There are parallels to be seen between Gerard's pursuit of Kimble and the pursuit of Jean Valjean by Inspector Javert in "Les Misérables", though Javert never lets go of his obsession to follow the letter of the law and hunts down his fugitive, even killing himself when he discovers that he cannot reconcile his tenets with the mercy Valjean shows him. Gerard, on the other hand, was portrayed externally as a man like Javert, but internally as more of a thinking man who could balance justice and duty. According to some of those who worked on the show, these parallels were not coincidental. Stanford Whitmore, who wrote the pilot episode "Fear in a Desert City", says that he deliberately gave Kimble's nemesis a similar-sounding name to see if anyone would recognize the similarity between "Gerard" and "Javert". One who recognized the similarity was Morse; he pointed out the connection to Quinn Martin, who admitted that "The Fugitive" was a "sort of modern rendition of the outline of "Les Misérables"." Morse accordingly went back to the Victor Hugo novel and studied the portrayal of Javert, to find ways to make the character more complex than the "conventional 'Hollywood dick'" as whom Gerard had originally been conceived. "I've always thought that we in the arts ... are all ‘shoplifters’", Morse said. "Everybody, from Shakespeare onwards and downwards ... But once you've acknowledged that ... when you set out on a shoplifting expedition, you go always to Cartier's, and never to Woolworth's!"