Talk about make-believe. In “Pool,” the 1999, third-season episode of the NBC series The Pretender, Jarod (Michael T. Weiss) must quickly learn pool so that he can competently hustle a racist pool shark suspected of killing Marvin Dupree, an African-American family man. Part of the absurd premise of The Pretender was that the prodigy Jarod had the ability to master any skill he needed so that he could successfully impersonate anyone. So, to become an ace billiards player, Jarod need only combine his “familiarity [with] the architectural theory of dynamic symmetry, as well as Descartes’ theory of coordinate geometry” with a few lessons on chalking and holding a cue, courtesy of pool parlor hottie Billie Vaughn (Jennifer Garner, a couple years before her star-turning role as gorgeous chameleon Sydney Bristow in Alias).
Most of “Pool,” unfortunately, doesn’t involve pool. Instead, it involves Jarod sleuthing around, piecing together why the man was killed and adjusting a few branches on the Dupree family tree. There are also some flashbacks to Jarod at the Centre, first learning about racism and pledging to “never accept it.”
In many ways, “Pool” is the successor to another indefensible billiards TV episode, “Pool Hall Blues” from the series Quantum Leap. This 1990 episode also suggests that grasping pool is largely a matter of knowing your interior and exterior angles. Like Jarod , Dr. Beckett from “Pool Hall Blues” has never held a cue or made a stroke (as we comically observe in each episode), but a few amateur tips resolve that little wrinkle. Jarod’s superior intellect is replaced by Al’s Handheld super-computer, but otherwise they serve the same purpose – namely, to find the perfect angle for making every shot. Then, presto, you’re shooting like Thorsten Hohmann.
Eerily, the similarities extend beyond this nonsense. Both episodes send in the great white superhero to solve a racial problem, though in “Pool,” the problem is a little more nuanced, since the black man killed is also – surprise! — the father of Billie, the white daughter. And both episodes rely on climactic games of high-stakes 9-ball (in “Pool Hall Blues” the wager is the pool hall; in “Pool” the wager is not only $50,000, but also “something far more costly – like honor”) to vanquish the villains. Frankly, I’d like to “pretend” this episode never happened.
“Pool” and the rest of Season 3 of The Pretender is available to watch online or purchase. A transcript of this episode was available until recently at the Pretender Centre, an officially endorsed fan site for the series.
