Crash

This episode is rich in Centre lore, with an extremely personal and emotional storyline for Jarod. A good one!

As we were putting this one together, it was another one of those episodes that had a slam dunk Pretend, but not a lot of emotional stuff for Jarod. We knew for weeks that something was missing but just couldn’t quite find the core until — duh — (and a lot of the times the answers do seem painfully obvious) we hit on, what if Jarod was supposed to be on the plane that crashed, and then what if, to create greater impact — he actually gave his ticket and struck up a friendship with the guy he gave it to in the airline gate.

While we’ve hit this point a lot in this episode guide, it is because we kept realizing as we did this series that we were blessed with characters and a premise that was emotionally very rich. While a lot of it was by design, it is really a tribute to the talented and creative people who made up the Pretender family.

These flashbacks were played throughout the episode, highlighting Jarod’s emotional turmoil at having sent someone on a crashed plane (not knowing of course). The episode ends in an emotional scene with Jarod personally showing up at the dead man¹s house, asking the parents if they want to hear about their son¹s last couple of hours. Very effective.

The Centre story, probably one of our favorites — the high school reunion and the twisted truth (foreshadowing) of Lyle’s past and that he¹s faked his death once before. Hope it shows, but we had great fun coming up with all the reunion stuff and it works pretty darn well, especially set against the weirdness of Lyle¹s past.

As irony would have it, not long after this high school reunion episode, Michael T. Weiss himself headed off to Chicago and his own high school reunion — he never said if he saw Mr. Lyle.