When a private detective is found dead with a secret room full of photos of John, the investigation brings John to a woman who claims to know just who he is and what happened to him.

This is the kind of story that those making John Doe will have to be very careful of, as it's not the kind of trick I take kindly to, and neither will others watching the show. The simple fact is, while John may have been told part of the truth about who he is, by the end of the episode we're none the wiser about what is accurate and what isn't. The thing is, you can see this trick coming a mile off, firstly because it's been done before and secondly because John is given too much information; enough that a large part of the series would be over if it were all to be true.

It's a shame, because I'd happily settle for him finding out a couple of hard facts about himself after few episodes as long as some of the mystery remained. As it is, John is more frustrated and we're all more puzzled than we were before. It also means that the mystery of the investigation gets lost in the shuffle, and even by X-Files standards, the people behind John's problems are fast movers, able to empty a house and move people out of it before John's halfway down the motorway back home. Also, with all of John's knowledge, he should have been able to pinpoint exactly where he was taken from knowing every street in the world and realizing that things weren't quite right. I suppose there's an element that he needs to know to suspect something is up before his brain kicks in, but it does seem a little odd.

My biggest problem with stories like this is that they build in all this background and have the main character getting used to something new, only to rip it all away. Okay, so to convince John it has to convince us, but it's irritating to invest your time into an episode made up purely of false information that you needn't have paid any attention to. It's the ending that partly makes up for this as one of the group's people is killed and we get a couple of hints that will hopefully mean more as time goes on. It's still a bit of a fruitless way to spend an hour though.

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