One Vile Possibility for Red John’s Identity
The Mentalist, Season Four, and one Vile Possibility for Red John’s Identity
It’s been a great season for Mentalist fans so far. Patrick Jane started out September in jail and ended December recovering from temporary amnesia. When Bruno Heller was interviewed about the Mentalist between seasons three and four, he said: “Every season, you kind of take a chance to reset things. … Last season was almost serialized. There was a great deal of plot and story that you could follow through the whole season. We’re going to need less of that this season.”
So far, Heller has kept his word. The episodes have been less serial and more episode-specific. At the same time, we have seen some more character development, and the relationship between Jane and Lisbon has been developed to a point where it borders genuine friendship, and occasionally teases toward sparks eventually flying between the two.
Some highlights:
Epidode one: The shooting of “Red John” is seen from the POV of an unbiased observer instead of through Jane’s eyes. Jane ends up in jail, and finds that “Red John’s” gun has been stolen, while his boss at CBI, Director Bertram, instructs the DA to keep Jane “locked up as long as possible” for “damage control.”
Bertram then suspends Jane’s team, and tries to prevent them from clearing Jane of murder. The team, of course, investigates, and eventually clears Jane of wrongdoing, but they are all “reassigned” and the team is broken up.
The one thing that is obvious to Jane, though, is that the person he shot was working for Red John, and that Red John is still out there. Curiously, while Lisbon believes Jane was set up, she still wants to believe that the man Jane killed really was Red John.
Episode two: Jane manipulates almost everyone in the bureau to get his old team back together. It is quite humorous and it works.
One thing we see that episodes one and two have in common are that Jane’s influence is seen in the actions of Cho, Rigsby, Van Pelt, and Lisbon, as they all break rules to get the job done. If you contrast this with the first season, when almost every character was there to be a foil or “straight man” for Jane, they have loosened up considerably coming into season four.
The rulebreaking isn’t unethical, as the rulebreaking in “The Sheild” was, but it definitely helps develop all of the characters.
Episode three: We get to see a rare glimpse into the past of Patrick Jane when he runs into an old client during an investigation. We also get to see Jane do what he used to do when it becomes obvious that his former client still thinks he has psychic abilities.
Episode seven: Jane and the team search for a serial killer. Jane figures out it is a blogger who “knows everything about the case,” and a battle of wits ensues, complete with a Red John tease.
So, the next question is “where is the series going from here?”
It’s obvious that Red John and Patrick Jane aren’t finished with each other quite yet. Also, while it looks likely that The Mentalist will be renewed for 2012-2013, it isn’t official yet. The official status is “more likely to be renewed than cancelled.” So, it looks like another season-ender that can be interpreted two different ways.
We see a number of possible storylines. First of all, it’s almost a cliché that the lead male and female in a police drama eventually have to eventually develop a romantic interest with each other once they have been on television long enough. We expect to see this continue teasing toward next year, with the possibility of a full-blown romance if the show is renewed for another season.
As for Red John, we expect to see more of him in the last episodes of this season, but because Bruno Heller didn’t want this year to seem like such a serial or soap opera year, Red John hasn’t really been as much of a storyline. But we do see a disturbing possibility, first mentioned here last summer.
Patrick Jane is looking more and more like Red John
This is an intriguing possibility. Remember that this is television, where anything can and does happen. If Patrick Jane is schizophrenic and is both Red John and Patrick Jane, it would open up a rather large box of Freudian and Jungian speculation, and would be an entertaining series finale. We have an even juicier possibility, though: what if Patrick Jane is Red John and has been conning the CBI all along?
What greater shock could there possibly be for The Mentalist’s loyal audience than to find out that the tortured Patrick Jane is really the inexorably disturbed Red John? That is perpetually pained expression is only there to hide an evil grin?
Most good fiction employs a technique called “leading the reader,” or in this case the viewer. We are seeing more of Jane’s “con man” side this season; it could be part of the “bread crumb trail” to which we alluded elsewhere on the site. The ultimate extension of Jane’s “con man” persona could be for him to be conning his friends at the CBI.
Is it likely this will be the ending? No, but it certainly would be one of the most memorable endings ever to a series, and possibly the greatest “swerve” of all time. It still isn’t likely, but it is beginning to look a lot more so than it did this summer.
Incoming search terms:
- Red John Identity Theories
- lisbon one of red johns minions is Teresa Lisbon an accmplice of RJ
- patrick jane finds tongue in tupperware
- Couls Jayn be Red John
- list of red john possibilities
- maybe patrick jane is still a patient in the psyche ward
- mentalist 7 red john possibilities
- who is the guy who tells jane that redjohn will always defeat him
No, Patrick Jane couldn’t knowingly be Red John because his determination to kill Red John goes beyond actions or behaviors necessary to con the CBI staff. Think about it, on and off scene with the CBI staff, Patrick really, really, really wants to kill Red John. It’s not just an act he puts on. When we see Patrick in scenes away from CBI staff, he still sincerely wants to kill Red John for revenge. In the mall, he pulled that trigger thinking he was killing Red John. So if, and that’s a big humongous IF, Patrick were Red John, it would have to be along the multiple personality/personality disorder vein. He would basically be hunting himself to get revenge on himself. And even then, that’s a huge stretch and I don’t think it’s the case.
hi im a huge massive fan of the show and the whole red john thing is amazing and exstriemly well crafted and has me and hooked like a heroin addict but!!!!for all this mystery about red john there best be a good ending i remember the ending of season three and being verry anoyed because red john was some random guy weve never seen before it was a let down if jane is red john that would be amazing it would be like waching the usual suspects the first time you wach it it meens somthing entirely diffrent from the second time you wach if not jane its gotta be someone whos been in it from the begining. profiling red john. intelligence,menipultor of thaughts and actions,conman,dieceitfull,knowlege of police procidure,abilaty to hide in plane sight and move through sociaty easyly,irratinal thaughts,sleep problums,pride,be able to make people do things for him could youse hypnosis patrick jane looks good for me
ive recently had a new theory that it could be janes father….as alot of the time people who know RJ always say your very alike/similar, and hes always one step ahead of you. Wasnt it janes father who taught him everything he knows?
just a thought.
So hypotetically speaking (excuse my mistakes are because english is not my mother tongue language) if you want to know who is Red John, you can find reasons for everybody and for nobody at the same time…I think we have to focus on the clues that we have. 1. -The poems of William Blake (…tiger tiger; the poem is called “The Tyger” and it has a sister poem called the lamb). It´s a methaphoric way some centuries ago that the writer used to say that god created goodness but also evil. Peace and dark and blahblahblah. Apart from the fact that this poem came to the ears of patrick as a message 2 times, like a dilema we don´t know nothing else. 2.-The wife is also from the circus world, and the name is Angela Ruskin, if you look Ruskin in google (first thing some writers do when they decide the name of a character to read some facts about real people with the names that they decide to check for nicknames, histories and other blahblahs that can fit…) first and more important search result is JOHN Ruskin. Ok maybe is a casuality I don´t care but there is also some results on the googling of Ruskin and Blake at the same time. Probably the writers needed some theories to understand the thinking of “crossing lines between good and bad” that Blake knew very well. Other point the sociologist John Ruskin was “socialist” so Red John can be funny if they thought of that there… Apart from the fact that we only now one Ruskin alive in the fiction of the tv serie, Danny Ruskin… Can be another Ruskin, could be anybody with the small facts that we know but, Danny Ruskin was angry cos her sister desappear from their circus life, maybe he have a bad life after they start over, maybe he is just a con man like patrick as the tv serie mentioned but also maybe patrick jane “is so much like Red John” (So maybe they have the same childhood but “Red John started killing women after being betrayed by his sister???) Also possible in this hipothesis of Danny Ruskin, that “the creator” of the monster (the tiger), also created “the lamb”. When Jane lost the memory he was a dumbass by flirting everyone and if he was doing that during marriage, cheating people while wife only wanted to scape from circus, it´s maybe probable that Angela was the lamb…just maybe… I dont know nothing is just another theory, I will keep watching it as hell of an addiction haha
I thought of Patrick as red john, but the way the series has been structured the writers will really have to make some artistic acrobatics to justify Patrick as Red John. Episodes where Patrick receives a call from RJ’s blind girl friend who says RJ is with her (and we see someone in the room) only to find RJ has escaped when Jane shows up with the police force is a case in point. So yes, Jane could be RJ, but the writers will be pushing limits of credulity by this.
One interesting possibility (and one that has not been mentioned here before this I think) is that Red John is the head of the CBI (I forget his name but he is the same guy Jane takes with him to the coffee shop right before he kills the fake RJ). The reason is in one of the episodes, perhaps the same one, someone mentions the “Tiger, tiger burning bright…” poem to him and he immediately identifies it as a William Blake composition. He doesnt look like someone who might have an artistic streak and hence this is surprising. Also, he satisfies the criteria of being a powerful guy, with connections to politicians etc to be a step ahead of the police always. Perhaps he uses various cases against politicians as blackmail to get them to do his dirty work?
I think Patrick Jane is Red John. The writers leave just enough room for speculation as to that possibility. It would make a fantastic end to the series. He has opportunity he is very good at manipulation (so he can have many accomplishes) He could turn out to be split personality,because of his bizzare upbringing.
He does not even know he is like that. It would be so sad to have it end with Patrick Jane going off to the insane asylum as Red John, as if Red John had killed the Patrick Jane side of him. Very good ending, much better than some guy or woman that has been there all along or only once in a while.
IF it was Jane, how could he have been both about to be killed by those students AND the killer? It’s not him. But I do think either the new Chief or the Courier Man who delivered the Red John files to the new Boss’ Office may be correct. But an outsider is likely due to the episode where Bosco is killed, we ‘see’ Red John walk past whilst quickly injecting Rebecca with poison. A female Red John would be clever, but unlikely.
In my humble opinion, Patrick could not conceivably be Red John. The line “What fearful symmetry” does not make me think otherwise. I know I am not the first fan of William Blake to have mentioned his sister poem “The Lamb” but nobody else seems to have interpreted Red John to be the ‘Tiger’ and Patrick Jane as being the ‘Lamb’. In the second to last stanza of “The Tyger” the question is asked “Did he who made the lamb make thee?”. This makes me think that while some of the circumstances of Red John’s and Patrick Jane’s lives may have been quite similar they are not both meant to be tigers. One became a lamb. And the omniscient narrator of “The Tyger”, having seen this, saw the path Red John took and asked ‘If you were similar to begin with, and led similar lives up to a point; how can one be kind and gentle, while the other is cruel and vicious?’
I’m pretty sure Patrick Jane is not Red John. It would definitely be an interesting plot twist, but too much of the storyline becomes nonsensical if Jane is Red John. In the Season 2 finale, Red John appeared to Jane in disguise and recited the “Tiger, Tiger” poem. And then there’s encounter with Timothy Carter (Bradley Whitford) in Season 3 finale. Timothy Carter was put up by the real Red John to impersonate him. If Patrick Jane is Red John, then how does it make any sense for Carter to pretend to be Red John in front of Red John? Did Jane really go up to Carter and say “pretend to be me to fool me”?
How about:
Jane meaning and name origin
Jane \j(a)-ne\ as a girl’s name is pronounced jayn. It is of Hebrew origin, and the meaning of Jane is “God is gracious”. Originally a feminine form of John.
“The Mentalist” is “Monk Meets Life on Mars and Elsewhere Over the Rainbow”
One does not have to have super analytical skills to recognize “The Mentalist” is a similar but different version homage of Monk, another emotionally crippled San Francisco-area investigator savant tormented by his wife’s unsolved murder and committed to bringing evildoers to justice mixed with “Hey, it’s all a dream” genre like “Life on Mars,” “St. Elsewhere” and the “Wizard of Oz.” Red John is the Professor Moriarty-type character in a Tommy Westphal-type imaginary world like “St. Elsewhere” that is the dream state of a teetotaler, super sleuthr who is really a mental patient, Patrick Jane, who suffers from paranoid delusions due to feelings of extreme guilt in the deaths of his wife and child who were killed when he failed to stop at a RED LIGHT – hence the RJ symbol – while he was driving intoxicated and spends his days watching TV shows, which generate his ideas for the delusional episodes. The characters of Rigsby, Cho, Van Pelt and Lisbon are also his mental creations ala the “Wizard of Oz” genre – the Tin Man, Scarecrow, Cowardly Lion, and Dorothy – who in reality are psychiatric assistants and doctors at the mental hospital and the RJ minions such as Rebecca, Craig, Dumar as well as the criminals of the week are Jane’s fellow mental patients. In the final scene Jane confronts “Red John” – himself – the man behind the mask in an homage to “The Prisoner,” when awakens from his delusional dream state and realizes the true identities of Lisbon et al. “The Mentalist” was on the mental list.
I think Danixu’s comments made sense. Danny Ruskin can in fact be Red John. Angela Ruskin is the good and Danny is the evil—good and evil that came from the same parents (creat0r). The name Angela means “messenger of God”.
I think that either jane himself is red john or the wife of the guy he shot. My theory on the wife, The woman she had chained to the bed ,may have witnessed her killing jane’s family, and the husband who was shot by jane willingly covered up his wife’s identity as RJ
because the wife kidnapped the girl who witnessed the murder of jane’s family and forced her husband with blackmailing him as an accomplice to the crime. she tells him what Jane’s wife and daughter smelled like
the night they were killed. Jane realized he killed the wrong person when he adds his locker key to the VIC’s key chain to bait the wife of the vic to reveal her as RJ. Hence the last comment on the episode about deceiving the jury. Or… It really could in some twisted way be Jane as Red John.
It has to be Patrick’s father. He saved Patrick’s life and killed Patrick’s wife because she “was dead” when she left the carnival.
I think it is a woman. I think it is the female FBI Agent.
i think that it might be either Jane’s father or the wife of the man he killed