(Season 1, Episode 7 – “Seeing Red”)
Why do people in TV shows, when they’re being chased by an automobile, always run straight ahead? How come they don’t run off to the side, or down another street, or duck into a store doorway and instead run straight ahead, look back, and slow down and/or stop? That’s what happens to the victim in this episode. She’s run over and killed. Was it the weird, artsy boyfriend? The troubled son? The nervous daughter? The arrogant psychic? Or did the ghost of Christine come back and take over another car and start killing people?
I liked this episode but, like all Mentalist episodes, I feel that something along the line could have been done better. I don’t know why I guessed right away that the daughter is the killer, because it’s not like there was some series of clues that I could put together like Jessica Fletcher would. Jane does remember something that the daughter (played by Ashley Johnson, the youngest daughter from Growing Pains) said while being interviewed, that the body was found “in the gutter.” How would she know that if she wasn’t driving the car? That seems like a lame clue to me. Couldn’t she just say it was a figure of speech or just that she assumes that the body was in the street and used “gutter” in a general way? Isn’t the information in the police report or in the paper? Eh, that kinda bugs me.
I’m assuming we’re going to see the arrogant psychic again in a later episode. I don’t like her. It’s one thing to be confident, but she’s confident to the point of being cold and weird. Jane doesn’t like her at first either, because he knows that she’s a scam artist just like he used to be, so there’s a battle of wits going on. But I wonder about that last scene. Are we supposed to believe that she actually talked to his dead wife? Or does she just read up on Jane and figure out that he’s tortured by the death of his family? I truly hope it’s not the former, because I’m not prepared to believe in psychics, especially in a show where the main character used to be a phony psychic and is now doing good. We don’t need anything mystical in this show, thank you.
By the way, I don’t really get the whole seance scene. Does the psychic team up with the CBI to trick all of the suspects into believing that’s really the dead woman’s voice? It’s so oddly done (the quickness that the psychic contacted the mother, the daughter running upstairs, Jane talking to her upstairs while holding the cell phone behind his back, the cops in the van outside) that I’m not quite sure what exactly happened. Any help would be appreciated.
Still (and I think I say this about every episode of The Mentalist), this was very entertaining. Now I’m wondering when Red John will return.
Clacked by Bob Sassone 
on Nov 19, 2008 @ 12:15 EST5EDT
Hey, do people on clack watch the Mentalist? I’m kind of wondering as I don’t see too many comments on it. Anyhoo, for me this was the best episode to date with the great character reveal on Jane. I think the writers are deliberately making the suspect obvious. I suspected the daughter at her intro & the ‘gutter’ comment cemented it. I really liked the psychic as she’s an even match for Jane, more so than Lisbon, and she had great chemistry with Baker. Tooney was great in the 90s but Lisbon’s so one-note, Baker really looked more alive interacting with the female Jane than with the plain Jane -
I watch and enjoy The Mentalist, and to be honest, I really didn’t “get” this episode at all. I like the somewhat different, definitely entertaining take The Mentalist has on the standard procedural. The Jane character is really fun. But this episode was just weird, and I felt like there was a lot I didn’t get. I didn’t understand how Jane was going “to get” the medium, and in the end, I don’t think he “caught” her at all. But like Bob, I’m not prepared to believe in it, so I walked away from the episode confused as to what I was supposed to be thinking.
I think that they used the recordings of Kristina’s sessions with Rosemary to splice the voice during the seance. When Kristina came back at the end, it was under the guise of picking up the recordings. That’s what I took from it, anyway.