We prove that many seemingly simple theories have Borel complete reducts. Specifically, if a countable theory has uncountably many complete one-types, then it has a Borel complete reduct. Similarly, if $Th(M)$ is not small, then $M^{eq}$ has a Borel complete reduct, and if a theory T is not $\omega $ -stable, then the elementary diagram of some countable model of T has a Borel complete reduct.

We present a countable complete first order theory T which is model theoretically very well behaved: it eliminates quantifiers, is ω-stable, it has NDOP and is shallow of depth two. On the other hand, there is no countable bound on the Scott heights of its countable models, which implies that the isomorphism relation for countable models is not Borel.

We prove that if M0 is a model of a simple theory, and p(x) is a complete type of Cantor–Bendixon rank 1 over M0, then p is stationary and regular. As a consequence we obtain another proof that any countable model M0 of a countable complete simple theory T has infinitely many countable elementary extensions up to M0-isomorphism. The latter extends earlier results of the author in the stable case, and is a special case of a recent result of Tanovic.