My overall comment on the story: I'd prefer see some detective story that didn't involve showing just the upper or lower half of a dead body that had been hacked in half. Hey, maybe that's just me. Maybe lots of other people love this sort of thing. Maybe it boosts ratings. I don't know. Still, since I don't expect every episode to show these kinds of visuals I watched it for the story in spite of gruesomeness.
Right after this episode I watched Monk prove that the widow killed her rich husband right after an S.F. earthquake. I gotta say that the absense of hacked up body pieces and the way Monk slipped into gibberish made it a more pleasant experience than the John Doe episode. Still, the John Doe episode was worth watching in spite of the visuals.
Starting from the start: Why's Doe seeing a psychotherapist? Does she not know that he can't remember his past? She's asking him questions about his past. She's asking so many questions that she must know he can't remember. Okay, he's hypnotized. She does know about the amnesia. We learn that his past memory (if he even should have past memory - if he hasn't been cloned perhaps) doesn't work any better when he's hypnotized.
Shrink: "How do you know so much about psychotherapy?"
Doe: "I know so much about everything but me."
The comment he made about women being turned off by his weird mark on his skin doesn't ring true. A rich good looking guy is going to be a babe magnet, weird skin mark or not. Besides, he could afford to have it removed.
Why would Xanax be appropriate? Its not like Doe seems to be suffering serious anxiety. Upset about his past? Yes, but he's handling it fairly well all things considered.
But why this way? A bum wakes up and there is the lower half of a body in a dress lying next to him. Oh great.
A guy's blood was found on the victim (or what it on a knife nearby?). But the guy who matches the DNA is named Dan and he was in the lock-up of a mental hospital when the victim was killed. How?
Possibilities: He has a twin. His blood was taken from him to confuse the investigation. Dan cut himself with a knife and that knife was taken to kill the victim.
The Indian-looking girl in the Police Dept obviously has a crush on him and this seems totally appropriate. Her brains make her his type. Will he ever notice? Will the girl just show up in every episode pining for him with meaningful looks that noone else notices?
Repressed memories? Oh, come on. Why would John Doe need to ask the Dr Jansen what methods he uses? Doe ought to know already.
19.8% of twins are left-handed vs 9% for non-twins? Get out of here. Is that true?
Okay, adopted babies: would the social services agency have saved the records somewhere.
The twins are Daniel and Chistopher (nee Beauregard).
Chris is dead Polly tells them. Polly seems weird.
Doe figures out that Polly is Chris after a sex change. Well, Polly is as nutty as Dan. It must be genetic.
The dating service bar set-up done by Karen. Okay, why not? Still, seems like a rush to be trying to address his romantic needs so quickly. He has weird conversations with the 5 minute dates. He can't talk about his past.
Implausibility Alert: "Where did you grow up?" "Twin Falls Idaho." The girl he was having the 5 minute interview with also was from there. The odds are too slim for this.
John Doe: I have no personality.
But he does have a personality. Personality does not depend on having a past.
The mental hospital has this doctor who does stuff with dredging up memories to treat emotional problems. Doe finally admits his condition to the Doctor.
Doe: "I have retrograde amnesia"
Doctor offers him a trip into a sensory deprivation chamber. Well, I did that a few times. I don't see how that will make memories come back.
Implausibility Alert: Problem with the sensory deprivation chamber: Doe is shown laying way too deep in the
water. Normally the water is so high in salinity that a person doesn't sink that far into it. I think that is partly for safety to reduce the risk of drowning.
Implausibility Alert: Why would it be impossible to get yourself our of an isolation tank? Seems for safety reasons that wouldn't be done.
Implausibility Alert: Also, how could a camera film you in the isolation tank with light on? The idea of an isolation tank is that the person in it receives very few sensations?
Why did Dr Matthew Jansen leave Doe in the isolation tank and then split? Doe was in there for 2 hours. Why did he take Doe's tape? Is he doing something related to a Doe memory that Doe shouted out?
The two victims worked for a social services department and made the decisions that split up twins for adoption. We learn there was a third panel member who made the decisions who must be in danger.
Miss North works for Dr Jansen: She part of the plot? Odd look when Doe told her the third potential victim is in the Southeast Basin of some park area. Plus, what about her hand? The fingernail is missing? The same seemed be the the case with Dan. The hands flashed by so quickly that it was hard to catch that.
Doe puts it all together: Miss North is the mother of the separated twins and she's in a murderous rage about how they were split up for adoption. She and the twins share a genetic defect of their hands for fingernails. So Doe could connect the dots. Well, okay. What if they hadn't shared this defect? This seems too contrived.
Miss North must have given her two sons the genes that make them crazy. She's crazy and so are they both.
Implausibility Alert: How could Miss North know which tent out in the middle of nowhere would contain the guy she wanted to kill?
The buying of the paraglider was very cool. Doe's tracking Miss North's fleeing SUV with the hang glider.
Jansen is part of the plot that is watching Doe. That's my hunch.
Doe: "I have this amnesia thing. "
Brunette in bar: "Well, every experience is a new experience then"
Then we cut to Jansen being buried by a couple of white guys in white shirts and ties (so much for my hunch). They get in an SUV with the older white lady from the end of the last episode in the South Asian country. So Jansen was killed and the tape of Doe's isolation chamber experience is in their hands.
Why was there a DNA blood match with mental patient Dan? His mother's DNA would not have been a perfect match with Dan's DNA. After all, she gave only half her DNA to him and his father (whoever he was) gave the other half. The construction of this episode seems sloppy. Or did the mother take a blood sample to put at the crime scene to throw off the police? But why? It would make more sense to use a totally different person's blood as a way to throw off an investigation. The woman worked with a doctor. She probably had access to blood supplies to pull it off.
I do not like conventional detective dramas. I've seen so many of them that new ones just seem like the same old seen-it-a-mllion-times. John Doe seems to be developing as a detective drama with the added twist that Doe can draw on such a huge amount of knowledge even more so than Jarod in The Pretender. But whereas Jarod is supposedly a genetically engineered (or bred? its not clear) savant Doe's source of knowledge is much more mysterious and is so great that one can't imagine how even the most brilliant super genius would even want to know a lot of the knowledge he draws up. The knowledge extends way into the realm of uninteresting trivia (like the model numbers of old biolers for heating buildings).
So what's up with John Doe? Can the writers move the show along in directions that make it into something more than a cop show with a super detective? Lets examine the second episode for signs of its future prospects.
At the end of the first ep John was yelled to and addressed as Tommy by a woman on a passing boat. In the second ep we learn that he couldn't find the woman but he was able to cut a piece of plastic from a boat window where he saw her touch it. He used the plastic on the ship as a source of fingerprint and of course knew how to use common chemicals found in a bar to bring out the pring and make it more visible.
John Doe has the fingerprint. But few people have complete fingerprints on file. So that was unlikely to work in the first place. Of course if he found the woman too rapidly the show would develop too rapidly. So it is best that as expected the fingerprint didn't match with anything in police files.
Okay, before you know it he's helping Detective Hayes figure out why some pool has blood a blood appearance in it. Should we stop to wonder why the police would take such an interest as to send so many people out to investigate? Its an implausibility but is it an important one? There are worse ones to come.
I have my own suggestions for how the blood could have gotten into the pool when the alarm was on:
- Put the blood in a pouch that could be thrown into the pool from a distance. Have the pouch be something that would slowly dissolve and release its contents. One would need a good throwing arm of course.
- Have the intruder wear a wet suit that makes their outer appearance look really cold (below 92.7F according to one character) and that way the infrared alarm wouldn't go off. But maybe it has motion detection too. But can such an outside detector even work wthout going off too often from birds, dogs, and other critters and even leaves blown into the area?
Okay, this is all less than total fun. But having some guy climb up on the roof in order to deliver the blood thru the storm gutter isn't that clever. And why was only the back yard surrounded by infrared sensors?
"Fell from the sky."
"Don't be so sure."
So far I'm not deeply intrigued. Plus, the tie-in from the house to the brother's house via a bit of a flower petal is very far-fetched. Why would the guy have a piece of a flower still on him from somewhere else? Why would the owner of the house come out just as they were talking about the type of the flower it is and why would he know to comment that such flowers are around his brother's bouse? This is the sort of thing that dulls my enthusiasm for detective shows.
Why go to the brother's house with a SWAT team? At that point it was just a routine trip to go question a potential suspect to see if he'd put blood into a pool. Er, who cares?
The barn: Why is the brother handing upside down in the barn dripping blood? Weird plot twist.
Doe: "This man has been embalmed by a professional."
Why would the murderer embalm a person if they just wanted to kill them? And why would the murderer, if they were that worked up to kill someone, make sure that person went thru a proper Buddhist burial ritual with their hands? I don't get it.
Okay, so we cut to John Doe trying to figure out who he is. He's out putting signs up. At the same time he's being cagey with various people about his inability to recall any knowledge of who he is.
Sign: "Have you seen me? I'm missing?" Why not: "Do you know me?" as a more pertinent caption on the sign? Heck, since he's so rich from currency trading why not just run ads in newspapers asking for people who know who he is to call some number?
Regarding his reeling off the number of DMV records with Tommy as a name: If he can hack into DMV records then he could narrow himself down by height combined with approximate age. He appears taller than average and so a fairly small percantage of the populace will have his height.
Doe: Detective Hayes, Karen, Karen, Detective Hayes.
Karen: Hey Five Oh.
Like the Hawaii Five Oh reference. I wonder how many people got it. Probably well less than half the audience.
Then Hayes refers to his boss as "Lieutenant Boss Lady".
Gotta establish Karen's basis for a continuing role in the series. Doe didn't respond to Karen's pitch for a job by hiring Karen right away. But you just know he's going to since she's a recurring character. Well, by the end of the show he'd hired her and demonstrated a realization that he needed to be emotionally connected to people. He had to have a sort of emotional battle with himself about a wedding ring in order to get to the point of hiring her.
How'd Doe know what password to use on the US Customs database? Does he simply just know passwords? What is the nature of his knowledge?
I like the way people ask Doe questions where he answers them in a way that is honest but since the question askers don't know just what secrets he's hiding they misunderstand and are satisfied. Example:
Who are you?
I'm John Doe
Does that make the wife Jane Doe?
In a matter of speaking yeah.
Okay, how and why did the shipper guy let the smuggled-in Vietnamese die? Did a Vietnamese guy kill is brother in retaliation? Is the shipper corrupt? Or just careless? Or vicious? How would the shipper cause an entire large container from a ship to fall into the water?
Anyway, here we are at the end of another episode. Lots of things happened in it that are not worth describing and just served to carry us to the next interesting twist. As purely a detective show with a know-it-all detective it doesn't quite rise to something interesting. Doe doesn't have the quirkiness of Monk and so far doesn't have the supernatural abilities of the Dead Zone main character.
At the end of the episode Doe is on the cover of a local newspaper as the savant that helped crack a terrible murder case. Some white guy sees his face in the internet and brings it to some business lady in her own office. There is a cut to the view out of her window and the surprise is that the view is of a city that could be in the Middle East, India or somewhere else in the Asian subcontinent. Here's our second connection to his past and its made to seem simultaneously exotic and either business or spy related.
The John Doe show is going to rise and fall on how well his secret origin works to make him more interesting. Super detective skills just aren't going to do it. Will there be people who know something about his past who will be spying on him or trying to kill or manipulate him? Will the writers be able to make that angle interesting?
BIG ASIDE WARNING: I don't write these reviews to explain to a non-show-watcher what the shows and episodes are about. Unless you've seen what I'm writing about don't expect to understand it. These are not traditional style reviews. You can find those kinds of reviews in abundance elsewhere.
First: I hate the John Doe web site. Those little Flash pop-ups with small amounts of information in them are annoying. So little info per box. Splurge a little. Use whole pages to show information. Show multiple pictures and more paragraphs.
I think Flash is used because page designers like playing with it and not because it really helps any. Okay, there are probably pages where it adds something to the browsing experience. But I'm more often than not annoyed by it.
When he fell off the island (Horeshoe Island?) into the ocean why did he then immediately start swimming out away from the island? Whatever it takes to get the series going I guess.
When he was picked up by the Cambodian fishermen and was able to speak Khmer and didn't even realize that he was speaking or knew how to speak Khmer that was a nice touch. Pretty cool.
How's he supposed to be able to tell the time from the position of the sun? Unless he also knows the day and the latitude he can't calculate the information. Or does his brain have a running clock in it that he can just access?
Why would he be put onto a stretcher by paramedics but somehow in the next scene be trying to walk into a police station to report himself as a missing person. Why? Wouldn't he have been taken to the hospital with the doctors there deciding that he was an amnesia case?
Do all golf balls have the same number of dimples? I think not. That seemed like a dumb question to answer with such exactitude.
No, he wouldn't have been able to predict which horse would win by such a simple formula. That was another bogus way to demonstrate how much he knew.
The library scene where he starts answering everyone's questions initially showed a crowd gathering a bit too quickly.
Why didn't he shout to the woman on the boat to ask her her name or his full name? Tommy who? Was she mistaken? Ah, the mystery.
"I don't know things I'm supposed to know but I do know things I'm not supposed to know."
Digger. Who is Digger? I missed it. When did the girl Karen get hired as his assistant? Was that shown? I like, missed stuff.
At first it seemed he just had a huge amount of knowledge dumped into his brain before he woke up. But then it began to seem as if his memory is getting updated all of the time.
Why wouldn't he just pay to rent the hotel room to get access to it? After all, at that point he'd done well at the races and in playing currency options.
John Doe sits at a computer and uses "Web Find It" to search on "Jenny Nichols" with a result of "no match". Come on. I just did a Google Seach on Jenny Nichols and it returned over 50,000 hits. What would he be searching for to find out about her? What sort of search engine?
The idea of more manganese building up in the bones of a vegetarian is a clever. Nuts have a lot more manganese in them than meat.
This guy is like a cross between Monk, Jarod from The Pretender and Johnnie from the Dead Zone.
Does he know about things that aren't yet in any book? Like, can he tell is what mutations in genes can cause cancers even more genes that haven't been named yet? Or does he just know the sum total of all the knowledge of what has been discovered so far by all of humanity? If so, does he believe false things that scientists think are true that they will eventually find out that they are wrong about?
Was he placed on the island by aliens for some purpose?
Is his knowledge supernaturally derived?
Is his knowledge constantly updated?
Is he a mutation into a new mind-reading future human?
He's always going to be helping the police in every episode? I hope there are episodes where he just goes out there and runs down some bizarre mystery that does not involve crime. It would be fun if he even got distracted by something that annoyed him and figured out why something in society (even a product that he wants to be able to use that is poorly designed) doesn't work right and he figures out a solution for it purely for personal esthetic satisfaction.
He ought to become sly and not demonstrate to everyone he meets how much he knows. He's better off if most do not know what a freak he is.