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.
Hi. Red John here. You think you know who I am, but you don’t. You have seen me, but you won’t know who I am until I want you to know. It was great to watch you all fall for my latest ruse at the end of last season. Did you really think I would be stupid or careless enough to show myself in that cluster of people at the end of last season?
Red John
I might have been there all along, but not as Red John. You will all know who I really am when I want you to, and not a second sooner. This season, I will continue to have fun tormenting Patrick Jane, both from within and from without. And I will be here, at this website, to laugh at all of you, to give you enough bread crumbs to think you have a trail, just like I do for Jane.
So, why do I enjoy tormenting Patrick Jane so much? It started long ago, when Jane was a two-bit “psychic” and grifter. Jane made the worst assumption that anyone could make: that he was more intelligent than I am. I made him pay for his insolence by taking away what he loved the most. So now, he hunts for me.
Patrick Jane already rues the day he decided to speak my name in public. And now, he relentlessly pursues me. But is Jane really the hunter, or is he just the hunted? Patrick Jane thinks he is smarter than I am; he is wrong. Patrick Jane thinks he is better than I am; he is wrong. Most of all, Patrick Jane thinks that he can control the evil within his soul better than I can; he is wrong.
Over the last four seasons, you have seen me bring out some of Patrick Jane’s innate evil. This season, you will see it happen even more. This brings me to another thing you are all probably wondering about: why the apparent fascination with William Blake?
In an irony that Blake himself would appreciate, Blake and his poetry are merely metaphors for my greatness. William Blake was the greatest of his era, but his greatness wasn’t truly acknowledged in his own lifetime. Blake is seen as a “pre-romantic era” poet, but his work foretold the romantic era and predated it. In other words, William Blake was ahead of his time.
Blake’s poetry was among the finest ever written, but he was also a painter and an engraver. His visual art was every bit as stunning as his poetry. William Blake was a genius, but the world at large thought he was crazy, because he didn’t see the same things everybody else did. In other words, William Blake was just like me.
I am ahead of my time, like Blake was. I am an artist, just like Blake was. And my aspiring contemporaries, like Patrick Jane, don’t recognize my greatness because, deep down, they are jealous of my talent. I won’t write poetry like Blake, nor will I ever be mistaken for being a great painter. But I have no true peers in the arts of murder and manipulation.
People are my words, my brush, and my etching tools. I exist alongside of them, on the fringes of their lives. Not only do they not notice me, but they don’t notice that they are doing my bidding, solely on the strength of my superior intellect. My art isn’t the crime scenes, or even the murders themselves; my art and my genius are my ability to manipulate the process.
So, why did I choose the poem “The Tyger” to torment Patrick Jane? I will talk about it more in later posts. For right now, let it suffice to say that I am going to bring out the “Tyger” in Patrick Jane this season. At the end of Season 3, you all saw what Patrick Jane is capable of doing. Before he made the mistake of engaging me in battle, Patrick Jane was weak and lazy. He was a person who was almost as good at manipulating others as I am, but he didn’t truly know the “Tyger” within.
Before Patrick Jane thought he met me in that mall at the end of Season 3, and pulled the trigger, he thought he could claim higher moral ground. Now, though, Jane knows, deep in his soul, that he is no more “moral” than I am.
This season, I am going to help Jane find the Tyger within his own soul. Patrick Jane has turned out to be a worthy adversary. He is not quite as intelligent as I am, but he has surprised me with his ability to find the clues I leave for him, and to follow up on them. In time, I could develop Jane into a worthy contemporary. The question is whether Jane will ever see that we have more in common than he thinks we do.
Consequently, Season 5 should be subtitled, “The Continuing Education of Patrick Jane,” because I am going to continue to show Jane his dark side this season. Sometimes I will use violence, but sometimes I will use seduction, as I did with Lorelei. Jane thinks he is getting closer to me, but in reality, he will only get as close as I allow him to.
After Lorelei made it out of FBI custody in Episode 1, it is obvious to Jane that I was telling the truth about having “friends” in the FBI. Soon, though, Jane will figure out that I have “friends” a lot closer to him than the FBI. When he does, I will strip him of any faith he may have in the “system,” and bring him one crucial step closer to fulfilling his true potential.
By the end of this season, Jane’s dark side will have many of you wondering about him. Most of all, though, Jane’s dark side will have him questioning himself.
The more questions he asks of himself, the closer he will get to finding his true essence: the” Tyger” within.
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