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JOHN DOE

Episode 1.07 "Mind Games"
Written by Adele Lim, Russel Friend and Garrett Lerner
Directed by Fred Keller
Guest Stars: Joel Murray (Langenhan), Ryan Hurst (Elvis), Daryl Sabara (Wesley), Leslie Hopps (Althea), Alanna Ubach (Dionne).
Air Date: 11/08/02

I'm starting to think Hollyfeld's Adverse/Proportional Promo Theory is spot on. Last week sold me on "Mind Games", but it was so disappointing that I very nearly fell asleep. Actually, I did fall asleep. This is probably the longest it's taken me to do one of these things.

It all starts with some father/son bonding at Digger's bar. Frank and his son are watching football. It's daytime, so I assume it's a weekend. John shows off by calling the plays before they happen. Frank and his son are so cute in this scene that it's no wonder John was left with a little hankering for that sort of relationship. Good news John, you're about to get a visit from the Be Careful What You Wish For Fairy.

A woman arrives with the younger brother from Spy Kids in tow. His name is Wesley, but he's not as cool as that British tool from Angel. She accosts John about this personal info, and we find out that her little boy is John's son. Of course, it's not that simple. The woman conceived her son through artificial mans, and she bribed a nurse at the facility to get John's DNA profile. After some digging John reveals that Wesley, her son, is the product of a project called Otto. There were multiple donors and anyone of them could be the kid's father. John tries to help out by tracking down the other donors. Oh look, one of them is George from One Crazy Summer. Yay. They're a little gun shy and make with the threatening remarks, though. Then one of them turns up corpsified with his brain missing. Finally with the interesting bits.

Too bad it doesn't last. After John involves the police, he gets some lessons in responsibility screamed into him. Boring. Back to the mutilations. The now suspect members of Otto won't talk at first, but once they see pictures of their buddy's screwed up skull, they squeal like the delicious pigs they are. Otto was a Eugenics project these people participated in while they were in college. They were considered the top of the gene pool back then. I guess our standards have gone up a bit in the last decade. Though this explains why they were so edgy before it's a bit of a let down. I was hoping for some weird creepy angle that tied into John being engineered or something, but alas no.

Not only was that revelation tired, but the killer's motivations were equally lame. He was one of the donors, but went nuts and decided to put the geniuses out of their misery. By taking their brains. Right. It falls flat as far as Insane Motivations go. It was also contrived that two of the donors involved in Otto were never seen by the others. This makes things way to easy and eliminates these other poor clods too soon. Where's the mystery? The Suspense and Drama? I don't care if the killer disappeared down a dead end street. You don't need to impress me crap like that reconstruction of said disappearance. Give me character development, twists and turns. Anything but this tired horse shit.

When all is said and done, John's not the father, but George from One Crazy Summer is. It was pretty obvious since they went out of their way to make the other man besides John a total dick. I guess it's sort of cool that John's found some genius friends to play with, but I doubt they'll be reappearing next week. Or ever again, for that matter. If you've been dropping by the Official John Doe site over at Fox.com then you probably remember the first clue to John's identity that they dropped over there. They had some surveillance footage of John and Frank from another episode and the question, "Who's Otto?" So this settles that I suppose. Only it sucks. They really need to work on these mysteries. They're becoming less compelling as we go along. Grace Zabriskie, of Twin Peaks fame, shows up at the end to let us know "it's time". I guess next week is another Doe-centric ep. I hope it's better than this one. "Mind Games" gets:

Episode Rating: 5 out of 10

- Steven Dougherty has a room in his house where he keeps brains, too. Unfortunately they're all from Fox TV Executives. He's kicking himself for that blunder right now.

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