Bank

They are traditionally called ‘bottle shows’, that is, episodes that take place in a confined amount of space and time, usually designed to save money and time, rarely do they succeed at doing either. A popular form of ‘bottle show’ is the bank robbery, which brings us here.

The challenge with the bank robbery show is to fight the cliches that invariably come with it, while keeping the action and story taut. The payoff for the ‘bottle show’ is creating a way for your adversarial characters to spend a plausible amount of time together and learn more about each other. Therein lies what our goal was, get Miss Parker and Jarod together in a dangerous situation, and have them there for a purpose.

While not as successful as an earlier ‘bottle show’, ‘Toy Surprise’, ‘Bank’ does have its moments and sets the table for the season two finale nicely.

With Pretender, we always tried to find the elements within a story that make it uniquely Pretender. Like we said, the bank robbery episode has been done, but what could we do to make it uniquely our own? For one, we could show off numerous Jarod pretender skills in one episode, i.e., doctor skills in helping a dying man, thief skills by helping the robbers to crack the safe, demolition skills to construct a crude detonating device to thwart the bad guys, etc.

But with all that, the best moments in the episode are — surprise — Jarod and Miss Parker and the personal revelations they share here (many of which Jarod has lured her here for, not knowing of course the robbery would happen).