Damn, your review of Doe Re: Me is idiotic. What do you mean why he saw a psychotherapist? He thought it would help, which it did sort of in his hypnosis and seeing flashes of possible suppressed memories. Yes, the comment about his blemish is true. I don't suppose you've heard of a nubbin? How seriously anxious must Doe be to take Xanax? He's been freaking out before. No, Doe oughtn't to know what every psychologist's methods are! Doe could've figured out the woman's location in that interview. Doe, not having memories or emotions developed (except for anxiety), /didn't/ have a personality. /How/ doesn't sensory deprivation make memories come back? The camera was in because we needed to see him, stupid! North being the mother was not as unlikely as there was a paraglider conveniently there for Doe to buy, which was more contrived. There was a name on the canteen, stupid. It was not a South Asian country; it was the Middle East! At least your unresolved questions were valid.

Autymn, my responses:

1) Everyone has a personality. One doesn't need to remember one's past in order to have a personality. It is obvious that many personality characteristics are present in a child from a very young age. A lot of personality is genetically coded for. So, yes, he'd have a full personality.

2) Doe experiences many emotions. He's experienced sadness, happiness, relief, and assorted others.

3) He wouldn't know the methods of any particular psychiatrist. But he would know all psychiatric methods that have been taught or published anywhere.

4) No, we didn't need to see him in the sensory deprivation chamber. We just needed to know he was in it. Any camera in the isolation chamber couldn't see anything since it was totally dark. No, the camera wasn't in there for us to see him. It was in there for the doctor. But it would have been totally dark. So the camera would not have worked. Though an infrared camera could have shown his body in the infrared spectrum.

5) I agree that the availability of the paraglider was highly contrived. Still, it was a neat sequence. Though in reality I wouldn't expect the paraglider to be able to catch up with the vehicle.

1) How does everyone have a personality? A few have lack of personality or none at all. Take Al Gore in his speeches, for example. In speaking, the person is not expressive and one's pitch, face, neck, and limbs don't reflect the necessary mood in each subject. You're not objecting because of misunderstood semantics, are you? A lack of beliefs is not itself a belief system, meaning that science is not a religion. And a lack of personality is not a personality itself.

2) Of course he has, but they're not in sync with the rest of people. They're disorganised, awkward, and obstructed. He has to /find/ his personality because he doesn't, yet, have one.

3) So what's your problem?

4) He's the main character, so we did need to see him and his actions and reactions. Have you heard of the omniscient voice?

5) Yes, and there was a 50-50 chance that John would've glided in the wrong direction!

Autymn,

1) Yes, everyone really does have a personality. If you administered any of a number of personality typing tests to Al Gore you'd find he has some kind of personality. How a person comes across delivering public speeches is not an indication of a lack of a personality.
As for Doe's personality: He has one that is as clear as day. He shows compassion for instance. A personality can be highly developed and yet not 't manifest in highly emotionally expressive form.

2) Doe makes many moral judgements and seems to have a strongly developed moral sense. He tries to track down bad people and chooses to help people around him when there is nothing in it for him. He does this in spite of any memory of his past. What causes him to do this?

4) Doe in the isolation chamber: We could have seen him do things in his imagination. He could have flashed back on memories he has formed since coming awake on the island. He could have had hallucinations that we could have watched (and we did see some of those). It was not necessary for us to see him lying there in the isolation tank. Since isolation tanks are totally dark inside a regular light camera is useless in one. The writers made a mistake in how they did that.

"personality"
2. The totality of qualities and traits, as of character or behavior, that are peculiar to a specific person.
[This needs to be developed. It did not yet apply to Doe. Rattling off facts spontaneously in the first episodes was not a peculiar trait of a person, but of what he had become by external intervention.]
3. The pattern of collective character, behavioral, temperamental, emotional, and mental traits of a person: Though their personalities differed, they got along as friends.
[Maybe after Doe ran into many people and got used to interacting, and after he recalled the preferences of the person of his former life, that he actually exhibited this. But because most of his life is missing, when he is called on to describe himself involving drawing on his past personality and recollection thereof, the gaps in his memory prevent him from exhibiting a personality.]
4. Distinctive qualities of a person, especially those distinguishing personal characteristics that make one socially appealing: won the election more on personality than on capability. See Synonyms at disposition.
[This is relative, and depends on who he's with.]

Why don't you try having an AI, without emotion, take a type test? Random or uncorrelated answers do not make a personality. Do the tests measure intensity of personality? There's a lower threshold where we can say that one has no personality, and that any occasional internal or external emotions are purely accidental.

2) No, as time went by he did recover memories of his past, even though they weren't the discrete, audible or visual voices that're called thoughts. See, you said "developed".

4) Since when were shots of completely-dark scenes ever dark? Writers intentionally add a background light from nowhere so we see the character/s; otherwise, we'd get dead screen. It was not "necessary" storywise, but it was necessary to emphasise that he was /in/ the tank.

Doe had a personality from the very beginning. Consider what he did and what he could have done instead. He didn't know who he was. He could have responded by wandering around aimlessly or by trying to get committed to a mental hospital. Instead he pursued getting money and pursued trying to figure out who he was. It was important to him to find out what his past was. Why was it important? He had to have values that made him feel that it was important. Where'd the values come from? He had way too much motivation from the very first episode. He was stubborn and driven. He also was intensely curious about other things that he didn't immediately have answers to. Well, not all people intensely curious, not by a long shot.

Anything he did with drawings or other things you cite are things that the writers put in there to try to reinforce the idea that he had no past. But the idea that this made his personality into a blank slate is inconsistent with all the actions he took and all the choices he started making from the very beginning.

Dark scenes: Look, how could the the lab's VCR record him in the sensory deprivation tank if the tank was totally sealed off from a source of light?

Curiosity and motivation do not require a personality—behaviour, yes, but personality, no. If he had all the public knowledge in the world, why would he remain wandering around or get in a mental hospital? If you keep poking him, and he moves away, it doesn't mean it's part of his personality. He prefers to avoid pain and suffering like any other intelligent, or responsive, organism. (Machinery can be stubborn and driven. Combine Newton's Laws with Murphy's Laws.) Because he knows everything but who he is, his extant faculties tell him that he can improve his conditions by finding out.

Was there a monitor where the doctor could see John? Then it was a special case where recording him was necessary. Sometimes therapy sessions are taped.

Autymn, we can argue all day just what is "personality". The psychologists who come up with testing and classification systems can not state with exactness just what is a personality. But lets look at it from this perspective: do personality characteristics rely on one's memory? Or are they innate? Identical twins that were separated at birth are far more alike in personality than non-identical twins or random pairs of children.

Doe had a personality from the very beginning of the show. It made sense that he did. It is part of human nature to have one. He immediately started making decisions that were characteristic of his personality. A different personality would have made different decisions.

Erasing someone's memory of their past does not erase their personality. In fact, absent memories of one's past one's decisions will be based more on one's personality type since one can't use lessons learned from past experience to guide one toward making choices that go against the tendencies that one's personality would cause one to have.