By Jeff Jensen on Nov 24, 2013 at 1:16PM
It was Rebecca that made me pay attention to The Mentalist. I had never seen the CBS crime drama starring Simon Baker until the eighth episode of season 2. “His Red Right Hand” was the one where a secretary in the Sacramento offices of the California Bureau of Investigation shot Sam Bosco (Terry Kinney) and two other agents on behalf of a serial killer — Red John, a brilliant phantom with a blood-drawn smiley face insignia, powerful influence and connections, and a scores of similarly brain-sick and unnervingly gleeful devotees.
In the last act, an assassin — presumably Red John himself; we never saw his mug — silenced Rebecca by deftly applying poison on her wrists. When Rebecca saw him, she recognized him, and her eyes lit up happily, and she smiled the smile of a fawning fangirl. It was all so eerie, and well played by the actress, Shauna Bloom. In the aftermath, the head of the CBI office, Virgil Minelli, played by Gregory Itzin, aka The Despicable Nixonian President on 24, abruptly resigned to take early retirement. Now that was suspect. I was instantly convinced Virgil was Red John. C’mon! Despicable Nixonian President on 24! And then, Bosco, on his death bed, told the show’s hero, con man-turned-trickster detective Patrick Jane, that if the carny Sherlock should ever catch Red John, he shouldn’t arrest him, he should kill him. He whispered something into Patrick’s ear and died. What did he say? WHAT DID HE SAY?!
My imagination was captured. I knew I’d be sticking with the show to watch Patrick solve the mystery: Who was Red John?
On Sunday night, longtime viewers of The Mentalist will get a definitive answer, as the sixth-year drama is finally closing out the Red John saga. I would like to say it’s about time, but the truth is that this moment is way past due: Red John should have been bagged, tagged, and buried two years ago, maybe three. The creative story of Red John is a cautionary tale reminiscent of two others: ABC’s Alias, the spy-fi series created by J.J. Abrams that spent five years both indulging and resisting its most interesting story — the Rambaldi mystery-mythology — and its natural tendency to be complex and serialized; and The X-Files, a procedural drama that saw its quickly accumulating alien conspiracy mythology take on a dynamic, if unwieldly, life of its own.
With Red John, Mentalist mastermind Bruno Heller had the challenge of figuring out how to service a part of his franchise — a lighter, more conventional crime procedural than the dark fantasy of Alias or The X-Files — that connected powerfully with viewers — more powerfully, probably, than he ever wanted — without altering the show’s tone and storytelling. The result is a mystery epic that captured our imagination and then lost it with a mix of bold choices and miscalculations-in-retrospect. Red John will leave some once again bemoaning the lack of master plan vision in Big Saga TV. In truth, it merely proves the rule that governs all TV shows, whether it’s a formulaic crime procedural, drawn-out crypto-serial, speed-plotting thriller or competition reality series: The obligation of a hit show is simply to remain a hit show, by any means necessary.
Part One: Red John Rising
The Mentalist never presented Red John as a “follow the clues” puzzle that you could piece together. Yes, there was Red John’s fixation with “The Tyger” by William Blake, which sent us to the bookshelf – or at least the Internet – to study the poem. In season 5, another Red John associate, Lorelei Martins (Emmanuelle Chriqui), told Patrick: “I only wonder why the two of you didn’t become life-long friends the moment you shook hands.” Cut to: Fans clicking through Mentalist wikis, searching episode guides for handshakes. But what was always more intriguing to ponder was how Red John was getting away with all these murders (a high-ranking law enforcement official or conspiracy of such powerful people, perhaps?), and how was Red John able to get so many people to do his bidding. Drugs? Mind control? Really great candy? Only stories could give us the answer, not clue-tracking. And so we waited on The Mentalist to tell them.
The Mentalist did an impressive job of building the Red John mystery during its first three seasons. Sometimes, the show hit the story square on the head with a dedicated Red John episode. Other times, an episode that seemed to have nothing to do with Red John would surprise you with a nifty beat that nurtured it. One of The Mentalist’s best hours, “Red Moon,” was a twisty tale about someone who was killing police officers. The prime suspect was a kooky astrologer, and the story made fun sport of him, but the murderer turned out to be another cop, Todd Johnson. In the last scene, Todd – dying from severe burns after being set on fire by an unknown assailant – chilled Patrick – and us – by simply reciting a verse from “The Tyger.” With that, we understood Todd was another Red John associate. “Red Moon” exemplified another winning storytelling stratagem: Milking great story for more good story. Recognizing Todd and his vivid, cryptic death had made an impression on the audience, The Mentalist spent much of season 3 investigating his murder via another colorful supporting character, J.J. LaRoche (Pruitt Taylor Vince), an imposing mound of no-nonsense with beady Cylon-scanning eyes. The storyline could be seen as vamping – foreshadowing more overt filibustering in subsequent seasons – but it was an organic vamp because the show was dealing realistically with the consequences of what had come before.
The Mentalist has always had a knack for compelling rogues and colorful recurring players and casting them well. Red John benefitted from this. Since season 2 and until recently, Malcolm McDowell played Bret Stiles, leader of a politically connected cult “alternative religion” called Visualize. Fans have always suspected Bret for Red John (his alleged brainwashing practices would certainly explain how Red John controlled his acolytes), and since his first appearance, which had nothing to do with Red John, The Mentalist has fed that theory by integrating him into the Red John lore.
Red John was certainly interesting for what he represented thematically: Our fascination with evil, the pervasiveness of pulp fiction in pop culture. He executed his wickedness like a showrunner, telling sick stories via his agents, i.e. his actors. As the series progressed, Red John would claim he was only doing very bad things for the purpose of keeping Patrick Jane and the CBU team interested in chasing him. Red John was metaphorical meta-commentary on the serial killer genre before The Following, and did it more cleverly.
The other thing that made Red John so captivating – the most important thing – was the emotional hold he had on our hero. Patrick Jane wasn’t motivated by justice, but revenge: Red John murdered his wife and daughter in his own home. This event spurred Patrick to give up the life of a high paid “mentalist” – he was really a con man with a keen understanding of behavior and keener ability to manipulate it – and his hustler-huckster powers for good, helping CBI solve homicides search for Red John. Simon Baker has played Patrick Jane with a breezy, sunshiny air that was fundamentally ironic for it masked – sometimes thinly — a heart gone freezer-burn cold. He had little to zero empathy or sympathy for criminals, suspected criminals, or innocents associated with criminals; for Patrick, “innocence” was a crock, and he took delight in busting anyone or everyone on their secrets and shame, no matter how benign. He’s like Dr. House’s more smarmy, better looking, better dressed, yet equally misanthropic and alienated kid brother.
Besides being a snarky-smug prick, and recklessly obsessive about apprehending Red John, there were queasy undercurrents: 1. The possibility that Patrick liked the cat-and-mouse gameplay of chasing Red John, that it had become dependent upon it for him meaning, that catching him would destroy him*; and 2. Would Patrick really go full Dirty Harry and murder Red John once he caught and cornered him? In this way, Patrick Jane has been one more example of pop culture’s recent tendency to portray dark knight crusaders who risk damnation with a shady pursuit of justice. No, neither characteristic is terribly original. But Baker has embodied all of this very well, in what has been an old fashioned TV star performance, and even as signs of checking-out fatigue have crept into his performance. He can often looks like he was just roused from a nap. But then, Patrick Jane does take a lot of naps. (In a massive attic/loft office at CBI that he’s basically made his home! Your tax dollars at work, Californians!)
*The Mentalist has occasionally played a beat I’ve never liked: Cranky rival law enforcement types suspecting/accusing Patrick of being in league with Red John because of his icky enmeshment with the case, callous indifference to their authority, and plays-by-his-own-rules solipsism. Such bogus tension. The lesson of Patrick Jane: Sometimes, a mentalist prick is just a mentalist prick.
By the end of the third season, The Mentalist had reached a defining moment. Ratings were strong. Common sense said: Don’t mess with success. But the producers began to worry that Red John was making the series darker, heavier than desired, and that accumulating narrative was too much for viewers to carry forward, and might even discourage new viewers from watching. Moreover, after three years of building and stretching, clues and misdirection, fans needed a substantial development. The predicament was analogous to romantic dramas with an ongoing when-are-they-ever-going-to-get-together storyline. See: Castle. The producers of that ABC show addressed a similar crossroads at the end of its third season by having Nathan Fillion’s titular novelist/crime-solver character declare his love for Stana Katic’s police detective … as she was fading into unconsciousness and possibly into death after getting shot. She recovered, of course, and spent the next season pretending she didn’t hear him.
The Mentalist followed suit with its season 3 finale, which, coincidentally, aired three days after the aforementioned Castle episode. (I like trivia.) A two-hour, two-ep event – “Strawberries and Cream (parts 1 and 2)” — brought Patrick Jane face to face with Red John at a shopping mall food court. Or at least Patrick thought he was facing off with Red John. The dude sounded like Red John – a fey high tenor – and oozed the kind of high strange sinister we expected from the villain. Bradley Whitford (The West Wing, Trophy Wife), in an unbilled cameo, was terrific in the part, and Simon Baker rocked the acting duet with him. The scene was exactly what you wanted from this showdown, and it ended with Patrick cooly pulling a gun and murdering Red John and then returning to his cup of tea.
It was a killer moment. And of course, it was a fake-out. In the season 4 premiere, Patrick and company figured out that Whitford’s character, Timothy Carter, wasn’t Red John, but another Red John proxy. Patrick, always the con man, then let the world believe – while defending himself during his murder trial (he was acquitted; whew!) – that no matter what the evidence said, he believed that he had killed the real Red John. The lie was all about gaining a tactical advantage: Patrick wanted to lull his adversary into think he was done and over the case. It was a clever-clever strategic stall – for Patrick, and for the show.
Some viewers felt burned by the Red John/Timothy Carter bait and switch. It felt like the show was taking back its biggest, boldest, all-time best move and walking Red John back to zero. But for others, the (not completely unexpected) revelation was welcome news: As perfect as that shopping mall showdown might have been, The Mentalist had not yet provided answers for the sub-mysteries associated with Red John, like the significance of the Blake poem or how Red John was manipulating his minions. The show could have kept Red John dead and cleaned up the lingering questions without him. But the most compelling scenario for mystery resolution was this: Patrick had to collar Red John and make him spill his secrets. The season 3 finale misdirect, then, really was pure “Strawberries and Cream” – which is to say, The Mentalist was having its cake and eating it, too. The maneuver allowed the producers to credibly scale back on Red John and focus more on lighter, case-of-the-week stories.
It made a lot of sense. And it was a miscalculation from which the show never recovered.
Part Two: Red John Waning
The “Strawberries and Cream” runaround may have been a smart move for franchise sustainability, but creatively, it didn’t do much for the show. Season 4 was a drag. By this, I mean it moved really slowly: It felt like a lot of waiting around for Patrick to reactivate on Red John. In one strong episode that served as another exhibition of Patrick’s ruthless extralegal pragmatism and another example of a non-Red John episode becoming one by the end, Patrick manipulated Red John via a TV interview to murder another psycho – The San Joaquin Killer (David Paymer) – after failing to find a way to put SJK behind bars. This winner outing set up an arc in which an FBI agent was sent to both investigate Patrick’s actions and smoke out his true stance on Red John. It was another example of the show milking great story for more story by dealing straight with the actions-have-consequences thing. But it also felt like a rehash of the Todd Johnson/LaRoche play, which reinforced an overall feeling of treading water.
The Mentalist concluded season 4 with a pair of episodes that brought Red John back to the forefront. They were quite entertaining, marked by some classic Patrick Jane chicanery, and they left the hero with a living Red John associate (and love interest), Lorelei Martins. The expectation was in season 5, Patrick would engage in a flirty-deadly war of wills with Lorelei and seduce more Red John intel out of her. Nope: She escaped in the season premiere. Despite a strong introduction, the Lorelei was never riveting as the show wanted her to be. The business of catching her, and then catching her again, provided the season with one of two Red John narrative arcs.
The other concerned a fishy Homeland Security agent with chimney smoke eyebrows and blushed cheeks, Robert Kirkland (Kevin Corrigan), another iteration of another increasingly tired Mentalist trope: The rival law enforcement officerswho barges into CBI and takes control of the Red John investigation. The Mentalist wanted us to really, really like Kirkland for Red John. Through it all, Patrick began compiling a list of official Red John suspects, using the handshake clue provided by Lorelei to tab possible candidates. Over the course of the season’s last 13 episodes, Patrick whittled down the roster from 408 (our hero shook a lot of hands) to just 7. They included Kirkland and other vivid recurring players and memorable guests stars, including McDowell’s Brett Stiles and Sheriff Thomas McAllister (Xander Berkeley). It sounds like busy year on the Red John front, but it felt more like meaningless busywork, and even more so now, in light of recent season 6 revelations. Season 5 certainly gave us more Red John than season 4, but the amount was skimpy and artlessly stretched.
The double-whammy of sluggish season followed by a sound-and-fury-signifying-almost-nothing season cost the Red John story a lot of allure and all of its momentum. Or: The Patrick Jane/Timothy Carter moment at the end of season 3 represented a high-water mark that was never matched; everything after that just seemed “Eh” by comparison. Regardless, it became very easy to mentally check-out of The Mentalist; to lose the thread of the Red John mystery; to doubt that the storytellers were guided by vision. Some long-form mystery serials squander audience investment by filling their inevitable stall periods with too much misdirection, too much contextual trivia (i.e., mythology), and too much one-step-forward/one-step-back runaround plotting. The Mentalist committed another sin altogether: It just got kinda boring.
Part Three: Red John Is Dead. Long Live The Mentalist?
The current season of The Mentalist, the sixth, arrived with the promise to tie up the Red John yarn. It has gotten there quickly. The seven episodes so far have tried hard to explain Red John sub-mysteries and make the whole saga interesting again before retiring it, like fattening a sad, lean bird for slaughter. We got a major clue: Red John has a tattoo of three dots on his shoulder. The list of seven shrunk when Kirkland murdered another suspect, and then was murdered himself after it was revealed that he, like Patrick, was a vengeance-driven Red John hunter. His backstory was most convoluted; a twin brother was involved. Part of his narrative utility was to embody for Patrick the soul-warping grotesque of Death Wish vigilante justice. Will Patrick damn himself anew when he gets Red John in his crosshairs?
Kirkland’s killer(s) belonged to a secret society within the California law enforcement community known as The Blake Association. Their secret handshake: “Tyger, Tyger.” Their dark mark: The three-dot tattoo. Ergo: Red John was a member. Many of the episodes have been engrossing enough, but The Blake Association has the whiff of last-second invention – imposing an organizing principle upon a mess of story, as opposed to a story that always had one. (It’s a complaint that many longtime Lost viewers had of the late-game Jacob/Man In Black play that brought unity – or tried to –to its mythology.) That said: It is rather fitting that we’re getting The Blake Association — an outrageously incredible expression of paranoid conspiracy theory corn — on the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination. Coincidence? I THINK NOT. (Not!)
I’m not sure how much The Blake Association really has to do with Red John: At this point, on the eve of getting even more answers (hopefully!), it feels like a separate mythological strand that just happens to intersect at various points with Red John. I also suspect it was introduced mostly to set up the impending post-Red John reboot: Last week, the FBI closed CBI due to it being a rat’s nest of “Tyger, Tyger” corruption; after tonight’s episode, The Mentalist will skip ahead two years and find its characters leading different lives.
Shuttering CBI probably should have happened long ago. It just might be the most incompetently run police agency in all of pop culture, due in large part to the extraordinary license afforded to Patrick. It killed me last week when Patrick – a civilian employee; not a cop – unilaterally decided to hold a press conference at CBI to announce that the agency’s director, Gale Bertram (Michael Gaston), was Red John. (More on this in a second.) Not only was this just a cheaty contrivance designed to manipulate characters to do stuff the plot needed them to do, but it further subverted the long-eroding integrity of Patrick’s handler, partner, and boss, Agent Teresa Lisbon (Robin Tunney). She let him do as he wished, as usual, with her usual exasperated resignation. Boy, Patrick, I sure hope you’re right about this! YOU’RE THE BOSS! YOU TELL HIM WHAT TO DO!)
Dubious plotting often marks (and mars) serialized shows or storylines nearing the ends of their runs. You tend to see lots of coincidences, idiocy, and convoluted motivations that make you cry, Why are doing THIS when they should be doing that?! Dexter drove me batty with beats like these in its last days. If Deb and Dexter doesn’t leave The Brain Surgeon totally unattended after subduing him, then Deb doesn’t die, Dex doesn’t live out his life lonely and badly bearded. Similarly: Breaking Bad’s use of coincidence last 16. See: Hank finding Leaves of Grass in Walt’s crapper; Walt catching Charlie Rose in the Granite State bar. Nitpicks? Sure. And they are magnified to distraction during the endgame, when viewers who want to see everything come together are watching with those eyes. But that doesn’t make those choices any less artless, and all the more reason to work harder to avoid them. Still, I don’t see these kinds of flaws as evidence of a show that doesn’t have a master plan. On the contrary: I think what happens is that showrunners get so wedded to a final image, or a final scene, or a final act – regardless of how long ago or how recently they came up with it — that they give themselves permission to fudge a little (or a lot) to get there because they believe in it so much. Moreover, they know they will receive retroactive grace for their sins, as long as that last chapter or ep — which tend to get evaluated as things unto themselves — is unequivocally great.
Can The Mentalist generate that kind of transcendent magic for the Red John climax after so much squandering? I’m not sure. I get the sense the show itself is relieved to be done with servicing this increasingly untenable saga (that could be another explanation for storytelling sloppiness) and can’t wait to move into the reboot and see if there’s a version of the series that can continue and even flourish without it. Hopefully exhaustion and move-on itch won’t lead to a half-assed effort tonight.
Moreover, there’s the matter of whether the identity of Red John will satisfy the audience.Two episodes ago, Patrick brought together the final five Red John suspects, held them at gunpoint, and made them bare their arms so he could identify Red John by his tattoo. Twist! Three of the five had the trio of dots. Then a bomb went off. We don’t know who planted or detonated it. Patrick survived, as did Gale Bertram. He’s a character who has been with the show since season 3, and whose oblique quoting of Blake in one episode immediately made him a choice suspect. Last week’s episode did nothing but encourage us to believe that he is indeed the long sought phantom menace of The Mentalist. However, a quick, admittedly unscientific survey of some Mentalist message boards and Wikis indicates that some fans don’t believe that Bertram is Red John, or don’t want him to be. This tends to happen when fans get too fixated with a theory, or when a show does its job too well (Bertram makes so much sense, it feels rather boring), or when a show does its job poorly. Some Mentalist viewers have become conditioned to not trust the show’s storytelling because of everything it has done to stay alive, by any means necessary, for better or worse.
I can relate to all these perspectives. I approach tonight’s last Red John episode with the theory that Red John isn’t Bertram, but actually … our old friend Virgil Minelli. Evil Nixonian President from 24! C’mon! (Back-up theory: It’s Robert Kirkland’s twin brother. Option 3? Red John is not one person, but many, operating under a Kaiser Soze-like name and persona. You see, my friends, we are all Red John. In a way. Kinda. No? Never mind.)
Seriously: I am not rooting for my theories. I’m rooting for The Mentalist to close out Red John with its best energy. I haven’t seen that from the show in awhile, not since that inspired day when Patrick Jane shot a man that should have been Red John in a shopping mall and calmly returned to his tea. Wouldn’t it be grand if The Mentalist could live up to that moment again tonight? It would go a long way capturing my imagination anew and keep me around for the show it wants to be — and maybe has always wanted to be — moving forward.
SRC: insidetv.ew.com/
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