The Mentalist "If It Bleeds It Leads" Review
The Mentalist in a nutshell: It's all an ILLUSION. Don't believe it just because it's on TV.
Dr. Linus Wagner: Everything you told me, Mr. Jane, is total fiction, isn't it?
How does Patrick Jane "burn" the killer of a Flood On The Air? It's ELEMENTARY. In "If It Bleeds, It Leads" Bruno Heller shows the viewers that just
because it's on TV doesn't make it real. That was the case with those Iraqi WMDs, nicht wahr? Them poor Americans sure is a gullible bunch. Maybe THAT is the point Bruno is making in The Mentalist: It's
all an ILLUSION. As Jane says. "Pay attention, people!" Do the viewers with half a REVIEW BRAIN really
believe the CBI crew does accident investigations that involve a
fatality on a state park? Not to mention that Sacramento is 100 miles
from the ocean, doesn't the CBI have better things to do than help a
park ranger with his paperwork? It is...
Unbelievable. That describes Jane's cherry-picking analysis of
the accident scene: It's murder because the victim's handbag is missing
and she was eating a sandwich. The handbag couldn't fly out of the open car
doors as it crashed down the cliff? Yeah, no other possible explanation there.
Cue OPENING SHOT: LOMA VISTA Camera pans down --AIR -- WATER -- LAND. The only thing missing -- FIRE and a CAR CRASH- Wait for it. For those paying atttention, of course, FIRE is the basis of the show. LAND- OCEAN - AIR M could refer to MARS, the symbol of FIRE.
Then consider the cast of the episode's characters: FLOOD, SKY, BOB
FROM HOMELAND, TOMMY THE MAN OF FIRE. In classical thought, the four
elements Earth, Water, Air, and Fire frequently occur; sometimes including a fifth element or quintessence (after "quint" meaning "fifth") called Aether. In
Buddhism, the four elements are a basis for understanding
suffering and for liberating oneself from suffering. Jane is troubled
like that other Sherlock Holmes character on "Elementary." (He BLEEDS
and LEADS.) The earliest
Buddhist texts explain that the four primary material elements are the
sensory qualities solidity, fluidity, temperature, and mobility; their
characterization as earth, water, fire, and air, respectively, is
declared an abstraction. That describes The Mentalist: It's not real, it's an ILLUSION.
Jane and Lisbon discover reporter Cassandra Flood's death on the beach
is connected to super-rich Tommy Volker, who can give Red John a run for
his money. Volker had Flood killed because she tried to warn -
unsuccessfully like a real Cassandra - that Volker is an evil man who
had an entire tribe in the Amazon killed to save his geo-thermal
project, harnessing the fires of hell itself. Then there's the
reappearance of the man in the black limo, Bob Kirkland of Homeland
Security, who warns Lisbon that Volker is a powerful man with powerful
friends. Ted McGlinley "Baxter" as Ed Hunt is revealed by Jane as the
killer of Flood on the air when Jane tricks him into believing Hunt
left his reading glasses in her car when he tampered with the brakes.
On the surface Jane's investigative style appears to be a Sherlock
Holmes "Elementary" style of deduction, but digging deeper reveals
Jane's flights of fantasy are out of this world as Tommy Volker's Virgin
flight into space.
EARTH TO MENTALIST VIEWERS: The truth is Red John is Patrick Jane's imaginary evil twin, his "perfect symmetry" alter-ego (Jane/John), Professor
Moriarty character in a "Tommy Westphall" imaginary world
like "St. Elsewhere's" snow globe and "Life on Mars" that
is the dream
state of Jane. NB. The
fake Jane character in "Red Moon" where a corpse was found in a
burned car was named Ellis Mars (or (EL) He is Mars). Ellis Mars:
The mind is a powerful weapon. It can create reality.
Jane: Perhaps we can see
each other again.
Lorelei: That’s not up to me.
Jane: Oh, you have no say in it?
Lorelei: None at all. It’s very "Westphall."
Jane: I don’t follow you.
Lorelei: I do what Red John tells me to do.
Burning clues: Jane appears to be a Sherlock
Homes super-sleuth character but in reality is a mental patient with a cracked eggshell who suffers from paranoid
delusions due to feelings of extreme guilt in the
deaths of his wife and child who were burned as he was (CBI = intensive
burn care?) in a horrific car accident involving a driver named Tanner when he failed to stop at a
BLINKING 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. Note: Jane's eggshell blue car - a vintage 1972 Citroen DS 20 that Warner Bros., producer of "The
Mentalist" for CBS, had in its inventory. It was used in the 2008 movie
"Speed Racer." For "The Mentalist," the car was shipped from Germany and
painted eggshell blue (it was originally red).
Jane burns his Red John files with a bottle of booze. "The Mentalist" is obsessed with fire, as in half the episodes it plays a significant plot point. Out of the Frye-ing pan into the... As Kristina Frye discovered, when you get too close to Red John, you get burned. "Tiger, Tiger burning bright, they were "Au-burned." In the "Red
Mile" episode Jane arrives at a crime scene outside Auburn,
California. Shouts from Alabama football fans of "Roll Tide" first
appeared
during the Alabama-Auburn Tiger game in 1907. Curiously, a corpse was found in a burned car in "Ruby Slippers,"
in which Jane discovers the identity of Fifi Nix, like Jane's Phoenix,
has risen from the ashes of his past life. In "Red Dawn" Jane is given a desk next to a fire extinguisher that is there, then it's gone, then it's there again. Fake Red John read all about it - catch the fire-y headline on the front page of the newspaper Tim Carter was reading before Jane shot him. Red John appeared to Jane in the burn mask.
Red Face to Face
EARTH WIND & FIRE
When you wish upon a star
Dreams will take you very far, yeah
When you wish upon a dream
Life ain´t always what it seems, oh yeah
Once you see your light so clear
In the sky so very dear
Mentalist in a Box: The characters of Rigsby, Cho, Van Pelt and Lisbon are also Jane's creations ala the "Wizard of Oz;" the Tin Man, Scarecrow, Cowardly Lion, and Dorothy in reality are the assistants and doctors at the mental hospital and the RJ minions are Jane's fellow mental patients. In the final scene Jane confronts "Red John," and in an homage to "OZ" awakens from his dream state to realize the true identity of
The Man with Two Names: Red John's phony identity is Roy Tagliaferro
(read: "cut iron"). The ROY CUT IRON
anagrams are "court irony" and "you r citron." How ironic that Jane, the
court jester who arrives at the crime scene in his Citroen, a master
reader of how
others' emotions control them, was a prisoner of his own. In the End
the Mentalist was on the mental list, a prisoner of his own device.
"Mentalist, noun. A master manipulator of thoughts and behavior."
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