Yes, every fan who has religiously followed Mentalist for 5 seasons on CBS and on reruns ( as I have) must be talking about this - the final reveal of Red John. While this last episode once again reminded me of certain similarities between Mentalist and that other show with a not-so-normal detective trying to find the guy who killed his wife - Monk. However, the tone of Monk is rather light as compared to Mentalist which borders on the dark mainly because of the darkness in the character of Patrick Jane - a trickster who uses his all too brilliant mind to cheat people for money or used to, now he just uses it to trick criminals into revealing themselves while trying to track and kill the guy who killed his wife and child. Mentalist never had a moral foundation while Monk never went against what was right and what was legal. Very few of the other police procedurals on TV ever allowed law enforcement officials to kill with the level of justification that the people at Mentalist had. None of the CBI agents and Red John's minions too, for that matter, ever flinch at shooting to kill. Sure, Red John and his organization demands that kind of loyalty but does CBI or FBI? It seems a waste in many cases to have criminals die on you instead of going through the more excruciating legal process and ending up in jail for the rest of their life or giving some vital information about their bosses. "Bad people are bad and deserve to die" is no longer an accepted trope on TV at least not for any of the good shows. Mentalist perhaps never aimed for such greatness and is pretty comfortable with its moral standing or lack of it. It is a TV series that runs in seasons, so killing people off is a great way to get closure on many plots. Hence the logical end of the Red John arc is also (no surprise) his death. And the fact that Jane doesn't waver in killing Red John reflects the morality of the show.
What doesn't satisfy me and most certainly many viewers of the series as well is the identity of Red John. He is literally a superhuman magician for most of the series, even two episodes ago when three people with three dots turned up instead of one Red John. At the end of Season 3, Patrick Jane kills a person who claims to be Red John and to ensure Jane gets convicted for this, the gun mysteriously vanishes among other tricks. At the end of Season 5 Red John magically lists all the names on Jane's list of suspects. There are no two ways about it, this guy is a magician. Hence, what we need is tricks of the level of The Prestige to boggle our minds in the big reveal. Instead what we get is a lame "fake my death with a bomb" trick. I did expect better from the writers of this show. Plus, there wasn't any of the cat-and-mouse game that was promised with the finale of last season. After 5 seasons of at the most one clue per season, we suddenly have so many clues fall literally into Jane's lap this season. And while people on Jane's list dying one by one seems to be the only way to cross them off the list in the first few episodes, suddenly we get a big clue about the three-dot tattoo. None of these was anywhere near the level of magic trick that we expected from Red John, Perhaps the writers made a mistake by making Red John someone that Jane knew. If they had allowed it to be a stranger, then they could have created a whole new persona keeping with everything we had come to imagine about Red John. But now they had to work with who we know Sheriff McAllister to be and how Jane missed this guy all this while.
Perhaps if in one shot all people on Jane's list had died and the trick became figuring out who was actually dead and who was faking it plus again which one of the three tattooed fellows was Red John that might have been more interesting. Personally, I feel that if from the beginning the creators had made Red John an organization and not a single person, that would have made for a more entertaining show. If Jane or someone else indeed kills the actual guy who killed Jane's family followed by Jane vowing to root out the entire organization.. but I get carried away. That was not the show that we got and it is too late to go "what if?". Perhaps when I have my own show....Till then we shall make do with surrogates such as Mentalist. Perhaps some of the tricks of Jane are still left to be seen in the episodes to come before the end of the season.
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