John is zapped by lightning and loses all of his knowledge of everything. Finding himself useless to the police, his life starts to fall apart, just as he becomes an unwilling part of the game of a killer who is copycatting Jack the Ripper's crimes.

I'm not quite sure what the point of this episode is. It doesn't seem to demonstrate John's strength of character much, as everything crashes down around him when his knowledge disappears. If it's meant to rob him of his money and life in preparation for the season finale, it does that just fine, but he seems rather uninterested in the fact that all his money has been lost due to lack of knowledge of the stock market. It seems that when the going gets tough, the tough get to live out on the street.

I suppose it makes a degree of sense when John is doubly crippled, as he still doesn't have any of his original memories. Which is a shame really, as this is the perfect opportunity: John loses his added memories and starts to retrieve those he used to have. All he acquires is colour vision, which is of passing interest. He wouldn't have had to find out much to make it work, but it would give him something to live for and work on rather than this being an episode about what a worthless man John is without his extensive knowledge. However much Avery might tell him that he's still her friend, it just doesn't convince. She really does seem to be after him purely for his facts. Only Digger really seems to support his friend in his hour of need, although John's stupid desire to hide his memory loss from everyone sets the story back a good 10 minutes.

Even the Jack the Ripper plotline doesn't quite come off. If it's truly a copycat killer, the only possible explanation for the murder of men is that a woman is doing the killings. The 'revelation' that it's really two women is of little consequence, and their attempt to start up the now-traditional game of cat and mouse with John goes nowhere for obvious reasons. If only he'd show that he has his own intelligence, it would help, but aside from a couple of simple deductions that the cops are apparently incapable of making, he doesn't do a lot.

Plus, of course, there's no escaping the fact that this is the oldest trick in the book. It takes a lightning strike rather than a bang on the head to wipe John's memory, but to then resort to another electrocution to return his faculties to him is pathetic. For a start, we've at no point been led to believe that John is indestructible, just programmed with all the world's knowledge, yet he can survive a lightning strike with not even some frazzling, and be electrocuted and fall a good few feet yet still get up okay a short while later. Unless this is an exciting new plot point we can expect (which I doubt), it's all a little too unreasonable.

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