like fallen soldiers we will learn, that once forgotten twice removed, love will be the death of you
It’s been awhile since I’ve done a snarky recap of anything. Then again this isn’t so much snarky as it is gleefully indulgent in creepy subtext. It’s probably excessively long and image-heavy.
I chose Pretender because I recently finished an epic two-week marathon over actually putting effort into the last semester of my degree, because I forgot how much I love this show and it’s wackiness, and also because it’s just too easy to mock.
This is 4.09 centric, but gets inevitably off topic. So there’s spoilers for other episodes, but let’s be honest, the show’s been dead ten years, you’re going to need them to keep up.
If you didn’t watch this show, you need to. It’s equal parts fucked up and amazing and Andrea Parker has really nice legs.
‘Til Death Do Us Part is probably in my top ten of Pretender episodes, sheerly for the amount of batshit insane it consists of. Pretender was a reasonably fucked up show all on its own (and I mean this in the fondest possible way) but this episode is really the icing on the cake for me, for so many reasons.
First up, it’s the anniversary of Thomas’ death. Thomas Gates, for anybody that’s managed to forget, was the reasonably charming and rustic renovator that accosted Miss Parker at a service station vending machine, effectively helping her to remain an ex-smoker. He asked her if she believed in fate.
Miss Parker thinks fate is a load of shit, pretty much, but Thomas managed to worm his way into her not-so-icy heart anyway, and what resulted was a whole bunch of really sweet scenes that are completely devastating when coupled with hindsight. Thomas believed that his whole life, everything he’d ever done up until the moment he met Parker had been wasted, because he hadn’t known her yet. Evidently, someone didn’t think it improved much after he met her, and decided to take care of that for him.
I think everybody kind of saw it coming, possibly Miss Parker included, but that didn’t make it hurt any less.
So it’s the anniversary of Thomas’ death and understandably, Miss Parker is feeling more than a little melancholy. I don’t think this is any excuse for her to start seeing creepy sepia apparitions of her dead boyfriend, but we’ll roll with it because there’s a lot of bare skin from both parties.
Miss Parker sleeps naked. This will be important for added creepiness later on.
We get a whole heap of Miss Parker/Thomas flashbacks, including that Moment of Foreshadowing where he said something stupid like “when I die, you can have all my shirts”. Miss Parker looks pretty alright in a flannelette shirt, but then again that woman looks alright in basically anything, the exception maybe being that plastic blue suit she wore for most of Inner Sense.
Don’t you hate it when you try to have a shower but your bluish-tinted dead boyfriend won’t stop getting all up in your grill about your emotional retardedness? Yeah, me too.
Miss Parker’s pulled from her creepy apparition boyfriend by the phone ringing. It’s Broots. They’ve found Jarod’s latest lair. Broots doesn’t understand why she’s got better things to be doing than pissing around with Jarod’s stuff that is presumably only ever ‘trying to tell [Sydney] something’ anyway. Sydney tells Broots to think back to what happened a year ago. Broots laments that he left her messages on her answering machine like it was any other day. Miss Parker arrives just in time to assure him it is just any other day.
Jarod’s left Miss Parker a cheerful present in the form of a diorama of the day she and Thomas first met. It’s not creepy at all, and if you think it is, you just don’t understand Jarod’s Vision, okay? Scratch that. It just pretty much confirms what we’ve sort of known to be true all along - that Jarod’s a sociopathic, sadistic bastard that was dropped on the head several times stolen as a child. I spend a lot of time watching this show and wondering how it was ever allowed to be on television, and also what the writers were smoking and where I can get some of it. When I find out I’ll let you all know.
Sydney is sure there’s an innocent reason Jarod left her such a thoughtful gift. Yeah, we’re not buying that either.
The creepiness isn’t even over yet, because we then pan in to find JAROD WAS ACTUALLY WATCHING THEM THE ENTIRE TIME, DRESSED AS A MOTHERFUCKING CLOWN. I’m not even making this shit up.
He has a photo of them in his pocket. I can’t even.
Cue title sequence. Don’t pretend you don’t know it by heart.
Miss Parker does grief in the form of doing tequila shots off of Thomas’ tombstone. She was even thoughtful enough to bring two glasses, which is lucky because Jarod’s always happy to crash her party with his general air of asshattery.
This episode makes me dislike Jarod a little bit, because he spends most of it being a total dick by making little jabs at Miss Parker and then going on to insist that he would never treat Thomas as one of his little games which really doesn’t fly with the pre-title sequence at all. Miss Parker justifiedly pulls her gun out at this point, and Jarod is all just kind of ‘whatevs’ which is really arrogant and annoying but slightly hot.
Pretty much the only way this episode could get more insane would be for this angry lapel grabbing to turn into a steamy make out session on Thomas’ grave, but apparently even this show had its limits.
MISS PARKER: I should shoot you where you stand.
JAROD: You can’t, I took the pin out of your gun.
MISS PARKER: I sleep with this under my pillow.
JAROD: You also drool a little out of the side of your mouth.
Everybody remember the part where Parker was sleeping naked last night? Yeah.
Jarod reminds Miss Parker that she has unfinished business. Just in case she forgot, or something. He tries again to put flowers on Thomas’ grave but Miss Parker snatches them off him because what the fuck, seriously. She turns around for about 0.56 of a second and wants to know why he’s tormenting her, but it’s too late because he’s done a Where’s Wally and vanished into thin air. He left her Thomas’ business card, though, ‘cause he’s thoughtful like that.
Broots deciphers Rumor to be the name of a Centre operative, and the code for a Centre audio phone tap file. Miss Parker wants it, obviously, but if Broots had that kind of initiative we’d miss out on a lot of his humorous bumbling about tongueless blind people.
Lyle and his best buddy Cox inform Miss Parker that Mutumbo is dead. Mutumbo was a member of that all-powerful club the Triumvirate, which, considering how often it’s mentioned, we know surprisingly little about.
Cox asks Miss Parker if she’s seen her father lately. She hasn’t, and gets all defensive about it, and Cox gives a charming little speech about the importance of family which is like the dark side’s version of what Jarod is continually ramming down all our throats, and reminds me of the shit my work tries to pull about everyone being a team player.
Sepia!Thomas chooses this really inappropriate time to turn up and try to badger Miss Parker into admitting she loves him. It’s like Days of Our Lives only not, because Cox is still in the room and he’s a taxidermist/grim reaper and Lyle is probably a cannibal and Jarod is around somewhere being a genius who can become anyone he wants to be who also has a clone and this show is still science fiction and not drama, damn it.
Since Miss Parker is the only person who can see sepia!Thomas, she was effectively about to admit her love to Mr Cox, which would have been amusing but disturbing. He totally gets that bedroom vibe from her though, and breathes in her scent with relish before he exits. (Note to self: find out if anyone’s written Miss Parker/Cox yet?)
Lyle: CALL ME.
(Real quote, I shit you not.)
In case you’ve forgotten, Miss Parker and Lyle are twins but it doesn’t stop them having amazing sexual chemistry, mostly because Lyle still thinks she’s beautiful when she’s angry, and because they slept together like, five times before Bloodlines (just because we never got to see it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, okay?) and secretly still want to do it. They deal with their sexual frustration by joining each other in the bathroom occasionally, holding hands outside elevators and having eye sex at every available opportunity.
There’s a really nice shot of Miss Parker and Sydney on the steps of the Sim Lab here. The Miss Parker/Sydney dynamic in this episode is all kinds of subtle and lovely, and not weird and vaguely sexual at all, and that’s saying something coming from me.
I think she’s been crying in every single scene which is a lot for an ice queen, really, but it’s bearable because, like Jarod, she hurts so pretty.
Blah blah people are dying, second chances, blah unfinished business. It started off sweet but I rapidly lost interest in this scene because Miss Parker was wearing pants.
Miss Parker gets a call from her father, who is on the run with his crazy pregnant wife Brigitte. Brigitte has tried to kill pretty much every character on the show at some point, including Mr Parker, but then she came back with her hair dyed brown and vaguely reminiscent of Miss Parker which was Mr Parker’s thing, apparently, because he started spending a bit of time with her in the hot tub and now she’s the size of a whale. She’s dyed her hair back blonde again, sadly, so we can’t add her emulation of Miss P to list of fucked up things in this episode but we do get to add the fact that she’s seen Mr Parker without any pants on.
Mr Parker: Listen Angel, we need to hook up.
Lololol. I’ve recently been forcing a few of my friends to watch this show, and both their initial reactions were along the lines of ‘I feel like the writers want me to ship everybody.’ It’s a pretty accurate summary.
What the Pretender essentially is, for anyone that hasn’t realised yet, is a Sexual Subtext Drinking Game in show form. The way you play is to have 4L of hard liquor on hand to start with for each new episode, and every time you get a weird vibe that two people on the show are doing it, you drink. Feel free to add your own rules, such as:
Slash: +1 drink
Between blood relatives (suspected or known): +1 drink
Relative happens to be a twin or clone: +2 drinks
Disturbing age gap: +1 drink
For each character that is under the legal age of consent: +1, and so on. This is an excellent way to build up a tolerance to alcohol that rivals that of Miss Parker’s in fanfic.
Back to Miss Parker’s office. Broots has found the phone tap, but he isn’t sure Miss Parker wants to hear it. It’s a conversation between Thomas and Jarod, in which Thomas is telling Jarod what he’s planning to do with Parker on the weekend, probably so Jarod could make a creepy model re-enactment of that, too. Miss Parker isn’t very impressed, and nobody really blames her.
Miss Parker deals with her frustration in the only way she seems to know how lately - she stares emptily at a kind of weird photo of her and Thomas that it doesn’t make sense for anyone to have taken and heads to the shower to have a conversation with his ghost.
Surprise! Sepia!Thomas is now blonde and pregnant and Brigitte. Brigitte announces that she almost had a tub birth while Miss Parker and Daddy Parker share a tender, loving reunion that could be misconstrued in several ways if you’re as messed up in the head as I am.
Miss Parker splays her hand over Brigitte’s massive belly and says she wants to help both of them. It conjures up images of Jarod and little Miss Parker’s first meeting through the glass and I can’t help but feel like this was setting up some kind of weird Miss Parker/baby connection that sadly, we’ll never get to find out about.
She asks her father about Rumor, and he mumbles a lot and plays dumb which really isn’t anything new. Brigitte, for some odd reason, helpfully explains what we already know - that Rumor is a code name, and that the number is for a phone tap. Why she decides to reveal this information isn’t really explained, and we can’t even chalk it up to a plot point, but we’re used to this kind of shit in this fandom.
Cut to Miss Parker playing with Jarod’s model in her office. Apparently he hasn’t had time to watch her sleep/thieve her firing pin this time, because he resorts back to his usual MO of the cryptic phone c all rather than turning up to torment her face to face.
This episode doesn’t have a pretend because it’s really the Miss Parker Show, but since the Pretender was a catchier title, there’s some obligatory screen time of Jarod wearing a nice sweater in front of some pretty scenery. He wants to reiterate that he would never treat Thomas as a game, and that deception was never his intention. UM, WHAT? His actual intention, apparently, was to ‘create love’. Read: play God, which is kind of ironic since he spends four seasons whining about The Centre doing the same thing.
Jarod thinks putting Miss Parker and Thomas together is one of the most rewarding things he’s ever done. I think it’s one of the fucking creepiest things he’s ever done, but same difference. Miss Parker is devastated and tells him he’s a voyeuristic, interfering bastard. The infliction in her tone when she realises and whispers, ‘you didn’t meet him after I did, you knew him before?’ is absolutely heartbreaking, and Andrea Parker never ceased to impress me, even when the writers made her character into a whiny lovesick damsel in distress. This scene is painful to watch for many reasons, one being Jarod’s inability to stay the hell out of her life but mostly because of Andrea Parker’s amazing acting.
Miss Parker asks Jarod to tell her about the Thomas he knew, and we hear about what an amazing guy he was and how he helped Jarod take down a corrupt construction worker, and the sharing of this story, albeit brief, only serves to tighten the messed up Jarod/Miss Parker/Thomas triangle.
JAROD: And Miss Parker - be careful. Rumors... can kill you.
Yeah, he thinks he’s on CSI Miami or something.
Sepia!Thomas reappears and tells Miss Parker to get the hell over it and just have sex with Jarod already. Or something along those lines. Whatever.
Mr Cox and his gangsta thugs have Broots cornered in the little boys room. Honestly, this scene is hilarious, but also more than a little disturbing.
COX: You *are* a washer, aren’t you, Mr Broots?
Cox seems to enjoy the hand dryer a little too much, apparently because his dad used to let him help out in the morgue after school. If he was good.
COX: CLEANLINESS IS TRUTH.
Cox wants to know what rumours Broots has been hearing, lest he lose his hand to an overly thorough drying.
The scene ends there but we all assume Broots gave in and wet his pants because that’s what Broots does. Broots cools down his hand and tells Miss Parker that the identity of Rumor is contained in a hardcopy file called a Z3. Miss Parker deduces from this that Thomas was killed by someone inside the Centre. No shit, Sherlock.
Cue really nice scene between Miss Parker and Broots at her house. He’s dropped her home and offers to stay and keep her company but she’s not really feeling it tonight. She wants to know why we always wait until it’s too late to tell someone how we feel, and Broots says something cute about life being like a bug on the sidewalk that we always end up stepping on before we remember that it’s a miracle.
Broots is there for Miss Parker if she needs him, if she knows what he means. She does, but she’s distracted by one of the producers’ shopping lists left lying around cleverly disguised as a Z3 file. Apparently this tells her everything she needs to know about who killed Thomas because she grabs her gun and hightails it out of there, even though Brigitte’s name isn’t mentioned on it once. Gotta love that swing dancing.
Miss Parker’s driving Broots’ car, most likely because it matches her outfit and a girl has to accessorise. Broots was also probably pretty happy to let her have it once he realised her dead boyfriend is living in his rear view mirror - would’ve made reversing pesky.
Daddy Parker has no idea where the fuck Brigitte is, or how the hell Miss Parker even found him. The car has a tracking system, which is really handy for someone that’s on the run because someone in the Centre is trying to kill him.
Daddy Parker: FML.
Daddy Parker acts all surprised about his wife being a cold hearted murderous bitch. Because nobody could’ve seen that coming.
Daddy Parker: *manhandles*
Obligatory close-nosed Miss Parker/Lyle scene to keep the shippers happy. Lyle warns that Parker probably isn’t the most popular surname to be having at the moment. I love it when they get all up in each others’ grill like they’re gonna make out.
Miss Parker clearly hasn’t gotten any in a very long time because she all but throws herself at every male character she encounters in this episode, familial relations be damned. The only thing this episode is really missing is some good old fashioned Miss Parker/Raines creepiness. Miss Parker needs Broots to steal a key to Brigitte’s supa sekrit cabin in the woods that Daddy Parker told her about, sort of accidentally on purpose.
Miss Parker: OH HEY BROOTS CALL ME.
Jarod wants Miss Parker to know that it was her eyes that really made Thomas feel at home. I don’t know who he thinks he is that it’s okay for him to woo Parker on behalf of dead!Thomas, but Miss Parker doesn’t get nearly enough annoyed about this. The fact that Jarod has been discussing his huntress’ homely qualities with her lover may seem kind of sweet on the surface but it’s not. It’s just not. It’s creepy and messed up and I really wish he’d stop alluding to it. You can tell he has a Miss Parker/Thomas themed red notebook somewhere that he writes journal articles about how warm and gooey yet jealous and anguished their relationship made him feel. I’d really like to read the fic where Miss Parker finds this notebook and severs all of Jarod’s appendages and rams them down his throat in response to it. What she does instead in this scene is confesses to Jarod that she never got to tell Thomas she loved him. Sucks to be Thomas or Jarod, really.
Broots has found the key to Brigitte’s supa sekrit cabin in the woods, because all of the Rumor phone tap files were directed there. Miss Parker’s all guns blazing and ready to fuck Brigitte’s shit up, but hesitates when she remembers Brigitte’s carrying the spawn of Parker/Satan inside her ridiculously shaped womb.
I hate it when I’m trying to murder someone and my stupid unborn baby brother gets in the way.
Brigitte has a condition called placenta previa which basically means she’s going to die giving birth because there’s nobody around to give her a caesarean. Miss Parker won’t have any of this nonsense - if anyone’s going to kill Brigitte it’s going to be her, not some completely manageable birthing disorder.
Miss Parker mentally prepares herself to go where pretty much everyone else in her family has already been before - between Brigitte’s legs.
I love Mr Cox. That is all.
Brigitte needs to push because Miss Parker can see the head and the head is blue, and she may not be overly maternal or anything but blue doesn’t really seem like a good colour for a baby’s head.
There’s a whole lot of blood that goes disturbingly well with Miss Parker’s shirt.
Miss Parker ends up delivering her brother/nephew/son/uncle/whatever. I’m not really sure whose kid that is but I’m fairly certain it’s not Daddy Parker’s, so whichever way you look at it, it’s kind of weird. I think it’s this point in the DVD commentary for this episode that Andrea Parker notes that she pretty much gave birth to every character on the show at some point, including herself. It’s basically the truth. “And you were worried about kissing your brother.”
Miss Parker seems genuinely sorry that Brigitte has died, whether it’s because she wanted to kill her herself or that she actually sympathised with her is not entirely clear.
The baby’s all gooey and gross.
COX: I see I’m too late for the Lamaze.
Cox is the doctor that Daddy Parker found for Brigitte. OB-GYN, Harvard ’93. The thought of Cox as a gynaecologist/being around small children is more than a little unsettling.
Daddy Parker calls the baby the Last Piece. It sounds like it means everything, but really it means nothing, and we’re lucky to see the thing once more outside of this episode.
COX: She’s gone! :D
Daddy Parker planted the Z3 file - presumably his daughter’s ire was a failsafe for Brigitte’s troublesome pregnancy. Miss Parker wants to know if Daddy Parker is even remotely concerned about his wife, or if he even wants to know if it’s a boy or a girl. He’s all, ‘eh, ‘til death do us part’ and to be completely honest with her, he really doesn’t. All he cares about is cord blood and placenta. Mm, yummy. Apparently he had his priorities straight though because those samples manage to make a reappearance in the movies when the actual baby couldn’t even manage to. They never give the baby a name so we’ll just go with let’s-just-say-Parker Baby. Considering everyone on the show seems to have some connection to that particular creepy incestuous family tree, it’s a pretty safe moniker.
Cox plants the gun that killed Mutumbo on Brigitte and merrily sets about making her supa sekrit cabin disappear.
CABIN: *goes splodey*
Back to the cemetery - Miss Parker and Jarod are friends in graveyards. Miss P admits that she’s realised getting revenge for Thomas’ death wouldn’t have made her feel any better. Jarod acts like this was never the unfinished business he was referring to, which is a total lie, but in any case, he thinks she should let her heart win the war and finally tell Thomas how she really felt. She apparently agrees.
Cue a really cheesy montage that doesn’t fit with the tone of the show at all but really sums up the cracktasticness of this episode. It's to End of the Innocence by Don Henley, which is quite fitting for all its mentionings of last goodbyes and lying fathers. Miss Parker’s looking very pretty on the swing she and Thomas were photographed on, wearing a pretty violet dress that does lovely things for her eyes. Too bad this isn’t Days of Our Lives.
It’s pretty and painful and sad and out of place all at once.
Miss Parker: I love you, Tommy.
Thomas: And I love you, Parker.
NAWW. YOU GUYS.
That’s it for this one, folks. Stay tuned for the next instalment of CREEPEE SUBTECKS R US, most probably the Miss Parker/Lyle edition.
I chose Pretender because I recently finished an epic two-week marathon over actually putting effort into the last semester of my degree, because I forgot how much I love this show and it’s wackiness, and also because it’s just too easy to mock.
This is 4.09 centric, but gets inevitably off topic. So there’s spoilers for other episodes, but let’s be honest, the show’s been dead ten years, you’re going to need them to keep up.
If you didn’t watch this show, you need to. It’s equal parts fucked up and amazing and Andrea Parker has really nice legs.
‘Til Death Do Us Part is probably in my top ten of Pretender episodes, sheerly for the amount of batshit insane it consists of. Pretender was a reasonably fucked up show all on its own (and I mean this in the fondest possible way) but this episode is really the icing on the cake for me, for so many reasons.
First up, it’s the anniversary of Thomas’ death. Thomas Gates, for anybody that’s managed to forget, was the reasonably charming and rustic renovator that accosted Miss Parker at a service station vending machine, effectively helping her to remain an ex-smoker. He asked her if she believed in fate.
Miss Parker thinks fate is a load of shit, pretty much, but Thomas managed to worm his way into her not-so-icy heart anyway, and what resulted was a whole bunch of really sweet scenes that are completely devastating when coupled with hindsight. Thomas believed that his whole life, everything he’d ever done up until the moment he met Parker had been wasted, because he hadn’t known her yet. Evidently, someone didn’t think it improved much after he met her, and decided to take care of that for him.
I think everybody kind of saw it coming, possibly Miss Parker included, but that didn’t make it hurt any less.
So it’s the anniversary of Thomas’ death and understandably, Miss Parker is feeling more than a little melancholy. I don’t think this is any excuse for her to start seeing creepy sepia apparitions of her dead boyfriend, but we’ll roll with it because there’s a lot of bare skin from both parties.
Miss Parker sleeps naked. This will be important for added creepiness later on.
We get a whole heap of Miss Parker/Thomas flashbacks, including that Moment of Foreshadowing where he said something stupid like “when I die, you can have all my shirts”. Miss Parker looks pretty alright in a flannelette shirt, but then again that woman looks alright in basically anything, the exception maybe being that plastic blue suit she wore for most of Inner Sense.
Don’t you hate it when you try to have a shower but your bluish-tinted dead boyfriend won’t stop getting all up in your grill about your emotional retardedness? Yeah, me too.
Miss Parker’s pulled from her creepy apparition boyfriend by the phone ringing. It’s Broots. They’ve found Jarod’s latest lair. Broots doesn’t understand why she’s got better things to be doing than pissing around with Jarod’s stuff that is presumably only ever ‘trying to tell [Sydney] something’ anyway. Sydney tells Broots to think back to what happened a year ago. Broots laments that he left her messages on her answering machine like it was any other day. Miss Parker arrives just in time to assure him it is just any other day.
Jarod’s left Miss Parker a cheerful present in the form of a diorama of the day she and Thomas first met. It’s not creepy at all, and if you think it is, you just don’t understand Jarod’s Vision, okay? Scratch that. It just pretty much confirms what we’ve sort of known to be true all along - that Jarod’s a sociopathic, sadistic bastard that was dropped on the head several times stolen as a child. I spend a lot of time watching this show and wondering how it was ever allowed to be on television, and also what the writers were smoking and where I can get some of it. When I find out I’ll let you all know.
Sydney is sure there’s an innocent reason Jarod left her such a thoughtful gift. Yeah, we’re not buying that either.
The creepiness isn’t even over yet, because we then pan in to find JAROD WAS ACTUALLY WATCHING THEM THE ENTIRE TIME, DRESSED AS A MOTHERFUCKING CLOWN. I’m not even making this shit up.
He has a photo of them in his pocket. I can’t even.
Cue title sequence. Don’t pretend you don’t know it by heart.
Miss Parker does grief in the form of doing tequila shots off of Thomas’ tombstone. She was even thoughtful enough to bring two glasses, which is lucky because Jarod’s always happy to crash her party with his general air of asshattery.
This episode makes me dislike Jarod a little bit, because he spends most of it being a total dick by making little jabs at Miss Parker and then going on to insist that he would never treat Thomas as one of his little games which really doesn’t fly with the pre-title sequence at all. Miss Parker justifiedly pulls her gun out at this point, and Jarod is all just kind of ‘whatevs’ which is really arrogant and annoying but slightly hot.
Pretty much the only way this episode could get more insane would be for this angry lapel grabbing to turn into a steamy make out session on Thomas’ grave, but apparently even this show had its limits.
MISS PARKER: I should shoot you where you stand.
JAROD: You can’t, I took the pin out of your gun.
MISS PARKER: I sleep with this under my pillow.
JAROD: You also drool a little out of the side of your mouth.
Everybody remember the part where Parker was sleeping naked last night? Yeah.
Jarod reminds Miss Parker that she has unfinished business. Just in case she forgot, or something. He tries again to put flowers on Thomas’ grave but Miss Parker snatches them off him because what the fuck, seriously. She turns around for about 0.56 of a second and wants to know why he’s tormenting her, but it’s too late because he’s done a Where’s Wally and vanished into thin air. He left her Thomas’ business card, though, ‘cause he’s thoughtful like that.
Broots deciphers Rumor to be the name of a Centre operative, and the code for a Centre audio phone tap file. Miss Parker wants it, obviously, but if Broots had that kind of initiative we’d miss out on a lot of his humorous bumbling about tongueless blind people.
Lyle and his best buddy Cox inform Miss Parker that Mutumbo is dead. Mutumbo was a member of that all-powerful club the Triumvirate, which, considering how often it’s mentioned, we know surprisingly little about.
Cox asks Miss Parker if she’s seen her father lately. She hasn’t, and gets all defensive about it, and Cox gives a charming little speech about the importance of family which is like the dark side’s version of what Jarod is continually ramming down all our throats, and reminds me of the shit my work tries to pull about everyone being a team player.
Sepia!Thomas chooses this really inappropriate time to turn up and try to badger Miss Parker into admitting she loves him. It’s like Days of Our Lives only not, because Cox is still in the room and he’s a taxidermist/grim reaper and Lyle is probably a cannibal and Jarod is around somewhere being a genius who can become anyone he wants to be who also has a clone and this show is still science fiction and not drama, damn it.
Since Miss Parker is the only person who can see sepia!Thomas, she was effectively about to admit her love to Mr Cox, which would have been amusing but disturbing. He totally gets that bedroom vibe from her though, and breathes in her scent with relish before he exits. (Note to self: find out if anyone’s written Miss Parker/Cox yet?)
Lyle: CALL ME.
(Real quote, I shit you not.)
In case you’ve forgotten, Miss Parker and Lyle are twins but it doesn’t stop them having amazing sexual chemistry, mostly because Lyle still thinks she’s beautiful when she’s angry, and because they slept together like, five times before Bloodlines (just because we never got to see it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, okay?) and secretly still want to do it. They deal with their sexual frustration by joining each other in the bathroom occasionally, holding hands outside elevators and having eye sex at every available opportunity.
There’s a really nice shot of Miss Parker and Sydney on the steps of the Sim Lab here. The Miss Parker/Sydney dynamic in this episode is all kinds of subtle and lovely, and not weird and vaguely sexual at all, and that’s saying something coming from me.
I think she’s been crying in every single scene which is a lot for an ice queen, really, but it’s bearable because, like Jarod, she hurts so pretty.
Blah blah people are dying, second chances, blah unfinished business. It started off sweet but I rapidly lost interest in this scene because Miss Parker was wearing pants.
Miss Parker gets a call from her father, who is on the run with his crazy pregnant wife Brigitte. Brigitte has tried to kill pretty much every character on the show at some point, including Mr Parker, but then she came back with her hair dyed brown and vaguely reminiscent of Miss Parker which was Mr Parker’s thing, apparently, because he started spending a bit of time with her in the hot tub and now she’s the size of a whale. She’s dyed her hair back blonde again, sadly, so we can’t add her emulation of Miss P to list of fucked up things in this episode but we do get to add the fact that she’s seen Mr Parker without any pants on.
Mr Parker: Listen Angel, we need to hook up.
Lololol. I’ve recently been forcing a few of my friends to watch this show, and both their initial reactions were along the lines of ‘I feel like the writers want me to ship everybody.’ It’s a pretty accurate summary.
What the Pretender essentially is, for anyone that hasn’t realised yet, is a Sexual Subtext Drinking Game in show form. The way you play is to have 4L of hard liquor on hand to start with for each new episode, and every time you get a weird vibe that two people on the show are doing it, you drink. Feel free to add your own rules, such as:
Slash: +1 drink
Between blood relatives (suspected or known): +1 drink
Relative happens to be a twin or clone: +2 drinks
Disturbing age gap: +1 drink
For each character that is under the legal age of consent: +1, and so on. This is an excellent way to build up a tolerance to alcohol that rivals that of Miss Parker’s in fanfic.
Back to Miss Parker’s office. Broots has found the phone tap, but he isn’t sure Miss Parker wants to hear it. It’s a conversation between Thomas and Jarod, in which Thomas is telling Jarod what he’s planning to do with Parker on the weekend, probably so Jarod could make a creepy model re-enactment of that, too. Miss Parker isn’t very impressed, and nobody really blames her.
Miss Parker deals with her frustration in the only way she seems to know how lately - she stares emptily at a kind of weird photo of her and Thomas that it doesn’t make sense for anyone to have taken and heads to the shower to have a conversation with his ghost.
Surprise! Sepia!Thomas is now blonde and pregnant and Brigitte. Brigitte announces that she almost had a tub birth while Miss Parker and Daddy Parker share a tender, loving reunion that could be misconstrued in several ways if you’re as messed up in the head as I am.
Miss Parker splays her hand over Brigitte’s massive belly and says she wants to help both of them. It conjures up images of Jarod and little Miss Parker’s first meeting through the glass and I can’t help but feel like this was setting up some kind of weird Miss Parker/baby connection that sadly, we’ll never get to find out about.
She asks her father about Rumor, and he mumbles a lot and plays dumb which really isn’t anything new. Brigitte, for some odd reason, helpfully explains what we already know - that Rumor is a code name, and that the number is for a phone tap. Why she decides to reveal this information isn’t really explained, and we can’t even chalk it up to a plot point, but we’re used to this kind of shit in this fandom.
Cut to Miss Parker playing with Jarod’s model in her office. Apparently he hasn’t had time to watch her sleep/thieve her firing pin this time, because he resorts back to his usual MO of the cryptic phone c all rather than turning up to torment her face to face.
This episode doesn’t have a pretend because it’s really the Miss Parker Show, but since the Pretender was a catchier title, there’s some obligatory screen time of Jarod wearing a nice sweater in front of some pretty scenery. He wants to reiterate that he would never treat Thomas as a game, and that deception was never his intention. UM, WHAT? His actual intention, apparently, was to ‘create love’. Read: play God, which is kind of ironic since he spends four seasons whining about The Centre doing the same thing.
Jarod thinks putting Miss Parker and Thomas together is one of the most rewarding things he’s ever done. I think it’s one of the fucking creepiest things he’s ever done, but same difference. Miss Parker is devastated and tells him he’s a voyeuristic, interfering bastard. The infliction in her tone when she realises and whispers, ‘you didn’t meet him after I did, you knew him before?’ is absolutely heartbreaking, and Andrea Parker never ceased to impress me, even when the writers made her character into a whiny lovesick damsel in distress. This scene is painful to watch for many reasons, one being Jarod’s inability to stay the hell out of her life but mostly because of Andrea Parker’s amazing acting.
Miss Parker asks Jarod to tell her about the Thomas he knew, and we hear about what an amazing guy he was and how he helped Jarod take down a corrupt construction worker, and the sharing of this story, albeit brief, only serves to tighten the messed up Jarod/Miss Parker/Thomas triangle.
JAROD: And Miss Parker - be careful. Rumors... can kill you.
Yeah, he thinks he’s on CSI Miami or something.
Sepia!Thomas reappears and tells Miss Parker to get the hell over it and just have sex with Jarod already. Or something along those lines. Whatever.
Mr Cox and his gangsta thugs have Broots cornered in the little boys room. Honestly, this scene is hilarious, but also more than a little disturbing.
COX: You *are* a washer, aren’t you, Mr Broots?
Cox seems to enjoy the hand dryer a little too much, apparently because his dad used to let him help out in the morgue after school. If he was good.
COX: CLEANLINESS IS TRUTH.
Cox wants to know what rumours Broots has been hearing, lest he lose his hand to an overly thorough drying.
The scene ends there but we all assume Broots gave in and wet his pants because that’s what Broots does. Broots cools down his hand and tells Miss Parker that the identity of Rumor is contained in a hardcopy file called a Z3. Miss Parker deduces from this that Thomas was killed by someone inside the Centre. No shit, Sherlock.
Cue really nice scene between Miss Parker and Broots at her house. He’s dropped her home and offers to stay and keep her company but she’s not really feeling it tonight. She wants to know why we always wait until it’s too late to tell someone how we feel, and Broots says something cute about life being like a bug on the sidewalk that we always end up stepping on before we remember that it’s a miracle.
Broots is there for Miss Parker if she needs him, if she knows what he means. She does, but she’s distracted by one of the producers’ shopping lists left lying around cleverly disguised as a Z3 file. Apparently this tells her everything she needs to know about who killed Thomas because she grabs her gun and hightails it out of there, even though Brigitte’s name isn’t mentioned on it once. Gotta love that swing dancing.
Miss Parker’s driving Broots’ car, most likely because it matches her outfit and a girl has to accessorise. Broots was also probably pretty happy to let her have it once he realised her dead boyfriend is living in his rear view mirror - would’ve made reversing pesky.
Daddy Parker has no idea where the fuck Brigitte is, or how the hell Miss Parker even found him. The car has a tracking system, which is really handy for someone that’s on the run because someone in the Centre is trying to kill him.
Daddy Parker: FML.
Daddy Parker acts all surprised about his wife being a cold hearted murderous bitch. Because nobody could’ve seen that coming.
Daddy Parker: *manhandles*
Obligatory close-nosed Miss Parker/Lyle scene to keep the shippers happy. Lyle warns that Parker probably isn’t the most popular surname to be having at the moment. I love it when they get all up in each others’ grill like they’re gonna make out.
Miss Parker clearly hasn’t gotten any in a very long time because she all but throws herself at every male character she encounters in this episode, familial relations be damned. The only thing this episode is really missing is some good old fashioned Miss Parker/Raines creepiness. Miss Parker needs Broots to steal a key to Brigitte’s supa sekrit cabin in the woods that Daddy Parker told her about, sort of accidentally on purpose.
Miss Parker: OH HEY BROOTS CALL ME.
Jarod wants Miss Parker to know that it was her eyes that really made Thomas feel at home. I don’t know who he thinks he is that it’s okay for him to woo Parker on behalf of dead!Thomas, but Miss Parker doesn’t get nearly enough annoyed about this. The fact that Jarod has been discussing his huntress’ homely qualities with her lover may seem kind of sweet on the surface but it’s not. It’s just not. It’s creepy and messed up and I really wish he’d stop alluding to it. You can tell he has a Miss Parker/Thomas themed red notebook somewhere that he writes journal articles about how warm and gooey yet jealous and anguished their relationship made him feel. I’d really like to read the fic where Miss Parker finds this notebook and severs all of Jarod’s appendages and rams them down his throat in response to it. What she does instead in this scene is confesses to Jarod that she never got to tell Thomas she loved him. Sucks to be Thomas or Jarod, really.
Broots has found the key to Brigitte’s supa sekrit cabin in the woods, because all of the Rumor phone tap files were directed there. Miss Parker’s all guns blazing and ready to fuck Brigitte’s shit up, but hesitates when she remembers Brigitte’s carrying the spawn of Parker/Satan inside her ridiculously shaped womb.
I hate it when I’m trying to murder someone and my stupid unborn baby brother gets in the way.
Brigitte has a condition called placenta previa which basically means she’s going to die giving birth because there’s nobody around to give her a caesarean. Miss Parker won’t have any of this nonsense - if anyone’s going to kill Brigitte it’s going to be her, not some completely manageable birthing disorder.
Miss Parker mentally prepares herself to go where pretty much everyone else in her family has already been before - between Brigitte’s legs.
I love Mr Cox. That is all.
Brigitte needs to push because Miss Parker can see the head and the head is blue, and she may not be overly maternal or anything but blue doesn’t really seem like a good colour for a baby’s head.
There’s a whole lot of blood that goes disturbingly well with Miss Parker’s shirt.
Miss Parker ends up delivering her brother/nephew/son/uncle/whatever. I’m not really sure whose kid that is but I’m fairly certain it’s not Daddy Parker’s, so whichever way you look at it, it’s kind of weird. I think it’s this point in the DVD commentary for this episode that Andrea Parker notes that she pretty much gave birth to every character on the show at some point, including herself. It’s basically the truth. “And you were worried about kissing your brother.”
Miss Parker seems genuinely sorry that Brigitte has died, whether it’s because she wanted to kill her herself or that she actually sympathised with her is not entirely clear.
The baby’s all gooey and gross.
COX: I see I’m too late for the Lamaze.
Cox is the doctor that Daddy Parker found for Brigitte. OB-GYN, Harvard ’93. The thought of Cox as a gynaecologist/being around small children is more than a little unsettling.
Daddy Parker calls the baby the Last Piece. It sounds like it means everything, but really it means nothing, and we’re lucky to see the thing once more outside of this episode.
COX: She’s gone! :D
Daddy Parker planted the Z3 file - presumably his daughter’s ire was a failsafe for Brigitte’s troublesome pregnancy. Miss Parker wants to know if Daddy Parker is even remotely concerned about his wife, or if he even wants to know if it’s a boy or a girl. He’s all, ‘eh, ‘til death do us part’ and to be completely honest with her, he really doesn’t. All he cares about is cord blood and placenta. Mm, yummy. Apparently he had his priorities straight though because those samples manage to make a reappearance in the movies when the actual baby couldn’t even manage to. They never give the baby a name so we’ll just go with let’s-just-say-Parker Baby. Considering everyone on the show seems to have some connection to that particular creepy incestuous family tree, it’s a pretty safe moniker.
Cox plants the gun that killed Mutumbo on Brigitte and merrily sets about making her supa sekrit cabin disappear.
CABIN: *goes splodey*
Back to the cemetery - Miss Parker and Jarod are friends in graveyards. Miss P admits that she’s realised getting revenge for Thomas’ death wouldn’t have made her feel any better. Jarod acts like this was never the unfinished business he was referring to, which is a total lie, but in any case, he thinks she should let her heart win the war and finally tell Thomas how she really felt. She apparently agrees.
Cue a really cheesy montage that doesn’t fit with the tone of the show at all but really sums up the cracktasticness of this episode. It's to End of the Innocence by Don Henley, which is quite fitting for all its mentionings of last goodbyes and lying fathers. Miss Parker’s looking very pretty on the swing she and Thomas were photographed on, wearing a pretty violet dress that does lovely things for her eyes. Too bad this isn’t Days of Our Lives.
It’s pretty and painful and sad and out of place all at once.
Miss Parker: I love you, Tommy.
Thomas: And I love you, Parker.
NAWW. YOU GUYS.
That’s it for this one, folks. Stay tuned for the next instalment of CREEPEE SUBTECKS R US, most probably the Miss Parker/Lyle edition.