This weeks presented us with another one of those Mentalist episodes where they fooled you by doing the obvious thing. You get your mind all set to figure it out another way, because you think they won’t go the route of making one of the possible victims the culprit, but then they do and it kinda screws you up. And you slap your head and say I knew it all the time!
Because you did … sort of.
I knew something was up when the bomb didn’t go off under the bed. It seemed too weird and convenient that it was under the bed of the guy who would seem to be the main target of the killer, and then not go off. But two other things didn’t make sense about the scene. One, it was way too contrived. How did the guy know exactly how to time the bomb so Jane and Lisbon would “rescue” him before it went down to zero, and while he was “asleep” in his bed in the dark? Seems like the whole thing was designed more to fool the audience than for realism. And then there’s the whole thing with the handy digital timer. This isn’t an original observation, a lot of people have talked about the use of digital timers on bombs in TV shows and in films. Why the hell would a bomber put a digital timer on a bomb? Besides having something handy that viewers can keep track of?
Roger Ebert calls them a “quick, cheap device for manufacturing phony suspense.” And I have to agree with him, though I think that device is here to stay.
Clacked by Bob Sassone 
on Mar 26, 2009 @ 17:00 EST5EDT
I was torn between him and the guy with the injured ankle but honestly I didn’t really care for the murder storyline at all this week.
The banter between the guys and girls on the team is currently so entertaining that it’s just fun to be there and feel as if you are visiting friends. If this were to happen on a Red John episode though I guess I would be a little bit offended too.
Except when you don’t really buy the fake-out, so you expect Patrick Fabian to be the killer the whole episode (and you’d be right 90% of the time because it’s Patrick Fabian).
The bomb part was easy. After sending the Joe Q. Public message, he waited until he heard Jane’s car pull up outside to start the timer, then pretended to be asleep. The large digital readout was purely for the CBI’s benefit, so he would seem to be in imminent peril.
You’d think bombers would learn to have the bomb go off when the timer has 1:00 minute left…