Only the perfect mind can solve the
perfect crime.
The show “John Doe” lasted only one season.
In my opinion it was one of the best detective/science fiction shows I have seen in a long time. The tragedy of this short lived show was that no one really knew who John Doe was, not
even the main character, John, himself.
John Doe woke up
on Horseshoe
Island with no memory of who he was. After
a short time, Doe realized he knew everything. He knew obscure facts and any
information about anything someone could ever want to know. He knew everything
but who he was.
Armed with his amazing mind, John
Doe set out to discover who he really was and what had happened to him to cause him to lose the totality of his memory. Along the way, he befriended two detectives, Jamie
Avery and Frank Hayes,
and helped them crack many difficult cases haunting Seattle. He rented a room above a bar called The Sea, owned by Digger, who became one of John’s
best friends. John was constantly plagued by his
lost memory and obsessed over who he really was. Every episode teased the audience
with a small tidbit about what could possibly be John Doe’s past.
One of the different aspects of John
was his black and white vision. Occasionally he would see certain objects in
color, be they photographs, a small bird called a Phoenix, and a woman who waved
at him and called him Tommy. John
never found the woman whom he saw on a boat heading away from him, but he found out from certain members of a group called
the Phoenix Organization that the woman’s name was Teresa.
The Phoenix Group, it appeared, was following
John, and did not want him to find out about his past.
Unbeknownst to him, the Phoenix Organization planted cameras in his apartment and monitored his progress on finding
out who he really was. Whenever John seemed to be getting close to his past,
the Phoenix Group would step in and divert him from his goals, going so far as to kill a young girl John had befriended as
a threat to him.
In the cliffhanger season finale, which
turned out to be the series finale, it appeared that John’s best friend, Digger, was
working for the Phoenix Organization, and had kidnapped Teresa in order to keep her from John. It was the ultimate tragedy of this show that John
never found out who he truly was. The producers revealed that John Doe
obtained his amazing memory from a near death experience, but other than that, nothing else was revealed about the show, and
we shall always be left wondering: Who is John Doe?
