The Mentalist: Ladies In Red
By fred | October 22, 2008
(S01E04) The Mentalist is another procedural cop-drama, and so we all know what to expect from such shows : every week we get a new crime, things get investigated, people are interrogated, some of them lie, their lies are revealed and about one hour later the murderer is going behind bars. There’s no real mystery there, they all work the same and there isn’t even one of them where there’s a chance they won’t catch the bad guys in the end.
So obviously, when you’re watching such a show, whichever it is, you’re not doing so for that aspect of things, but for whatever will make this show different than the others, for that “twist” that will get you entertained for the hour you’ll spend watching, for what it has that others don’t have. In this case, the answer is obviously Patrick Jane, it’s the quirks and unusual ways of that character, perfectly portrayed by Simon Baker.
Which is why I didn’t mind that this episode was very predictable, that it was so easy to tell who did commit the crime. Not that it’s usually impossible to guess it, but this show had become quite good at keeping you guessing and not having it too obvious. You could find who it was before they announced it, but it wasn’t evident, and maybe it took some time to get there.
Except for the pilot, in which the bad guy was more than obvious from 5 minutes into the episode, things had gotten much better lately. This week however, things were pretty obvious very rapidly, and by the middle of the episode, when they questioned the mistress, you knew without a doubt. There was something about what Adrianna was saying (and the way she was saying it) that made it easy to believe, and the fact that she knew the daughter, they had met and liked each other, and that, with the victim, they were thinking of running away with her, it all pointed in the same direction.
We had already seen that the daughter was looking for someone to play with, that she never played with her mother, and from this this moment on, they just kept adding and adding and adding to the list, starting right after with Jane checking whether or not the mother even cared / went to the movies with her daughter. You couldn’t possibly have doubts, just like you knew where the diamonds were — if not specifically, you knew they had to be somewhere in the daughter’s room.
But as I said, this isn’t really a problem when the rest of the episode is good, and it was very good. This show is turning out to be a really fun one, and probably my favorite new series of the season so far actually. What I especially liked this week was first, that we didn’t get Jane to do a little show about his “abilities”.
Sure, the first scene could fall under that category, but it was nothing like the rock-paper-scissors bit or when he “guessed” where the keys were hidden, it was part of the investigation, and it was just him doing what he does, what he’s been brought in to do – even though I thought they went a bit too far in having no one but him notice the paper halfway under the bookcase.
For a moment I feared that, when he was challenged to seduce the widow, this would turn into just a demonstration of his skills. I was really glad it went a different way, and that most of his “tricks” were otherwise very subtle or felt quite natural — watching him give the (fake) diamonds and get Adrianna to give him not only her phone, but the gun as well - loved that bit.
It was also really good to see that, once again, everyone was working the case as a team, that it was a full cooperation and not a competition or anything like it used to be at first. And while most of the episode focused first on Jane, and then Lisbon, even the rest of the team got a little more to do. I also like that they also want and try to get involved, but are often sent back to their desks by Lisbon, because everyone has its own place.
Jane didn’t do any hypnosis or anything like that, which is a good thing, but one thing that seems to be a rule – besides him getting in trouble somehow, and on that note the addition of the big boss felt very natural – is how he’ll always use deception to have the bad guy to eventually confess of his/her crime. And maybe they needed that, which is why they went as far as they did, because if all they added to point to the widow wasn’t enough, after she pretended not to know who her late husband was having an affair with, to have the two women meet and start talking to each other like they knew each other and who they were, to have both use the other’s name, was yet another proof the widow had been lying all along.
Another very good episode, and as always Patrick Jane is really an interesting character that makes for a really entertaining show. What did you think of this episode ? How soon did you know Jennifer was behind her husband’s death ? Did you know about the duck ?
Posted in Reviews
Shows: The Mentalist
The Seduction Chronicles. | 7Wins.eu