining entangled with the institution that imprisoned him. And Jarod wants the one thing his genius cannot manufacture for him.

A past.

That is the promise THE PRETENDER makes. Yes, Jarod will become somebody new next week. Yes, somebody who thought he'd gotten away with something terrible will discover that the strange new doctor, lawyer, pilot or cop in town knows considerably more than he should. Yes, Miss Parker will arrive approximately five minutes after Jarod has disappeared. Those are the mechanics. The story underneath them is different. Someday Jarod will learn who he really is.

Someday he will discover what happened to his family. Someday the Centre will have to answer for what it did to him. And somewhere along the way, Miss Parker may have to discover whether she is chasing Jarod because she wants to catch him—or because the Centre has spent her entire life making sure she never stops running either. THE PRETENDER would have four seasons to answer those questions. It would get 86 episodes. Then, remarkably, it would get two more movies.

Few canceled television series have ever been given that many opportunities to finish what they started. Which makes what happened next particularly difficult to explain. Because after all of that, Jarod was still running. And the Centre still had secrets.

PART TWO: FOUR YEARS OF RUNNING

THE PRETENDER had found itself a nearly perfect television machine. Jarod could go anywhere. More importantly, he could be anyone. One week his search might place him inside a hospital. The next it could put him behind a badge, inside a courtroom, aboard an aircraft or anywhere else his particular talents could be useful. That flexibility gave the series an advantage most fugitive shows don't have. Jarod wasn't merely changing locations.

He was changing lives. The weekly stories usually followed a satisfying pattern. Jarod discovered someone who had been harmed. He investigated what happened, assumed whatever identity gave him access to the people responsible and constructed an elaborate simulation of his own. Only now the unwilling subject was usually the villain. Jarod had spent his childhood being placed into frightening hypothetical situations so the Centre could study how he solved them.

As an adult, he began doing something remarkably similar to bad people. He made them understand. Sometimes that meant frightening them. Sometimes humiliating them. Sometimes placing them into a carefully controlled recreation of what they had done to somebody else. Jarod had escaped the laboratory. He had also taken the laboratory with him. That could have been the entire series. It wasn't. Because while Jarod moved from identity to identity, THE PRETENDER kept returning to Blue Cove.

The Centre was still looking for him. Miss Parker, Sydney and Broots formed the pursuit team, but gradually their side of the series stopped functioning merely as the weekly reminder that Jarod was a fugitive. The Centre had secrets. Then it had secrets underneath those secrets. There were files that couldn't be accessed, rooms people weren't supposed to enter, projects whose names meant nothing until they suddenly meant everything, and people within the organization who appeared to know considerably more about Jarod and Miss Parker than either of them knew about themselves.

The Centre became less a corporation than an archaeological site. Every time somebody dug through another layer, they found something buried underneath. That was especially true of Miss Parker. At the beginning of the series, Jarod's mystery and Miss Parker's mystery appear to be separate. Jarod wants to know what happened to his parents. Miss Parker wants to know what happened to her mother, Catherine. Then the lines begin crossing.

Catherine Parker had known more about the Centre than her daughter had been told. Her death was surrounded by questions. Her activities before that death connected her to people and projects buried inside the Centre's history. Jarod, naturally, kept finding pieces of that history. Which created one of the show's most effective relationships. The man Miss Parker was supposed to capture was frequently the man giving her the clues she needed to understand her own life.

Jarod could have simply disappeared. He was probably the one person on Earth most capable of doing it. Instead, he remained close enough to torment his pursuers, telephone Sydney, taunt Miss Parker and occasionally leave behind exactly the piece of information someone at the Centre needed to find. That wasn't carelessness. These people were his captors. They were also the closest thing he had to a family for most of his life. Sydney had helped raise him.

Miss Parker had known him as a child. And Broots, despite working for the organization hunting him, gradually became another human connection Jarod wasn't entirely willing to sever. THE PRETENDER therefore complicated its own chase. The Centre wanted Jarod back. Jarod wanted answers from the Centre. Miss Parker wanted Jarod. Jarod wanted Miss Parker to understand the Centre. Sydney wanted Jarod safe. Sydney also remained at the Centre.

Everybody was running toward and away from everybody else at the same time. And the mythology kept expanding. Jarod learned that his parents were alive—or at least had survived far longer than the Centre had allowed him to believe. He discovered that he had a brother. Then the question of Jarod's family became entangled with another young Pretender named Kyle, another victim of the Centre whose childhood had taken a much darker path.

There was Major Charles, Jarod's father. There was Jarod's mother, Margaret, perpetually somewhere beyond his reach. There was Emily, his sister. There was the mysterious boy who would become known as Gemini, another young Pretender produced through the Centre's experiments. Every answer changed the question. Jarod was no longer simply looking for his parents. He was discovering that the Centre had reached into his family repeatedly, manipulating lives across generations and creating new victims from the same extraordinary genetic material that had made Jarod valuable in the first place.

Miss Parker's family tree wasn't getting any simpler. Her father, Mr. Parker, sat near the center of a web of Centre secrets. Her mother had apparently been working against parts of the organization. There were questions surrounding Catherine's death. There were questions surrounding Miss Parker's own birth. There was Mr. Raines. There was Mr. Lyle. There was Brigitte. And somewhere above almost everyone were the Triumvirate and an organizational structure deliberately designed so that discovering who was in charge only revealed somebody else standing behind them.

By the later seasons, THE PRETENDER had become something substantially different from the program suggested by its weekly plots. The Pretender-of-the-week stories were still there. But the audience wasn't merely returning to see what profession Jarod would master next. They were assembling evidence. Who were Jarod's parents? Where was Margaret? What exactly had the Centre done to Jarod? What was Catherine Parker trying to accomplish?

Who killed her? What did Mr. Parker know? What did Raines know? How were the Parker and Jarod families connected? And what, ultimately, was the Centre? Those questions mattered because THE PRETENDER encouraged viewers to believe answers existed. This wasn't mythology painted onto the walls for atmosphere. Names returned. Objects returned. Old simulations acquired new meanings. Childhood memories became evidence. People presumed dead reappeared.

Family relationships changed as information surfaced. The series trained its audience to pay attention because something that looked insignificant today might become important two seasons later. That is a dangerous contract for a television series to make. The more elaborate the mystery becomes, the greater the obligation to solve it. By Season Four, Jarod had made enormous progress. He had found members of his family. He knew much more about his origins than the man who escaped the Centre in 1996.

Miss Parker knew considerably more about Catherine. Sydney and Broots had become increasingly entangled in questions the Centre would rather they stop asking. But the finish line kept moving. Jarod still hadn't reunited his family. Margaret remained elusive. The Centre remained standing. Miss Parker remained inside it. And Jarod remained outside it. Then THE PRETENDER reached the end of its fourth season. The final two episodes were called “The Inner Sense.” That title sounds promising.

It sounds like the sort of title you give a story when four years of secrets are finally going to converge. In one respect, they did. Jarod and Miss Parker were about to uncover information capable of changing what both of them believed about their families. The Centre's past was reaching into the present. The chase was narrowing. The mythology was moving. And when the second half of “The Inner Sense” aired on May 13, 2000, there was every reason to expect that THE PRETENDER would return and continue digging.

It didn't. NBC canceled the series. There would be no fifth season. And THE PRETENDER had committed the cardinal offense that gets a television series placed in this filing cabinet. It hadn't merely failed to answer its mysteries. It had ended while opening more of them.

CASE STATUS: VERY MUCH IN PROGRESS.

PART THREE: THE SERIES FINALE THAT WASN'T

May 13, 2000. THE PRETENDER reached the end of its fourth season with a two-part story called “The Inner Sense.” If NBC had wanted to demonstrate why canceling this particular series without warning was a terrible idea, the network could hardly have selected a better episode. This isn't a finale. It's an explosion in the middle of a sentence. “The Inner Sense” begins with something Jarod has spent years trying to achieve. His father, Major Charles, has found Emily.

Jarod's sister. For a man whose life has been defined by searching for his family, this should be an extraordinary moment. Another missing piece of Jarod's past is finally within reach. Naturally, the Centre gets there first. Jarod arrives to discover that Emily has been thrown from a window and left critically injured. His search for whoever attacked her leads toward a mysterious young man named Ethan. Meanwhile, Miss Parker is conducting an investigation of her own.

She has been digging into Project Mirage and the circumstances surrounding the death of her mother, Catherine. Then Broots uncovers something remarkable. A DSA shows Catherine Parker alive after the date on which Miss Parker had always believed her mother died. Catherine's death had been staged. Sydney knew. Years earlier, Catherine had told him she was in danger and intended to fake her death. She made Sydney promise not to tell her daughter.

So while Jarod is discovering another secret about his family, Miss Parker is discovering that one of the defining events of her own childhood was not what she had been told.

Again.

And then the two investigations become one. Ethan isn't merely another Centre victim. He is family. Jarod and Major Charles discover records showing that the Centre obtained genetic material from Major Charles. Miss Parker uncovers evidence that her mother had been impregnated as part of a Centre experiment. The result was Ethan. Catherine Parker is his mother. Major Charles is his biological father. Which means Ethan is Jarod's half-brother.

And Miss Parker's half-brother. After four seasons of THE PRETENDER slowly drawing lines between Jarod's family and the Parker family, the series finally produces a human being standing directly at their intersection. Jarod and Miss Parker share a brother. And the Centre created him. Ethan possesses something Catherine called the “inner sense,” an intuitive ability she believed she possessed herself and had passed to her daughter. The Centre wanted to combine that ability with the extraordinary genetic traits represented by Jarod's family.

Ethan wasn't simply born into the Centre's mythology. He was engineered by it. And Mr. Raines has been manipulating him. Raines convinces Ethan that the voices he hears are guiding him toward a purpose. That purpose is a terrorist attack involving explosives aboard a train. Jarod has to find his brother before Raines turns another extraordinary human being into a Centre weapon. Sound familiar? The difference is that Jarod gets there in time.

He convinces Ethan that the Centre has been using him. He persuades him to listen to the part of himself Raines hasn't corrupted. Ethan accepts Jarod as his brother. But the bomb cannot be disarmed. The train cannot simply be stopped. Jarod redirects it away from its intended target, and he and Ethan prepare to jump. Then Miss Parker arrives. Gun drawn. Because even after everything they have just learned, she is still supposed to bring Jarod back to the Centre.

For a few seconds, the entire series is standing in one train car. Jarod. Miss Parker. Their newly discovered brother. The Centre's crimes. Catherine Parker's legacy. Major Charles' stolen genetics. Four seasons of pursuit and manipulation compressed into one impossible situation. Jarod convinces Miss Parker to trust him. They run. The bomb reaches zero. The train explodes. CUT TO BLACK. That's it. That is the final image of THE PRETENDER as an NBC television series.

We don't see Jarod land safely. We don't see Miss Parker land safely. We don't see Ethan land safely. We don't see what happens to Emily. We don't see Jarod reunited with Major Charles. We don't see Margaret. We don't learn whether Jarod's family can finally be brought together. We don't learn what becomes of Ethan now that he knows who he is. We don't learn whether Miss Parker's discovery about Catherine finally turns her against the Centre.

We don't learn the full extent of Catherine's plan. We don't learn what the Centre ultimately intended to do with Jarod. And we certainly don't see Jarod stop running. The episode isn't coy about expecting another chapter. It ends with three principal characters fleeing an exploding train. That's not thematic ambiguity. That's a cliffhanger.

Had “The Inner Sense” been designed as the conclusion of THE PRETENDER, it would be almost incomprehensible. It spends two hours uncovering enormous pieces of mythology, introduces a new member of both central families, reconnects Catherine Parker's story to Jarod's, pushes Miss Parker closer to understanding what the Centre did to her family—and then detonates a bomb before anybody can deal with the consequences. Because the story wasn't finished.

The season was. NBC subsequently canceled THE PRETENDER. After 86 episodes, Jarod's four-year search ended with the screen going black while an explosion consumed the train behind him. For most television series in this filing cabinet, that would be the end of our investigation.

CASE FILE #008.

UNRESOLVED.

Stamp it. File it. Move on. Except something extremely unusual happened to THE PRETENDER. Somebody came back for the file. TNT wasn't prepared to leave Jarod underneath that train. Eight months later, on January 22, 2001, THE PRETENDER returned. Not for Season Five. For a television movie. The creators had been given something canceled television shows almost never receive: another chance. A chance to rescue Jarod. A chance to answer the questions.

A chance to finish the story. They called it THE PRETENDER 2001. Surely this time they would close the case.

Right?

PART FOUR: THE CENTRE REOPENS THE FILE

January 22, 2001. Eight months after NBC left Jarod, Miss Parker and Ethan running from an exploding train, TNT brought THE PRETENDER back from the dead. This was not a rerun. This was not a retrospective. This was a new two-hour television movie featuring the original cast and continuing the story after “The Inner Sense.” THE PRETENDER 2001. For viewers who had watched NBC pull the plug with Jarod's life, family and identity still unresolved, this was extraordinarily good news.

The file had been reopened. The movie quickly establishes that Jarod and Miss Parker survived the train explosion. Ethan survived as well, although he is largely removed from the immediate story. The cliffhanger that ended the NBC series is therefore resolved almost immediately. Everybody lived. Good. One question down. Approximately several hundred to go. THE PRETENDER 2001 then does something interesting. Rather than spend its entire running time cleaning up the mysteries left by Season Four, it introduces another one.

Someone is committing murders using methods disturbingly similar to Jarod's. The killer appears to possess Pretender-like abilities. Worse, the crimes connect to Jarod's past. Jarod eventually discovers another Centre secret: years earlier, the organization had created a project involving a second Pretender. Alex. Jarod wasn't the only one. Alex had been another child held by the Centre and subjected to its simulations. Unlike Jarod, however, Alex's path had taken him somewhere much darker.

And Alex knows Jarod. He knows the Centre. He knows what it means to have your childhood stolen and your abilities turned into somebody else's weapon. He is, in other words, a version of what Jarod might have become. That makes him an unusually effective enemy. Most of the people Jarod confronts can be defeated because Jarod understands them better than they understand him. Alex can play the same game. While Jarod pursues Alex, Miss Parker is pulled into another Centre crisis.

Her father is missing. The Centre itself is undergoing a violent internal struggle, with old loyalties shifting and familiar authority suddenly becoming considerably less secure. Mr. Parker eventually reappears with information that changes Miss Parker's position inside the organization. The Centre has been restructured. Mr. Parker has made a deal with the Triumvirate. And Miss Parker is about to discover that her family tree contains yet another branch nobody bothered to mention.

Mr. Raines is her uncle. Yes. That Mr. Raines. After four seasons of secrets about Catherine Parker, Mr. Parker, Mr. Lyle, Brigitte, Ethan and the Centre's various experiments, THE PRETENDER uses its first rescue movie to announce that Raines and Mr. Parker are brothers. At this point, a sensible person might stop asking why the Parker family has so many secrets and begin asking whether anyone at the Centre has ever filled out an honest birth certificate.

But the revelation matters. Raines is no longer simply the grotesque Centre operative who has haunted Jarod's life and manipulated generations of experiments. He is part of Miss Parker's family. The Centre and the Parker bloodline have become almost impossible to separate. Meanwhile, Jarod's confrontation with Alex produces something potentially even more important. Alex claims to know the truth about Jarod. Not merely another piece of it.

The truth. He tells Jarod that he knows who Jarod really is and suggests that the answer is worse than anything Jarod has imagined. This is precisely the kind of information Jarod has spent the entire series searching for. So naturally Alex does not tell him. Their final confrontation ends at a dam. Alex is cornered. Jarod wants answers. Alex would rather take them with him. He falls to his apparent death. And with him goes whatever secret he claimed to know about Jarod's true identity.

There it is again. THE PRETENDER gives Jarod an answer. Then drops it off a dam before he can hear it. If this were merely the continuation of an ongoing series, that would be excellent mythology fuel. But remember why we're here. THE PRETENDER had already been canceled. This movie existed because the series had unexpectedly been given another opportunity to continue its story. And THE PRETENDER 2001 does resolve things. Jarod survived the train.

Miss Parker survived. Ethan survived. The immediate cliffhanger from “The Inner Sense” is closed. But the larger promise remains untouched. Jarod has not found his mother. His family has not been reunited. The Centre has not been exposed or destroyed. Miss Parker has not escaped it. The truth about Catherine Parker remains incomplete. And Jarod still does not know the ultimate truth about himself. In fact, the movie has now explicitly told him that there is an ultimate truth about himself that he doesn't know.

That's not closure. That's another folder. Fortunately, TNT wasn't finished. THE PRETENDER 2001 had been conceived as the first of two television movies. The second arrived later that year. And this time the title suggested that the investigation was heading directly into the deepest part of the mythology. THE PRETENDER: ISLAND OF THE HAUNTED. Jarod and Miss Parker would go searching together. They would follow Catherine Parker's trail.

They would uncover secrets reaching beyond the Centre itself. And they would find something that appeared capable of explaining why their lives had been intertwined for so long. For the second time in less than a year, THE PRETENDER had been handed something almost no canceled television series ever receives. Another ending. This was chance number two. There couldn't possibly be another cliffhanger.

Could there?

PART FIVE: ISLAND OF THE HAUNTED

December 10, 2001. THE PRETENDER had reached the end before. NBC had canceled it. TNT had brought it back. THE PRETENDER 2001 had resolved the exploding-train cliffhanger, introduced Alex, added another branch to the Parker family tree and then killed the man who claimed to know the truth about Jarod before he could reveal it. Now came the second movie. THE PRETENDER: ISLAND OF THE HAUNTED. If the first TNT movie reopened the case, the second went looking for the oldest files in the building.

The trail begins with Catherine Parker. Miss Parker has spent years trying to understand her mother: what Catherine knew about the Centre, what she was trying to accomplish, why she died and how much of the life Miss Parker remembers was constructed around lies. Jarod has his own reasons for following that trail. Their investigations lead them toward the same destination. Carthis. An isolated island off the coast of Scotland. And for once, Jarod and Miss Parker aren't simply hunter and fugitive arriving separately at the same mystery.

They go there together. That matters. THE PRETENDER has spent years building an extraordinary relationship between these two people. Miss Parker is supposed to capture Jarod. Jarod routinely escapes her. Yet they share childhood memories, family secrets and a growing realization that the Centre has manipulated both of them. Now Catherine Parker has left them a trail. And they have to follow it together. Carthis is home to an ancient order connected to a collection of mysterious scrolls.

The scrolls concern the Centre. Not merely the modern organization Jarod knows. Something much older. The deeper Jarod and Miss Parker investigate, the more THE PRETENDER begins suggesting that the connection between their families may extend far beyond the experiments and conspiracies we've already uncovered. Their lives may be part of something that began generations before either of them was born. Catherine knew about it. She had come to Carthis.

She had been searching for answers. And she left behind a message for her daughter. That message is one of the closest things THE PRETENDER ever gives us to Catherine Parker speaking directly into the future. Miss Parker finally hears her mother's voice explaining that the answers she seeks are connected to the scrolls and to the history binding the Parker family to Jarod. For four seasons, Catherine Parker has existed largely as a ghost in her daughter's life.

Now the ghost is giving directions. The investigation eventually leads Jarod and Miss Parker beneath the island, where they discover a chamber containing the scrolls. And this is where THE PRETENDER does something astonishing. It puts the answers in the room. Not metaphorically. Physically. The scrolls are there. The history is there. The explanation Jarod and Miss Parker have been chasing is within reach. Then Mr. Parker arrives.

Miss Parker's father has spent much of the series existing in the uncomfortable space between loving parent and Centre patriarch. Whatever affection he feels for his daughter has never prevented him from withholding information, manipulating her or protecting the institution that has defined both their lives. On Carthis, he makes his choice. He takes the scrolls. And rather than allow Jarod and Miss Parker to possess them, Mr. Parker escapes aboard a helicopter.

Jarod and Miss Parker pursue him. They are too late. The helicopter explodes. Mr. Parker is apparently killed. And the scrolls disappear with him.

Again.

THE PRETENDER has brought its characters within touching distance of the truth and then physically removed it from their grasp. But not everything is lost. One piece survives. Jarod and Miss Parker recover part of a scroll containing an image that appears to depict two figures. One resembles Jarod. The other resembles Miss Parker. And the scroll is ancient. Now consider what the movie has just done. Jarod began THE PRETENDER trying to discover who his parents were.

Miss Parker began the series believing she knew who her parents were. Five years later, their investigation has moved beyond missing relatives and Centre experiments into something approaching destiny. Why do their families keep intersecting? Why was Catherine Parker involved with Jarod's family? Why was Ethan created from Catherine and Major Charles? Why have Jarod and Miss Parker's lives remained connected since childhood? What did Catherine discover?

What did the scrolls say? What was Mr. Parker trying to prevent them from learning? And why does an ancient document apparently contain images of two people who look like Jarod and Miss Parker? Those aren't answers. Those are questions considerably larger than the ones we started with. And then THE PRETENDER: ISLAND OF THE HAUNTED ends. Not Season Five. Not the beginning of another run of episodes. The second of two TNT television movies.

The last original live-action installment of THE PRETENDER. Jarod is still searching for his mother. His family is still scattered. Miss Parker still doesn't fully understand Catherine's plan. The Centre still exists. The truth about Jarod remains incomplete. And now an ancient prophecy—or something very much resembling one—has connected Jarod and Miss Parker in a way neither of them understands. THE PRETENDER had been canceled once.

It received a rescue movie. That movie ended with another mystery. It received a second rescue movie. That movie ended with an even bigger mystery. There is a point at which this stops looking like unfortunate cancellation and starts looking like a behavioral pattern. THE PRETENDER wasn't merely denied an ending. Given the opportunity, it kept declining to have one. And this time there would be no third television movie arriving to pick up the file.

Jarod and Miss Parker had reached the end of their screen story. Together. Holding a fragment of the answer. And staring at another question.

PART SIX: TWO MOVIES AND STILL NO GOODBYE

At this point, the defense may reasonably ask a question. What exactly did THE PRETENDER still owe us? After all, television mysteries are allowed to remain mysterious. Not every locked door needs to be opened. Not every secret organization needs to be reduced to an organizational chart. Not every piece of mythology requires a paragraph explaining precisely what it means. Ambiguity can be an ending. This isn't ambiguity. This is unfinished business.

Let's inventory the file as it stood when ISLAND OF THE HAUNTED ended on December 10, 2001. Jarod had escaped the Centre. That part of the story was complete before the series even began. He had discovered that the Centre used his simulations for purposes that could hurt and kill people. He had found his father, Major Charles. He had discovered siblings he never knew existed. He had learned that the Centre's manipulation of his family extended far beyond his own childhood.

He had discovered Ethan, the extraordinary half-brother he shared with Miss Parker. These are real answers. THE PRETENDER did not spend six years simply moving pieces around the board. But return to the promise made in 1996. Jarod wanted his family. He never got it. His mother, Margaret, remained the most important missing person in Jarod's life. He spent years following traces of her. He came close. He learned she was alive. He learned more about the family from which he had been taken.

But the reunion that should have completed Jarod's journey never happened. Think about how extraordinary that is. THE PRETENDER begins with a man searching for his mother. Four television seasons later, he is still searching for his mother. NBC cancels the show. TNT gives him another movie. Still searching. TNT gives him another movie. Still searching. Margaret isn't an incidental mystery introduced halfway through the mythology.

Finding her is embedded in the emotional foundation of the series. Jarod can become anyone. He wants to find the people who can tell him who he was before the Centre decided for him. That story remains unfinished. Then there is Miss Parker. Her assignment was to capture Jarod. She never did. But by the end, whether she *should* capture him has become vastly more interesting than whether she *can*. Miss Parker has learned that the Centre lied to her repeatedly.

It lied about her mother. It concealed members of her family. It manipulated her understanding of Catherine's death. It placed her inside a pursuit in which the fugitive she was chasing repeatedly supplied more truthful information about her past than the people for whom she worked. Catherine Parker had been trying to accomplish something. Miss Parker never completely discovers what. That matters because Catherine isn't merely another Centre mystery.

She is the moral question sitting underneath her daughter's entire life. If Catherine was trying to oppose the Centre, then Miss Parker has spent years serving the institution her mother resisted. Does she finally walk away? Does she turn against it? Does she help destroy it? Does she continue chasing Jarod? We never find out. Then there is the Centre itself. It survives. After everything Jarod learns about the use of his simulations, the abduction and exploitation of children, the experiments, the manipulation of families and the layers of secrecy surrounding the organization, there is no final reckoning.

No exposure. No destruction. No liberation of everyone still trapped inside it. No moment when Jarod walks back through those doors as a free man and forces the institution that stole his childhood to answer for what it did. The Centre is still there when the screen story ends. And then there are the scrolls. This is where the second TNT movie makes the case against itself particularly strong. ISLAND OF THE HAUNTED doesn't merely fail to resolve an old mystery.

It introduces a new mythology at the finish line. The scrolls suggest that the connection between Jarod and Miss Parker reaches deeper into history than either character understood. Catherine Parker knew about them. Mr. Parker wanted them. An ancient image appears to connect Jarod and Miss Parker. And whatever explanation might have made sense of that revelation disappears before they can obtain it. That isn't leaving one last poetic question for the audience.

That's introducing another locked room and then ending the movie before somebody finds the key. We can therefore separate the unresolved material into two categories. The first consists of promises THE PRETENDER made throughout the television series: Jarod's reunion with his mother. The reunification—or ultimate fate—of his family. Miss Parker's final relationship with the Centre. The complete truth about Catherine Parker. The ultimate fate of the Centre itself.

The final relationship between Jarod and Miss Parker. Those are the old files. Then the movies add new ones: What did Alex know about Jarod? What did the scrolls reveal? Why do they apparently connect Jarod and Miss Parker? What did Mr. Parker know about them? What did Catherine know? And what was the larger history behind the two families? Those are the files TNT brought into the evidence room itself. This distinction matters when deciding our verdict.

THE PRETENDER cannot be accused merely of suffering an unfortunate cancellation. That happened in 2000. Had the story ended with “The Inner Sense,” this would be one of the easiest cases Finale Interruptus ever investigated. NBC canceled a serialized mystery on a cliffhanger. Case closed. Except TNT reopened it. The first movie had the opportunity to resolve the NBC cliffhanger and move the characters toward an ending. Instead, it resolved the immediate danger and constructed another mystery around Alex.

The second movie had another opportunity. Instead, it expanded the mythology again and ended with Jarod and Miss Parker holding a fragment of an ancient mystery they did not understand. THE PRETENDER wasn't merely interrupted once. It was interrupted three times. First by NBC. Then by the ending of THE PRETENDER 2001. Then by the ending of ISLAND OF THE HAUNTED. Only the first interruption can be blamed entirely on cancellation.

The other two were creative decisions made while the filmmakers knew they were working in television movies rather than an open-ended weekly series. That doesn't make those decisions bad storytelling. They clearly expected—or at least hoped—to continue. A cliffhanger is a perfectly legitimate way to make an audience want the next chapter. There is only one problem. The next chapter has to arrive. It didn't. December 10, 2001 became the last time Michael T. Weiss played Jarod in a filmed continuation of THE PRETENDER.

The television set went dark. Jarod remained separated from his mother. Miss Parker remained caught between Jarod and the Centre. The Centre remained standing. The scroll remained unexplained. And the two people at the center of the story were left staring at evidence that promised there was still something enormous they didn't know. If this investigation ended there, the verdict would be obvious.

UNRESOLVED.

But unlike most of the shows in this filing cabinet, THE PRETENDER didn't completely disappear after its final broadcast. Craig W. Van Sickle and Steven Long Mitchell kept talking. Years passed. Plans surfaced. Continuation projects appeared. And eventually the creators began revealing things television never got around to telling us. Which raises the question that can change a Finale Interruptus verdict: If the ending wasn't televised, but the people who created the story later told us where it was going...

does that close the case? Time to interview the witnesses.

PART SEVEN: WHAT WAS SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN?

The witnesses are Steven Long Mitchell and Craig W. Van Sickle. And unlike some of the cases we've investigated, the creators of THE PRETENDER didn't disappear along with their television series. They knew there was more story. They wanted to tell it. And more than a decade after ISLAND OF THE HAUNTED, they actually got the opportunity. In 2013, Mitchell and Van Sickle announced that THE PRETENDER was coming back. Not as another TNT movie.

Not initially as a television series. As something they called THE PRETENDER REBORN. The plan was ambitious. There would be novels. There would be graphic novels exploring additional parts of the characters' histories. And the creators hoped all of it might eventually lead THE PRETENDER back into live action. For fans who had spent twelve years wondering what happened after ISLAND OF THE HAUNTED, this sounded like somebody had finally found the missing pages of the file.

The first novel, THE PRETENDER: REBIRTH, arrived in October 2013. Then came a second novel, SAVING LUKE. And here our investigation encounters an unusual problem. These books came from the creators of THE PRETENDER. But they weren't simply Novel Number Three following the two TNT movies. Mitchell and Van Sickle had decided to reintroduce their universe for a new audience. REBIRTH revisits the basic beginning of Jarod's story in a contemporary setting. Jarod has escaped the Centre. He is discovering the outside world. The Centre is hunting him. Miss Parker, Sydney and the familiar pieces of the mythology are present.

It is THE PRETENDER. But it isn't simply the next filmed chapter after Carthis. That distinction is important. If somebody watching ISLAND OF THE HAUNTED asks, “What did Jarod and Miss Parker discover next?” we cannot hand them REBIRTH and pretend the television cliffhanger has been resolved. The creators themselves explained why they took this approach. They could have written a book that answered the outstanding questions and wrapped up the original story.

They chose not to. They believed there was considerably more story to tell. And perhaps the most revealing thing Craig W. Van Sickle said during the revival was that fans kept asking for the ending, but the creators had originally planned for THE PRETENDER to continue for several more years. There was an ending. Somewhere. They simply didn't want to race directly toward it. That's fascinating evidence for this case. Because it tells us something we've suspected since ISLAND OF THE HAUNTED.

THE PRETENDER wasn't improvising mysteries without any expectation that they would eventually lead somewhere. Mitchell and Van Sickle regarded Jarod's story as unfinished. They had more planned. They had answers they intended to reveal. They even teased mysteries that television never solved, including something as basic—and wonderfully infuriating—as Miss Parker's first name. Remember that. We spent four seasons with her. Two movies.

And we still don't know the woman's first name. That's THE PRETENDER in miniature. Even her business card is a cliffhanger. The creators promised that answers would come as the revived story continued. But they were equally clear about something else. Answers would create new questions. Closure wasn't the immediate objective. Continuation was. And that creates an important distinction in our evidence. The later books prove that THE PRETENDER's creators still cared about the mythology.

They prove that there were intended answers beyond what appeared on television. They prove that Jarod's story wasn't regarded by its creators as complete when ISLAND OF THE HAUNTED ended. What they do not provide is the missing ending to the television series. There is no completed Season Five we can examine. There is no produced third TNT movie. There is no filmed reunion in which Jarod finally finds Margaret, Miss Parker makes her ultimate choice, the Centre receives its reckoning and the meaning of the scrolls is explained.

And, crucially, there is no creator statement we can responsibly substitute for all of that by saying, “Here's exactly how THE PRETENDER would have ended.” Mitchell and Van Sickle knew. Or at least they knew considerably more than they told us. They deliberately kept the file open because they hoped to continue telling stories inside it. That's their right. In fact, it's easy to understand. If you've spent years trying to resurrect a television property, finally getting control of the characters again and immediately writing THE END across the last page would be a peculiar business strategy.

But Finale Interruptus isn't investigating whether that was a sensible creative decision. We're investigating whether the original television story received its ending. It didn't. What happened instead is almost uniquely THE PRETENDER. NBC canceled the story. TNT rescued it. Twice. The second rescue ended with another mystery. Twelve years later, the creators rescued it again. And rather than close the mystery, they rebuilt the playground so they could keep playing in it.

There is something strangely appropriate about that. Jarod is a man whose entire life is built around becoming somebody else while trying to discover who he really is. THE PRETENDER has now spent decades doing essentially the same thing. Television series. Television movies. Novels. Graphic storytelling plans. Possible future live action. Different forms. Same identity. Same pursuit. Same unanswered question. Somewhere, according to the men who created him, there is an ending for Jarod.

But an ending that exists in the creators' heads is not an ending the audience received. The evidence therefore helps us understand what happened. It does not close the case. Which leaves us with one final question. After four seasons, 86 episodes, two television movies and a literary resurrection more than a decade later... who is Jarod? And did THE PRETENDER ever keep the promise it made to tell us?

PART EIGHT: WHO IS JAROD?

We opened this file with a promise. Someday Jarod would learn who he really was. Someday he would discover what happened to his family. Someday the Centre would have to answer for what it did to him. So let's return to the question THE PRETENDER asked when Jarod first escaped into the world. Who is Jarod? After 86 episodes and two television movies, we know considerably more than we did in 1996. We know he was taken from his family as a child.

We know the Centre recognized his extraordinary abilities and turned his childhood into a succession of simulations. We know those simulations weren't harmless exercises. We know Jarod escaped when he understood how his work was being used. We know his father is Major Charles. We know he has siblings. We know the Centre's interference with his family extended across years and generations. We know he shares a half-brother, Ethan, with Miss Parker.

We know the histories of Jarod's family and the Parker family are connected far more deeply than either of them understood when the chase began. We know a lot about Jarod. But THE PRETENDER didn't promise merely to give us information about him. It gave him a destination. Home. That's the part he never reached. Margaret remains out there. Jarod's family remains scattered. The Centre remains standing. Miss Parker never makes the final choice the entire series has been preparing her to make.

Catherine Parker's complete story remains beyond her daughter's grasp. The scrolls remain unexplained. The larger connection between Jarod and Miss Parker remains unresolved. And Jarod remains what he was when we met him. A fugitive. That makes THE PRETENDER one of the strangest files in this cabinet. Most Finale Interruptus cases are easy to understand. A television series builds an ongoing story. Ratings fall. Executives make a decision.

The show disappears. Nobody involved intended the last episode to be the last episode, and the audience is left staring at a cliffhanger created for a season that never arrived. THE PRETENDER certainly qualifies. “The Inner Sense” ends with Jarod, Miss Parker and Ethan running from an exploding train. NBC canceled the show. Had nothing else happened, our verdict would require approximately one sentence. But something else happened.

TNT gave THE PRETENDER another chance. THE PRETENDER 2001 resolved the train explosion. Then it introduced Alex, a man who claimed to know the truth about Jarod, and sent that truth over the side of a dam with him. TNT gave THE PRETENDER another chance. ISLAND OF THE HAUNTED sent Jarod and Miss Parker together in pursuit of Catherine Parker's secrets and the mysterious scrolls. Then it blew up the helicopter carrying most of the answers.

Twice THE PRETENDER was rescued from its unfinished ending. Twice it responded by creating another unfinished ending. That's almost admirable. There is confidence in constructing a cliffhanger. There is astonishing confidence in constructing one after somebody has already rescued you from the previous cliffhanger. The creators clearly believed there would be more. Years later, Steven Long Mitchell and Craig W. Van Sickle continued trying to make sure there would be.

The novels demonstrated that Jarod, Miss Parker and the Centre remained alive in their imaginations and that there were still stories—and answers—they wanted to deliver. But continuation isn't conclusion. A planned ending isn't an ending. An answer the creators know isn't an answer the audience has received. And a story that can someday continue is still a story that hasn't finished. So perhaps we've been asking the wrong question.

Who is Jarod? By the end, we know. Jarod is the child the Centre stole. He's the genius it exploited. He's the Pretender who discovered that understanding other people's lives didn't help him understand his own. He's the man who escaped and then spent years using the abilities forced upon him to help people who couldn't help themselves. He's Major Charles' son. He's Ethan's brother. He's Miss Parker's quarry, adversary, accomplice, childhood friend and something considerably more complicated than any of those words can comfortably describe.

He's the man who could become anyone. What we never learn is whether he finally gets to stop. That's the ending THE PRETENDER owes him. Not necessarily the destruction of the Centre. Not an encyclopedia explaining every secret project. Not a genealogy chart large enough to make sense of the Parker family. Not even a definitive explanation for every symbol on every scroll. Jarod needs to arrive somewhere. For six years of television, every identity was temporary.

Every occupation was temporary. Every town was temporary. Every victory ended with Jarod moving again because the Centre was coming and his family was still somewhere ahead of him. The natural ending isn't Jarod becoming somebody. It's Jarod no longer needing to pretend. Maybe he finds Margaret. Maybe his surviving family finally gathers in one place. Maybe Miss Parker walks away from the Centre. Maybe she walks away with him.

Maybe the Centre falls. Maybe it doesn't. Those are details the storytellers get to choose. But eventually Jarod has to stop running. He never did. And that's why the two TNT movies don't reduce the severity of this case. They make it worse. THE PRETENDER didn't lose its ending once. It lost it three times. The first time, NBC took it away. The next two times, the story reached the exit and decided there was still another corridor worth exploring.

There may yet be another corridor. Mitchell and Van Sickle have never treated these characters as dead. THE PRETENDER has already demonstrated an unusual ability to return after everybody assumes it's gone. Perhaps someday Michael T. Weiss will be Jarod again. Perhaps Andrea Parker will receive one more telephone call. Perhaps somebody will finally open the right Centre file. If that happens, we'll happily pull this folder from the cabinet.

Until then, the evidence is overwhelming.

CASE FILE #008: THE PRETENDER

ORIGINAL RUN: 1996–2000

TELEVISION MOVIES: 2001

EPISODES: 86

CENTRAL OBJECTIVE: JAROD DISCOVERS THE TRUTH ABOUT HIS IDENTITY AND REUNITES WITH HIS FAMILY.

LAST KNOWN STATUS: STILL SEARCHING.

VERDICT: UNRESOLVED.

Four seasons. Two movies. Three endings that weren't endings. Jarod could pretend to be almost anyone. THE PRETENDER could pretend to be almost anything.

Except finished.