I’m Done with “The Mentalist.” Here’s Why. (AKA When Good Writers Go Bad.)

There be spoilers ahead. Proceed with caution.

I thought very little of CBS’ “The Mentalist” when it first aired. Sure, Simon Baker was amiable enough; however, the show was another tepid entry in the “Genius Outsider Saves The Day” school of procedural drama saturating the airwaves at that time: mildly interesting premise; dour tone; bland writing; mediocre performances from a cast of relative unknowns. And given that it all spawned from the pen of Bruno Heller (the creative power behind HBO’s fascinatingly ambitious “Rome“), I found the whole affair to be even more disappointing, and I gave it a season at most.

Obviously I was wrong. Mea culpa.

Flash forward to season three: faced with a dearth of good TV to watch during the holiday hiatus, I decided to give “Mentalist” another shot. I tuned in to find Patrick Jane hot on the heels of the man he believed to be his nemesis, Red John. It ended in a stunning finale, during which Jane shot “John” (played by the inimitable Bradley Whitford) to death in cold blood, seemingly ending Jane’s consumptive quest for revenge on the monster who murdered his family years earlier. I was pleasantly surprised how the show had grown beyond what I’d seen in the first handful of episodes, and how the Red John mythology had developed into a strong, central mystery that had been resolved with brilliantly brutal efficiency.

But, of course, it was anything but resolved. Season four revealed that Jane had only killed a mere copycat of Red John, and that the infamous killer was still going strong. But this time, he had even more of a hard-on for Jane. I liked this development because in it laid the groundwork for an epic battle of wits between hero and villain. Sure, Jane had been on John’s radar before. But now John knew that Jane was serious in his commitment to end him at all costs. Now the game got real.

And for the most part, the show respected this. Each subsequent encounter with John or one of his acolytes became a little more intense, a little more perilous. Principal characters found themselves in ever-increasing danger of actually being written off the show killed. Suddenly, no one was safe any more because Red John could and would be anywhere, ready to strike at any time — and all because he knew Patrick Jane was ready, willing, and able, to do the same to him.

In my opinion, “The Mentalist” had finally become good TV. So I kept watching.

Season five saw the Red John hunt ramped up even more. Both hero and villain knew that they were fast approaching their fateful endgame, so the gloves fully came off. Jane pressed hard on every lead that he had as he narrowed his list of suspects down to a final seven. And John pushed back just as hard (if not harder), clinically executing everyone who might present any opportunity, any glimmer of hope, to Jane to discover his nemesis’s identity. The show was turning into a harried race to the finish, with the promise — the potential — for an earth-shattering conclusion to an arc that had grown better with time.

And then it happened. Last episode. The Big Reveal.

We met Red John.

And he was just a dude. A bit player who appeared in a total of five episodes through five seasons. For all its lengthy buildup and promises of grandeur, “The Mentalist” reduced its greatest villain to a guest star that barely anyone remembered prior to this season’s Seven Suspect list.

What an underwhelming load of crap.

Now this is anything but a slight on Xander Berkeley, the actor who played him. On the contrary, I love the man as an actor. Hell, he’s the only positive thing I remember about the movie Gattaca. But like us fans (and I think I can safely call myself that, after watching it every week for the last two seasons), Berkeley was done a disservice by a tragically poor choice on the part of the show’s writers: to force an inconsequential, lightweight of a character to bear too much weight while lacking the narrative strength to do so. Berkeley’s “Sheriff McAllister” was an unmemorable, underwritten character, who was never established as someone who could effectively “beat” conman extraordinaire Patrick Jane at his own game. Yet here he was, all of a sudden, the head of this vast network of rogue cops who was always one step ahead of who the show had set up as the “Smartest Man in Any Room.”

Just a dude. Give me a break.

By this time, you’re probably asking yourself, “It’s just a TV show that he watches. Why does this piss him off so much?” Well, it’s simple: as a writer of fiction, one of the things I strive to do is to create timeless, memorable characters who will live on in my audience’s minds well after they’ve finished my story. And what Heller & Co. had done with Red John was just that: create a character that could have gone down in the annals of TV history as one of the most epic villains of all time. But then (in my opinion, of course) they failed. They fumbled the ball on the one yard line on the last play of the game, and blew the championship, once and for all.

I’m pissed off because of the wasted potential. So. Much. Potential.

Of course, it’s easy to criticize from the sidelines. I only watch the show. I’m wholly unaware of whatever considerations they had going on the background, what challenges they faced in production, what pressures they were under from the network and sponsors. And I respect all of that, I really do. I’ve had to deal with “notes” from “suits” before, and they’re… well… “notes” from “suits.” But even with all of that, I still think there was a better road they could have taken. A story path that would have blown viewers’ minds and made them set that PVR to infinity and beyond in order to catch what was coming next each and every week on CBS. And if you’ll indulge me, I’ll tell you what I would have done with the opportunity to revise a little bit of “Mentalist” history.

As I mentioned before, the show spent four and half seasons making us understand and believe that Patrick Jane is always the Smartest Man in the Room. He can solve a major crime within seconds of walking into the crime scene, no matter how obscure or well-constructed. He can win any game of poker or similar skill on command, regardless of the opponents across from him. He can befriend and bedazzle anybody he encounters, and ingratiate himself to any individual or group if he so desires. He is always ten moves ahead, a god walking amongst puny mortals.

The problem with this, as a writer, is creating a villain who can best a seemingly invincible hero. The Joker plays off Batman’s craven need for order amidst the chaos of Gotham and life in general. Moriarty counters Holmes’ innate desire for acceptance with absolute and utter ruthlessness. But in Heller’s California, Jane is the ultimate gamesman, playing to win at all costs, without anything to hold him back (his family’s already dead, and everyone is expendable to him, insofar as Red John is concerned). So who, then, can possibly best Patrick Jane? Well, we’ve all heard the phrase, “My own worst enemy.” I would suggest that, in the world of “The Mentalist,” the only person who can reasonably beat Patrick Jane at his own game is Patrick Jane.

Patrick Jane should have been Red John.

All of the pieces were there: Jane discovers his wife and child murdered by someone he pissed off in his swindling conman days (instead of by a serial killer he’d “insulted” on a random daytime talk show that John just happened to be watching). The smiley face, then, becomes a directed, “Ha ha, got you back, asshole!” message directed only to him. The stress of the discovery sends Jane into a dissociative fugue state, during which he creates an alternate identity — Red John — to explain what happened in a way that takes the full blame off his shoulders. From then on, the Red John identity pops up from time to time, committing atrocities and putting grandiose, conspiratorial plans into motion, all to give Patrick Jane a continuing raison d’etre. It would become a weirdly protective, schizophrenic, bastardized defence mechanism gone awry, that would have turned the entire series into one big chess game in which Jane was effectively Bobby Fischering himself the whole time, and it would have been epic.

Or, at the least, more epic than just a dude.

So with that in mind, here’s how I would have done it (in point form, because I’m lazy and I’ve already written over fifteen hundred words on this topic):

• The CBI crew takes down Bertram aka “Red John” in some crazy-cool team scheme, during which Bertram dies without Jane getting to make the kill shot and missing out on his desired revenge;
• CBI crew relaxes, celebrates, thinking John is dead, once and for all;
• Cho (whom I love, by the way, and who reminds me so much of my RCMP member godfather, Gene) disappears, only to turn up dead in a Red John-signed murder, with clues at the scene indicating another member of the CBI crew as being responsible;
• Cat-and-Mouse game over the second half of the season to weed out who on the team could be Red John;
• Van Pelt gets picked off a la Red John, effectively ending the CBI crew (and given that she’s off the show now, anyway, no biggie);
• Rigsby is unhinged by Van Pelt’s death, goes after Jane for it, forces Lisbon to put him down;
• Jane discovers he actually is Red John (the whole fugue state/schizophrenic thing), realizes he has to end it;
• Season finale has Jane holed up, deciding whether or not to blow his own brains out and “kill Red John” as he swore to do, while Lisbon decides whether or not to save Jane…
• …but Jane disappears, leading into season six, when Lisbon has to track down the fugitive Jane/John with a new team/organization in tow.

So, yeah. That would have been my season five. I know it would have been ridiculously controversial, what with the elimination of most of the main cast (and potentially contractually impossible for that reason), and the irredeemable twist of transforming the series’ hero into the series’ villain (though I could make a different argument that Lisbon is the show’s true hero in another two-thousand word essay). But in my opinion, it would have been more organic to the character and to the major driving mystery of the entire series, would have made Jane/John truly one of the most memorable villains in TV history, and would have simply been more exciting overall.

Unfortunately, I’m but a mere viewer of the show. Or at least I was.

Just a dude. Sigh.