The Mentalist"Red Hair and Silver Tape"
Original Air Date: September 30, 2008.
Liz - TwoCents Reviewer
liz@thetwocentscorp.com
We open to a field, our heroes, and a dead girl's body, bound in duct tape at the wrist and ankles. When the local sheriff gives his opinion on the matter and the team starts -- oh, wait, Patrick has been looking at the body for the three minutes that everyone else has been talking. He has a better story. Also, he's going to kick the sheriff's butt at Rock, Paper, Scissors. Repeatedly. Why didn't we just call this show "Patrick Jane Is Better Than You"?
Oh right. This is a crime drama.
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[photo: Monty Brinton/CBS]
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The Mentalist
ReplyDelete"Red Hair and Silver Tape"
Original Air Date: September 30, 2008.
Liz - TwoCents Reviewer
liz@thetwocentscorp.com
We open to a field, our heroes, and a dead girl's body, bound in duct tape at the wrist and ankles. When the local sheriff gives his opinion on the matter and the team starts -- oh, wait, Patrick has been looking at the body for the three minutes that everyone else has been talking. He has a better story. Also, he's going to kick the sheriff's butt at Rock, Paper, Scissors. Repeatedly. Why didn't we just call this show "Patrick Jane Is Better Than You"?
Oh right. This is a crime drama.
Despite what I said last week, it looks like this show is headed for a fair balance between being character and plot driven, and they are putting it together quite competently. Nothing about the dialogue is awkward or forced, and it's acted subtly. For prime example of the first two, take Patrick Jane's scene with the victim's younger brother in the ice cream parlor. The drama and grief is palpable without being overwrought or overacted. It is, dare I say, skillful. I've seen worse.
This episode further shows us just how much Patrick Jane is willing to push the envelope, which includes hypnotizing witnesses, lying through his teeth, and going behind Teresa's back, over her head, and basically circumventing her. The casual observer says big deal, we saw this in the pilot and no one in law enforcement is going to keep someone who has such a blatant disregard for protocol. (Haven't heard anyone say this? My dad did, at commercial.) First, it's a TV show, give the old suspension of disbelief a workout, and second, yes they would, because even if it's illegal and unethical (the hypnotism, at least), it gets results.
I had a moment when he hypnotized poor Raquel. It was odd. I wasn't even sure that my cat hadn't accidentally stepped on the remote and changed the channel. I was even less sure that it would work. But on the other hand, I knew that this was exactly the kind of show where it would work. But of course the only time I've seen a hypnotist, my sister was hypnotized into thinking she had an attack eagle. Hilarious, but in a very different way. Without it, it would have undoubtedly taken much longer to get the truth out of her, and the plus side? No messy confrontation where someone gets slammed into the wall of the interrogation room. Take that, Law & Order.
As for lying about the handwritten "Sorry" note found in Melanie's locker… well, we can half blame this one on the kid being a jerk and making a move on Melanie and fainting dead away like a pansy. I don't think that it's outside of the realm of possibility that the note would have been filed away with evidence, that kid would have never been talked to, and the timeline would have been difficult to construct. Hector might have gotten arrested for the crime if those five missing minutes hadn't been accounted for. I'm not saying the guy wasn't a douchebag anyway, but if he'd gotten put away and redheads kept dying… come on. That would have sucked.
This episode also gave us greater insight into Patrick, Teresa, and the dynamic between them, when she is not giving him exasperated looks or berating him for his latest shenanigan. She tells him, "Not every murder is a secret inside another secret." It almost hearkens Mulder and Scully, who were on opposite sides of the "I Believe" spectrum as two people could get. Teresa is a rational, no-nonsense investigator who tends to subscribe to the Occam's Razor maxim: the simplest solution is usually the correct one. (Also, she's a total badass, did you see how she just took down Hector?) Patrick, however, seems to come from the Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction school. His psychological profiling doesn't always seem to point to the simplest solution, in fact most of what he says sounds like crazy talk, but in retrospect… it's all correct.
This was also where they started building the UST, or at the very least hinted that there could be some in the future. (Unresolved Sexual Tension, if you are new to the acronym. Something tells me I will use it quite a bit.) I can't decide how I feel about that quite yet, I will have to give it more time.
Did they nearly fake anyone else out? I started yelling that it was the sheriff when he was creepily not letting Grace go anywhere. But once we saw that it was the chef and his wife I realized that I should have known better. What was it he said at his beginning interview.. "It wasn't me, by the way." What? Who says that when they're being interviewed in a murder investigation, completely unprompted? That's right. The killer.
Sources (read: my Google-fu and subsequent linkage to Wikipedia) tell me that the next episode, airing October 14, is called "Red Tide." I'm noticing a pattern with these titles! How fast do you think they will get back to Red John? Will Patrick ever get a gun so he can stop faking people out with cell phones? How do you feel about the possibility of putting Patrick and Teresa together?