John Doe: Save As John Doe

John is approached by an attractive young woman who wants help in retrieving a briefcase to which she is entitled after the death of a millionaire businessman. However, she's not the only person after the case.

This is a weird one, as the story is all over the place, lurching from point to point with a worrying degree of lucky guesswork and randomness, chucking in a few extra things that might be related to John and might not along the way. It also contains the minimum number of suspects, so that there are very few people who could be responsible for what happens. That said, it does have scale in the way the person responsible for the crimes manages to turn the city against itself, bringing down waterworks and power lines to make himself a dangerous opponent.

But this is a problem in itself. The premise of the episode is a case that everyone wants but no one can get into. Yet it's only when John manages to open it that he finds circuit boards designed to look like the city and things start happening. How does the villain know what's in the case? And considering that no one could open the briefcase, why does his plan revolve around someone being able to, then working out what the circuit boards represent, then using them as a map to guide themselves around the city? It's only when all the decoding is done that a message from the criminal mastermind appears. Why go to all this trouble when he could just threaten John from the start? It's the world's most convoluted plan ever. It also doesn't help that John's new friend Paulette shares little chemistry with him, leading to a rather ineffective lost interest.

We are also introduced to several concepts that aren't properly explained. The scientist businessman who causes the entire mess is apparently trying to download his personality onto computer and then into cloned husk bodies, something a little more Sci-Fi than we're used to on this series. Once again, it's something that may or may not be connected to John, and it's reached the point now where I could care less. I can't believe that going back and noting down all the weird things that have been put forward as explanations for John and his situation would make things any clearer now, as there have just been too many red herrings. It pleases me to see that the executive producers are getting a frequent co-writing credit at this point in the series, clearly guiding things along in the way they want them to go, but part of me is still concerned that the whole concept is starting to get fuzzy.

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