Other Characters on
"The Pretender"

This is Mr. Raines (portaryed by Richard Marcus) -- the "death's head" of The Centre, Dr. William Raines threw aside his Hippocratic Oath in order to pursue illicit experiments on the human beings trapped in The Centre. Jarod once described Raines as, "The Centre's answers to Dr. Megele... An emphazema-ridden corpse who drags around his breath of life in a tank..."

When Sydney once asked him, "What happened to you?", Raines responded with arid humor: "Too many cigarettes... not enough vacations."

Raines had successfully turned Jarod's brother, Kyle, into a psychopathic felon, burned out Angelo's personality with electrocution therapy, and once stopped Jarod's heart from beating. Having been severely impaired by smoke inhalation when a fire of unknown origins swept through The Centre's 27th sub-level (SL-27), Raines must carry supplemental oxygen with him to breathe. When his oxygen tank was shot at (in Boston) and exploded, he was burned again, and had to spend months recuperating in The Centre's burn unit. He knows he's slowly dying, but he doesn't seem to care. (Even though dependent on an oxygen tank to breathe, he once bummed a cigarette off of Miss Parker.)

His current injuries and infirmities haven't stopped him from pursuing Jarod, however. After Jarod's escape from The Centre, Mr. Raines seemed plagued by a sort hate-filled insanity. He will now stop at nothing to see to it that Jarod is re-captured and destroyed... but no one really knows why he's so intent on this ghastly purpose. When Jarod once confronted Mr. Raines in an ally in Boston with: "You stole me from my parents. You had the FBI kill my brother, and now you're trying to kill my family. What have I ever done to you?!" Raines responded with a flat: "You exist."
A small clue as to why Raines so desperately hates Jarod was offered in the third season episode "Once in a Blue Moon", in which viewerslearned that Raines was once married, and had a daughter named Annie. In the 70's, Annie was kidnapped by a serial killer and murdered. Jarod, at the time a young teenager, assisted authorities in tracking down Annie's kidnapper and used his inate pretender skills to effectively "become" Annie's attacker so he could discover who the man realy was. Although Jarod was eventually able to identify the kidnapper and see to it that he was captured and incarcerated, Jarod could not find him before the man had murdered Annie and sent her parents a photograph of Annie's corpse. It may be that Raines still blames Jarod for being partly responsible for his daughter's death. [[In late October of 1998, Jarod finally located the place where Annie had been killed, and saw to it that Raines received the locket Annie was wearing when she died.]] Images of Raines weeping over the death of his daughter were an usual glimpse into the latent humanity that lurks somewhere inside Raines' otherwise "inhuman" persona.

The year before Jarod escaped from The Centre, Raines saw to it that Sydney went to Europe for a symposium during the last three weeks in October. During that time Raines subjected (or at least assisted others in subjecting) Jarod to who-knows-how-many different experiments; including the one during which Jarod was put into a cryo-freeze chamber and his heartbeat was stopped. [Mr. Lyle was in on this escapade; and it was Raines who scrambled to re-start Jarod's heart once it stopped.] When he "discovered" Halloween in 1997, Jarod went trick-or-treating as the most frightening thing he could think of: Mr. Raines. (Image above)

William Raines was also somewhat implicated in the death of Catherine Parker, although he wasn't the actual shooter. During the Thanksgiving weekend, the year before her death, Raines was seen scurrying from the Parkers' home (in the lightning and rain) after Catherine had been subjected to a brutal beating that sent her to the hospital with fractures and severe depression. He seemed to have been carrying some sort of bundle out across the yard, but that possibility has yet to be pursued in any further episode. Raines later threatened Catherine to keep her mouth shut when she discovered his experiments on Timmy (Angelo). And Raines was also caught, on DSAs, teaching a young Kyle to shoot bullets into a life-size cut-out of Catherine.

But in the "Toy Surprise" episode, he told Miss Parker that the people who had attempted to assassinate Mr. Parker (on the anniversary of Catherine Parker's death in 1998) were the same people who had killed her mother. In the "Bloodlines" episode, Miss Parker was told that her mother's killer was the "man in the dark suit" (someone Angelo saw but couldn't identify; and someone Mr. Fenigor claimed was "Jarod's father".) Mr. Raines apparently knows who the man in the dark suit is, but he's thusfar refused to inform Miss Parker (or Jarod).

In the spring of 1998, Mr. Raines was on the verge of re-establishing SL-27 and his experiments down there, and had even gone so far as to kidnap another child, Davy, whom he hoped to fashion into a Pretender of Jarod's capacity. Jarod interfered with this plan, of course, and rescued Davy.

Sydney then saw to it that SL-27 was burned out once again by a gasoline-fueled bomb. Although Raines survived the explosion, he was left (if temporarily) confined to a wheelchair.

For More Information about Mr. Raines,
PRODIGY and The Pretender Project see
Mr. Raines' Hybrid Biotract at The Centre

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