A man wakes one morning and jumps into a pool to find it filled with blood. When the police investigate, John Doe is drawn into the investigation and tries to help them figure out where the blood came from.
I can't give this a higher rating then three, for reasons I'll come to a little later. The main bulk of the story is fine. The investigation into the death is well-handled, the sub-plot of Detective Hayes' Lieutenant slowly coming to trust John works well, and the murders are suitably nasty and tricky for John to unravel. This is especially effective, as John's knowledge of everything allows him to uncover exactly how a murder was committed and the blood drawn down in to the pool, even if at no point does it explain why such a complex plan was attempted when the others deaths are simple assassinations.
Meanwhile, the other plot is John's search for the woman he saw in colour on the boat in the pilot episode. This doesn't work quite so well. Firstly, we're dragged unwillingly ahead in time, with John admitting upfront that he didn't find a way to get to the mysterious woman and hasn't been able to find out who she is. He does seem to behave rather oddly in relation to her. On the one hand she's a link to him somehow (although the girl in the pilot wasn't, so maybe not) but John's reaction is a little OTT. Going to look in a jeweller's, he spots a wedding ring and decides to buy it. While I appreciate that he's looking for anything to connect him to his past, just assuming he's married seems something of a stretch.
So what we have here is a bit of a mixture. It's a good, involving story, but I'm still concerned that the writers don't actually know where the whole 'Who is John Doe?' thing is going, and taking John's mysterious lady friend out of the equation early on is either because she'll play a bigger part further down the line, or because she was at the end of the pilot and no one had quite thought how they were going to sort out the cliffhanger. My concerns about the future of the show are increased here, as I'm worried there is no clear direction and it'll quickly become a police procedural show. We shall see.
***
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