After landing naked on an island off the Seattle coast, Doe was pulled from the sea and soon learned how to use his prodigious intellect to amass a fortune. Ensconced in a swanky condo -- and surrounded by new pals at Digger's (William Forsythe) seaside bar -- Doe now spends his time helping the police -- including Detective Frank Hayes (John Marshall Jones) and his boss, Lt. Jamie Avery (Jayne Brook) -- piece together obscure facts to solve crimes.

Ecstatic over the full-season pickup, executive producer Mike Thompson (who shares that title with Brandon Camp and director Mimi Leder), plans to hit the ground running, starting with this Friday's episode, "Idaho," in which the shadowy Yellow Teeth (Grace Zabriskie) -- seen briefly in a handful of episodes, including the conclusion of last Friday's -- may or may not tell the truth about Doe's identity and origins.

"We have a vision for this show," Thompson says, "and it's laid out over many years. The pilot revealed the sort of birth of this man, and the last episode of the show -- after hopefully a seven-year run -- will reveal who he is."

"In the meantime, it's a slow-burn process to get to that answer. Friday's episode will begin that process. This is definitely the first step in playing with this three-steps-forward-two-steps-back idea, now that John Doe is out there in the world. Actually, the episode opens with him as a guest on 'America's Most Wanted,' putting his mug on the screen and saying, 'Here I am.'"

"Yellow Teeth comes full-blown on Friday. She's the first of what we like to refer to as the nefarious forces out there, who become aware of John Doe and become aware of his gift, and suddenly the show is blown open by the possibilities."

"As soon as you've got entities descending on him, it's hard to know the difference between reality and fabrication. So we will start to enter a world where it's smoke and mirrors. It's hard to know the truth. He'll be pursuing leads about his identity, and some will be true, and some will be bogus."

"We hopefully have a long path to go, because we now have a foe. We have a theater for an adversarial clash of the titans, if you will."

Also, now that fans have seen several episodes and are familiar with the John Doe character, Thompson feels it's time to give the rest of the cast a chance to show off (and give Purcell a little time to spend with his family and doing publicity).

"It will start in episodes nine and 10, with Jayne Brook's character, Lt. Avery. We'll get quite deep into her life, and in subsequent episodes. Also, the character of Digger will become much more instrumental. We'll get him out from behind the bar and start to reveal the darker, dual life that he's led."

"Then the character of Frank Hayes, we'll also delve deeper into his personal life and how it affects him on cases."

Also look for Doe to shed his Northwoods-style, plaid-flannel wardrobe. "That was also strategic," says Thompson. "Dominic's a very good-looking man, and we feared that if we came right out of the gate with him in the most stylish clothes and the most fashionable look, that it would be real easy to write him off as a shallow model hack."

But he'll have to spiff up the wardrobe without the help of full-color vision. Doe sees in black and white (actually, grainy black-and-white, because, as Thompson says, "it looks cool" ), with only occasional things in living color. That's not going to change.

"He has an extreme version of color blindness, which is monochromatic vision. We do plan to play out the things he sees in color. In fact, in this Friday's episode, he does see some powerful things in color. That concept, for us, is a slow burn. That's one of the keys to it all, and that's something we plan to play out over a long period of time. It's definitely meaningful."

And with a new look may come a new friend. "The other thing we're doing," Thompson says, "which starts, not this Friday, but the episode following, which I think is after two preemptions, John Doe will have his first love interest. We will play that love interest out over the course of many episodes."