The Mentalist, season 5, episode 9, was a fairly quiet episode, but it did thicken the overall serial plot, and careful viewers who were quick enough to do a screen capture got to see two pages of Jane’s list of people who have shaken hands with him.
To recap and review this week’s case, Jane was able to figure out who murdered a real estate agent who was once affiliated with a gang. It looked like it was one of his old gang cronies, and the gangster did perpetrate a crime, but the victim’s “friends” from work committed the murder to cover up an accidental shooting they did at their company retreat the week before.
Jane was on his game, drawing the killers into a trap that was worthy of the days when we first became acquainted, and Jane was still making his living as a con man. Before we get more into Jane’s search for me, and the time and energy he is spending on finding me, I would like to point out a pattern. This season, we have seen Jane becoming more like he was in his con man days than he has been since he “reformed” and joined the CBI as a consultant.
But I digress. What’s most important here is that Jane is now spending every minute of his spare time documenting everyone he has shaken hands with, and trying to figure out who they are. Thanks to Lorelei’s revelation last week, he is now fully convinced that we have met. Agent Lisbon, though, asked him one question that might confuse Patrick Jane: “What if you’ve never actually met Red John?”
I have manipulated a lot of the events around Patrick Jane, but even I couldn’t manipulate this one. Or could I?
It wouldn’t be any fun if I revealed the truth yet, but I am quite amused by Jane’s diligence, and the part of Jane’s list that made it onto your TV screen. The names on the list:
Ellis Mars, Psychic.
Dean Harken, agent at a biotech facility.
Jason Cooper, second-in-command at Visualize.
Walter Mashburn, “playboy.”
Vint Molinari, CBI.
Dr Linus Wagner, Red John copycat
Virgil Minelli, old CBI boss, retired
Dr Towlen Morning, family doctor
Osvaldo Andilles, DA’s office, “road block.”
Andilles will be an intriguing name to many. Not only is he on Jane’s list, but he is on LaRoche’s list of suspects from last season. He has been extremely antagonistic toward Jane, and has made no attempt to hide his contempt for Jane.
Next week’s eposide, Panama Red, will involve medical marijuana. I will be providing some mirrors to go with the smoke. Stay tuned.
In the Mentalist, Season 5, part 5, for the 100th episode of the show, you finally got a glimpse of the disheveled mess that Patrick Jane was after I took away his precious family. In the beginning, you see an insecure man with what Agent Lisbon called a “homeless vibe” about him. When Jane walked into the CBI station, he was just an ex-con man who had barely been out of the insane asylum long enough to make it to the CBI office to ask if any progress had been made on my case.
It is strange for those of you who don’t remember Jane like I do to have seen him when he wasn’t full of confidence, but I stripped him of his confidence for a solid year. Eventually, Jane starts to recover the vestiges of what he was and is, and helps solve a murder case for the CBI: but not without showing his roots as a con man.
When Jane manipulates Steve Hannigan into punching him, it was the first real action he had taken since being locked away. In this episode, one can almost see Jane, growing from an insecure victim into the brilliant grifter he used to be. Getting Hannigan to punch him was a stroke of genius, because it allowed Jane to worm his way into the CBI office.
Once he got near the officers and the case files, his instincts took over, and he ingratiated himself to those he needed to, and got to tag along with Lisbon on a case. His ruse to expose the killer was straight out of his favorite con, the fake psychic, and he worked it to perfection.
But it’s at the end of the episode, in the last minute, that you get to see something really important. After Jane has been officially hired to assist the CBI, Virgil Minelli gets a call from FBI agent Alexa Schultz. Schultz and Minelli agree to “cooperate,” with Minelli agreeing to keep Schultz “in the loop” on the Red John investigation. Schultz also informs Minelli that Jane spent the last year in an insane asylum.
After she hangs up, Schultz says, “Done,” and the camera pans to her and another, mysterious man in a limo, who says, “Thank you.” In the credits, that man is known as Robert Kirkland.
As usual, there are more questions than answers here. Am I Robert Kirkland, sitting across from Schultz, or is Kirkland just another one of my minions?
Is this whole show, as some very clever fans suggest, going to turn out to be a clever imitation of the “Tommy Westphall Universe,” named after a character in St Elsewhere, who imagined the entire series in his autistic mind, and whose series had and has connections to as many as 282 television series? Are there going to be links to the Tommy Westphall Universe in The Mentalist? Things like this have been done in the Wizard of Oz and Dallas. It was also done in the short-lived “Life on Mars.”
Am I a figment of Jane’s imagination? Is he still in the insane asylum imagining all of these events and people? Or am I an alternate Jane personality who killed his own family? Am I any of the many possibilities that have been explored on this website?
My identity will eventually be revealed on the show, but not before I’ve tormented Jane a lot more. Keep reading, and keep watching. The best is yet to come.
At the beginning of The Mentalist, Season 5, Episode 3, it looks like everything is back to normal for Patrick Jane. He is back to being himself, and solves a case in his usual manner. So, did I decide to give Jane a break for this week, or am I busy behind the scenes? The short answer: both.
You may think Patrick Jane is back to normal. There was no mention of him using a hallucinogen on this show. Then again, it started in the morning and ended before one could see him at night. So, what things happened here that could be seen as extremely important?
The case was a typical one. Jane happened to be across the street from a bank robbery and murder as they happened. He made his usual entrance, and created his own, special brand of chaos. As he watched everyone react, he was able to peel away the obvious, layer by layer, until he figured out the truth: the murder and the bank robbery were two different crimes. He used his typical con to bluff the perpetrator into admitting her guilt. Jane is intelligent, and he knew she was guilty, but also knew a confession was necessary to make an arrest.
Remember how I have said that I have friends in the FBI? Do you think it was an accident that agent Lisbon was invited to a high-powered poker game by Agent Mancini? Remember that anything can happen at a poker game. People reveal themselves by their gambling habits. If anyone in that game, from judges to FBI agents to Lisbon’s boss, have any personality flaws, someone with access to the games can exploit them: someone like Red John.
Jane will figure out where Lisbon went, and then he is going to try and use Lisbon to help him eavesdrop on the poker games, but he isn’t going to hear anything I don’t want him to hear. Meanwhile, Mancini will keep working on Lisbon every chance he gets. The question to ask is, exactly who is watching who here?
Jane has no idea what is in store for him. And he has no idea that almost every crime he will be solving from now until the end is going to be something I had a hand in. I will be keeping Patrick Jane very busy this season, and he won’t realize that it is I who am pulling the strings.
Tune in next week, when I will hit Jane where it hurts again: through those close to him.
As promised, Patrick Jane’s dark side is finally starting to come out. At the beginning of The Mentalist, Season 5, Episode 2, we see Cho and Rigsby talk about how Jane hasn’t been the same since Lorelei disappeared. Jane wanders around the crime scene, and indulges his arrogance by making himself a cup of tea in the kitchen of the crime scene. But Jane doesn’t know that his habit is about to become a lot more of a “habit” than he bargained for.
When Lorelei opened a door with Jane that hadn’t been opened since his wife died, it had a profound effect on him. I thought I could convince him of the wisdom of joining me as an almost-equal, but he still hasn’t been broken down enough to make him embrace his dark side. Not to worry, though: Jane will soon embrace more and more darkness, until he questions the very existence of light.
There are no accidents where I am concerned. And, even though Jane doesn’t know I had a hand in this, does anyone really think it was an accident that Jane “happened” to find belladonna-laced tea at a crime scene?
It was really quite easy to convince a frustrated neighbor to use a hallucinogen to poison the diamond cutter. Just a simple word from a stranger in passing was enough to put the thought in her head; she never even realized she was being manipulated.
Jane’s arrogance is admirable; I possess a fair amount myself. But Jane’s arrogance will eventually do him in, and his habit of making himself a cup of tea at every crime is becoming far too predictable.
So, we all saw his hallucination when he drank the tea: his dead daughter. The daughter I killed. In the space of four episodes, I have forced Jane to revisit and relive feelings and memories that he felt were forever buried in the far reaches of his soul. The last scene was predictable. Was there anyone watching who didn’t figure out that Jane was going to start dosing himself with belladonna to make the hallucination of his daughter come back?
So, did everyone get the Alice in Wonderland connection here? I knew I would be, so to speak, pushing Jane down the rabbit hole, but when he saw an actual rabbit, it was exquisite. It seems that, somewhere in Jane’s subconscious, he likes Lewis Carroll as much as I like William Blake. And, that raises the most important question of all: how far down the rabbit hole will Patrick Jane go?
Belladonna is a poison, and Jane will now have to balance a poison that is killing him slowly against his most primal urge: to see his dead daughter and wife. He will also have to balance it with his profession, which requires him to be lucid when he is on a case. While he is doing all of this, he will still be trying to find me.
So, what will Jane find as he goes further down the rabbit hole? Will he finally see that, for all of his moral posturing, he is no better than I am? His actions have already shot down any pretense of higher moral ground. Now, it’s just a formality and a matter of time before Jane reveals himself for what he is: an intelligent but bitter man for whom the game, or the con, is the only thing that makes him feel fulfilled.
Jane thinks he will find me. He thinks he will kill me. And I have to admit the possibility that he very well might do exactly that, despite my obvious mental superiority. But by the time he does that, will he have found the good qualities he thinks he has embraced? Will he have the capacity to love again? Will he fully repair himself from the damage I have done to him?
Or will Jane become a broken shell of what he once was, and allow his refusal to let go of the past to take him so far down his rabbit hole that he never makes it back?
Remember The Tyger? Rest assured that I won’t let Jane go any further down the rabbit hole than I want him to go. A broken-down Jane is worth a lot to me; a broken shell is worthless. If I see Jane becoming too happy in his belladonna-induced dream world, rest assured that I will do something to wake him up.
Jane will once again embrace The Tyger within. He looks like a mere popinjay on the outside, but Jane and the rest of the world will soon learn that he is much more on the inside. He just needs someone to help him remember who he truly is.
Before season four of The Mentalist, producer Bruno Heller promised surprises, and a “reset.” He felt that last season was “almost serialized,” and wanted to make the individual episodes at least as important as the overall plotline. While he has done that to some extent, the introduction of Agent Darcy of the FBI has reestablished the serialization factor, and the Red John plotline is heating up going into the last part of season four.
One thing we can guess is that, with the renewal of the show for yet another season, the Red John saga won’t be ending anytime soon. Since CBS never seemed to renew The Mentalist until the current season has finished production, Heller is usually faced with three options. He can continue as though he is confident they will be renewed, and have a typical season-ender. He can also do what he did last year: come up with an ending that would work just great as a series finale, but leave himself “wiggle room” for a following season.
The only other option would be to produce two endings for the last show, and go with whatever is appropriate by the end of the season: a cliffhanger or a series finale. If we were to hazard a guess, it would be another “death of Red John” kind of episode with wiggle room, just like last year, but Heller did allude to some swerves this year.
So, we are once again left with speculation about who is really Red John, and where the show is going with storylines. Here are some observations, questions, and possibilities.
1. Agent Darcy (Catherine Dent) will probably get killed.
FBI Agent Darcy
As we saw in the episode “Blinking Red Light,” Red John doesn’t suffer insults wisely, nor does he allow anyone who really fixates on him to live, with the notable exception of Patrick Jane (Simon Baker). He demonstrated to Jane that he was capable of killing Darcy whenever he wants, but for some reason he didn’t. As the show progresses, though, and Darcy is inserting herself firmly into the middle, something has got to give.
Our guess is that, as Darcy gets closer to the truth, Red John sees her as a liability and gets rid of her. There is a possibility that he makes it look like Jane did it, but it is more likely that she dies a signature Red John death. We are guessing it happens in the last or second-to-last episode of the season.
2. Is Red John getting help from high places?
Gale Bertram
In the first episode, we saw that every potential witness who could expose the framing of Patrick Jane died, and that the deaths were not signature Red John killings. One of the immediate suspects is Director Gale Bertram (Michael Gaston). Bertram went to great lengths to try and take Jane down for the killing of the fake Red John, and broke up Lisbon’s (Robin Tunney)team out of spite after he was suspected as possibly being Red John.
Also, Red John’s resources seem endless, and he seems to know everything about everyone. Our guess is that he has a lot of people in his “debt” through the usual crime drama essentials such as blackmail and the threat of killing their relatives. Since he did have an FBI agent doing his bidding in season three, it isn’t out of the question for anyone to be on his “payroll” at this point.
Remember The Tyger? Rest assured that I won’t let Jane go any further down the rabbit hole than I want him to go. A broken-down Jane is worth a lot to me; a broken shell is worthless. If I see Jane becoming too happy in his belladonna-induced dream world, rest assured that I will do something to wake him up.
