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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Which is the Tiger? Red John? Patrick Jane? Are they one and the same?
William Blake’s original poem:
Tiger Tiger - Red John
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Could it possibly be that the great enigma of The Mentalist TV series is that the protagonist and the antagonist are actually the same human being?
Is Patrick Jane the very criminal mastermind he is so obsessed with hunting? A split personality?
How do we explain the second season finale “Red Sky In The Morning”? This episode shows the first time Patrick Jane and Red John actually come face-to-face, and Red John cites a few lines from William Blake’s poem “The Tyger”
Patrick Jane Faces Red John For The First Time
The first verse of the poem, the words cited by Red John were:
| TYGER, tyger, burning bright |
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| In the forests of the night, |
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| What immortal hand or eye |
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| Could frame thy fearful symmetry? |
What does this mean? It’s definitely a big clue, and in the context of the “Patrick Jane is Red John” theory, the events in the video and the poem could mean at least some of the following:
1) The masked person is an accomplice that may or may not know that Patrick Jane is Red John and is simply acting on orders.
2) Everything the audience sees in this scene is only the way it plays out in Patrick’s mind, and in reality he is not hopelessly tied to the chair and he’s the one that is really the masked man killing the students and inspiring fear.
3) The poem is Patrick’s darker self’s vision of himself, (Red John) or even of the good side, Patrick. The poem is a partner to “The Lamb” and the poet sits in awe of how the same God that created the innocent little lamb could have created the sleek, lethal tiger. Which side of Patrick is the Tiger? Maybe not even Patrick himself knows. The dark side may see the good side as dangerously as the good side may see the bad. This kind of confusion helps explain the fearful obsession between Red John and Patrick Jane.
Is this theory any good? Well, there are a lot of things wrong with it.
First of all, it’s pretty brutal to cast Patrick Jane as secretly a deranged killer capable of viciously murdering his own wife and daughter, not to mention the long list of other victims.
Second of all, it’s near impossible to explain events that transpire simultaneously in which Patrick Jane is in the company of Teresa Lisbon or another CBI agent as Red John acts. Could these all be accomplices? Yes. Is is likely? Not in this author’s opinion.
Thirdly, people connected to Red John don’t seem to behave in a way that indicates that RJ is Patrick Jane while they are in his presence. Rebecca, Agent Bosco’s secretary inside the CBI in the second season, for example, has no emotional connection with Jane but apparently does with the unidentified man that poisons her. The blind woman that was in love with “Roy” who is suspected to be Red John also seems to have no emotional connection with Jane.
Fourthly, the third season finale puts Jane physically in front of a man who has intimate knowledge of Red John’s crimes and provokes Jane into violent action.
Some fans have brought up some slight facts that could maybe possibly suggest a hint that Patrick Jane is Red John, however, the evidence against the case is much larger (in this author’s opinion) than any possible evidence presented in defense of this theory.
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