The Mentalist

Like a lot of us who, for five and a half seasons, have faithfully followed The Mentalist’s Patrick Jane in his obsessive quest for Red John, we were pretty sick of all the weekly mention of this badass who not only killed Jane’s wife and daughter but countless others. Finally, finally, even the writers had had enough and decided to let Jane find him and kill him. Good riddance to bad rubbish, as we used to say in my youth. But the series never made clear how RJ could have enlisted the number of people in his evil doings, never made clear why RJ decided to kill Jane’s wife and daughter, never made clear what would happen to the RJ followers when RJ was gone. And most curious of all, after Jane strangles RJ and calls Teresa to apologize for what he’d gotten her into and to tell her goodbye, suddenly two years have passed. The folks at the CBI have been scattered to the winds: Teresa Lisbon is now in uniform as a police chief; Wayne Rigsby and Grace Van Pelt, now married, are heads of a security firm; Kimball Cho is now in the FBI; and Patrick is now beach bumming on an island somewhere south of the border, sort of just waiting around until he can figure out a way to get back into the U.S. Two years. We went from what we presumed was the present to a time two years in the future. While Jane is bumming, he meets Kim Fischer, a teacher there on the island for a short holiday break. They connect and agree to having dinner together. Then Jane is severely beaten by a local drug dealer’s thugs, after which Kim takes him back to his room and leaves him to return to the U.S. Apparently, Kim (an FBI agent, not a teacher) and Agent Abbott, the FBI agent who’s been tailing Jane for two years, will be recurring characters in the future, and Rigsby and Van Pelt will be shown the door. I’m happy to say that this new plot line is a welcome relief from the old line, almost like starting over with a new series starring Simon Baker as a new Mentalist. And then we’ll have two romantic possibilities the writers can milk for all they’re worth—Teresa Lisbon and Agent Kim Fischer. Should be interesting.