Heh, I just finished rewatching these two episodes like five minutes ago :D
But yeah, the personality thing doesn't really work for me either, if we're supposed to see it as he was before his family's death. For one, it makes his wife look like a total fool for putting up with him...
It works better as an actual dissociative fugue, which is not a loss of memory - it's a loss of personality. To avoid the pain of his grief, Jane created himself a new personality, one which is completely free of guilt. This isn't the Jane who hasn't lost his family - it's Jane who never had that family in the first place.
And I wish the episode hadn't ended there, too. The thing about disassociative fugue is (or so Wikipedia informs me), that when the person wakes up from it, they have no memory of the time during the fugue. So Jane basically suddenly found himself staring at the smiley face without knowing how he got there :/
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But yeah, the personality thing doesn't really work for me either, if we're supposed to see it as he was before his family's death. For one, it makes his wife look like a total fool for putting up with him...
It works better as an actual dissociative fugue, which is not a loss of memory - it's a loss of personality. To avoid the pain of his grief, Jane created himself a new personality, one which is completely free of guilt. This isn't the Jane who hasn't lost his family - it's Jane who never had that family in the first place.
And I wish the episode hadn't ended there, too. The thing about disassociative fugue is (or so Wikipedia informs me), that when the person wakes up from it, they have no memory of the time during the fugue. So Jane basically suddenly found himself staring at the smiley face without knowing how he got there :/