YMMV / The Mentalist

• Alas, Poor Scrappy: Bosco. Since he was a jerk to Jane, mainly because he suspected that Jane was putting Lisbon and her career in danger, and/or flirting with her (and in Bosco's book, these were pretty equal crimes), he was not a fan favourite. Add 45 minutes of Lisbon looking beautifully distraught after his shooting - hey presto, everybody cries when Bosco snuffs it after admitting that he loves her.
• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • Is Jane a guy who likes to mess with people for the giggles and because it's fun, and does police work out of boredom and altruism? Or is he a guy warped beyond all repair by his family's murder who messes with people and hunts out murderers to inflict pain?
  • Todd Johnson: Did he murder cops just For the Evulz? Or did Red John order him to kill those cops for specific reasons? While his appearance in season 3 initially leans towards the former interpretation, the revelation in season 6 about the Blake Association casts his actions in a different light. If Johnson's killing of cops was tied with the Blake Association was it because said cops were former association members who turned traitor and needed to be silenced? Or was it because they were cops outside of the association who found out about the organization and were investigating it?
  • Red John/Sherriff McCallister. Just what are his backstory and motivations? What led him to become a serial killer? Why is it that he seems to have absolutely no remorse for his actions, but instead views them as Necessarily Evil despite most of them being petty murders of unimportant people? It's revealed throughout the course of the show that he does not view himself as weak, unhappy, evil or in need of redemption, and that he does not feel himself deserving of punishment for his deeds, so what does that make him? Is he some sort of Knight Templar or Well-Intentioned Extremist with a goal we don't know about? Does he suffer from Blue-and-Orange Morality, Black-and-White Insanity, or a little bit of both? Or is he just plain bonkers with delusions of grandeur? And did he start killing people before or after he became a sheriff?
    • One thing that's established about Red John is that he doesn't tolerate cheap imitations of his work, and specifically tracks down and murders two copycat killers because of that. However, when it comes to the killer in the Pilot episode, Dr. Linus Wagner, he never goes after them despite also copying Red John's M.O. Was this because Red John didn't have time to track down the killer before the CBI got to them? Or did he not care because the killer in that episode only used it to evade the police and he didn't see it as a mockery of his work compared to the delusional copycat killers who wanted people to believe they were really Red John?
    • In season 6, was Red John telling Jane the truth about being a psychic? Or was he lying to save his own skin? There's never a definitive answer for how Red John got the list of 7 suspects months before Jane did, so it could go either way.
• Angst? What Angst?: Everyone that has worked for Red John seems to treat his gruesome actions as well as the crimes they commit for him with the same amount of emotion as if he simply asked them to pick up something from the grocery store.
• Arc Fatigue: It takes five seasons for Jane to compile a concrete list of 7 suspects. It's all paid off now.
• Ass Pull:
  • Shettrick is Volker's mole. Unlike other Moles in the series, this time the writers just pull her out their asses.
  • For many, The Reveal that Red John was Sherriff McCallister falls into this. Mostly because so little evidence over the course of the series pointed to him (except for evidence in season 6, the season he was revealed, which should mark it as Ass Pull), and because it doesn't easily jive with what we did know about Red John (like his height and hair, which are pretty different to what they had been described as). Not to mention, any motive or backstory Red John had was dismissed by Jane as irrelevant, so we learn little about him beyond the fact that this man was Red John. Many of his impressive and nigh impossible psychic feats are given no explanation, and there are also logistical questions that push the trouble of his identity into Fridge Logic territory, such as how he could keep showing up and killing in Sacramento, where the team is based, especially in his last season, when he's supposed to be a small-town sheriff from Santa Monica, hundreds of miles away.
• Awesome Music: Rigsby's class reunion entrance to Ini Kamoze's "Here Comes the Hotstepper" in "Rose-Colored Glasses."
• Base-Breaking Character: Red John: the best Myth Arc since The X-Files, or the most annoying Arc Fatigue since How I Met Your Mother?
• The Chris Carter Effect: The Red John Myth Arc has become far more elaborate and convoluted than originally intended. While Bruno Heller supposedly knew who Red John was going to be from the start (although even that notion is contested by many), the character went from a particularly devious Serial Killer who knew how to cover his tracks, to a Serial Killer connected to a few other killers, to a Serial Killer with a shadow army of fanatically devoted, loyal-unto-death brainwashed followers. In season 6 they took his catchphrase ("Tiger, Tiger") and decided to turn what initially looked like a cult into a sophisticated, national wide criminal organization that nobody had heard of, and made Red John a possible member, then a possible senior member, and finally into the apparent mastermind of the whole thing. Oh, and he's repeatedly performing "psychic" feats that make Jane look like an amateur that are never explained or referenced again. Beyond a certain point, he's basically a comic book supervillain, and you have to start wondering why he ever resorted to anything as trivial as serial murder in the first place. The Reveal that he is Sherriff McCallister only raised further issues, as many clues that were dropped about Red John through the series turned out to be irrelevant (his height, for instance, as the actor in question is taller than Red John was stated to be) or never mentioned again, while practically all of the clues that pointed to him were only dropped in the very season he was revealed in.
• Complete Monster: Of the many criminals Patrick Jane is tasked with going up against, these are the worst:
  • Red John—Sheriff Thomas McAllister—is Patrick Jane's nemesis and a sociopathic Serial Killer responsible for torturing and killing dozens of women. When Jane, then a phony psychic, insulted Red John while offering to help the police catch him, Red John murdered Jane's wife and young daughter. Years later, Red John, although retired, commits a number of murders to silence loose ends or torment Jane. Some of his worst crimes include kidnapping and brainwashing Kristina Frye into believing that she's dead; trying to force Jane to kill his best friend and Love Interest, Teresa Lisbon; killing a woman because Jane had a happy memory of her; and beheading the therapist who helped Jane recover after his family's death. The mastermind of the Blake Association, a criminal conspiracy and protection racket for corrupt law enforcement officials, and leader of his own group of psychotics and serial killers, Red John regularly kills his minions or drives them to suicide when he has no further need of them. A raging narcissist driven by an intense need for attention, Red John revels in the power he feels by holding thousands of lives in his hands.
  • Season 5: Thomas "Tommy" Volker is a greedy executive responsible for slaughtering over 300 Amazonian tribesmen for refusing to relinquish their land to be used for his geothermal project. When a journalist links him to the massacre, Volker manipulates an old friend into sabotaging her car, having the journalist suffocated, the evidence stolen and his "friend" left as the fall guy. After CBI Agent Teresa Lisbon convinces Volker's secretary to provide evidence against him, Volker has his assassin strangle her to death while he looks on, smiling, and planning to have the same done to another employee of his who planned to go public with Volker's crimes. Later having his own assassin killed in a drive-by shooting, along with two innocent bystanders, for becoming inconvenient, Volker also plans to kill another of his own goons for being interrogated by the police and attempts to personally murder a young boy who witnessed one of his own crimes when even his own hitman is too disgusted to do so. Loyal to no one, Volker is a disgusting man who embodies avarice.
  • "Blood Money": The sociopathic Serial Killer Cale Sylvan makes his living as a hitman to get paid for his disgusting hobby. Connected to the "mysterious" deaths of seven people, Sylvan's most recent victim is District Attorney Kelly Flower, who he took the time to videotape begging for her life as a trophy to keep for himself. Although arrested, Sylvan is released and later found in his murder house, with a terrified captive man he plans to kill, and after Sylvan's own death, multiple bodies are found in the yard of the property.
• Designated Hero: Jane. Almost every episode has him break the law in various ways, antagonize or even traumatize a lot of people just because he personally doesn't like them (or just because he thinks it's funny or will mess with the killer), use his working together with the CBI as a shield to get away with pretty much everything and generally acting as pleasant as an elephant in a porcelain shop, even towards his allies and friends, all while showing zero shame or remorse about any of the aforementioned things. Nevertheless, at the end of the day it's all totally justified because Jane cracked the case.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Walter Mashburn, the bored billionaire with an interest in Lisbon, is only in two episodes but is a major scene stealer who is almost unaminously praised and who a lot of fans vainly hoped to see play big roles in the Volker and/or Red John arcs.
  • The combined episodes featuring LaRoche, Hightower, and Wainwright don't even add up to 1/4th of the show's episodes, and none of the three ever warrant main billing. However, the characters are all very well-liked by the fanbase by the end of their runs on the show, rivaling several of the more prominent characters in popularity. Put it down to all three of them getting some decent Hidden Depths and/or Character Development and LaRoche being a The Comically Serious By-the-Book Cop, Hightower having some Action Mom and Pragmatic Hero tendencies, and Wainwright being a Sharp-Dressed Man who is one of the few bosses to actually punish Jane when he really crosses the line.
  • Patrick's old carnie friend Pete Barsocky is only in three episodes, but is very popular for being a humorous Gentle Giant played by MC Gainey.
• Epileptic Tree: Countless theories on who Red John is.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: Jane and Lisbon. Or Jisbon as fans prefer to call it.
  • To a lesser extent, Rigsby and Van Pelt are also considered this. Same with Wylie and Vega in season 7.
• Fanon Discontinuity:
  • Some fans like to disregard everything after Season 3 (or at least the parts that continue the Red John arc) due to feeling that it provides a better conclusion, and remains more grounded in reality.
  • Not everyone really pays attention to the episodes that take place after the real final showdown with Red John in Season 6, given the cast shake-ups and how much it suspends disbelief that Jane is still allowed to work with law enforcement by that point.
• Franchise Original Sin: Some of the issues fans complained about with the Red John arc were issues that were present in the early seasons, but were mostly kept under wraps:
  • One of the biggest criticisms in general were the number of associates that were revealed to be working for Red John over the course of the series, with some of these reveals being seen as Ass Pulls by fans. This was something that existed in the first two seasons where the reveal that Dumar Tanner, the local sheriff in the area that the CBI Team is investigating in season 1 and Rebecca Anderson, Sam Bosco's secretary at the CBI in season 2 were helping Red John carry out the worst of his crimes. This was excused in the early seasons because there was at least an in-universe explanation given for why these people worked for Red John: Dumar Tanner from season 1 was revealed to be the son of Orville Tanner, who had aided Red John in committing his first murder in 1998. Furthermore, it's implied that Red John acted as a Parental Substitute to Dumar when his father was taken to prison, which explains why he's devoted to Red John. Likewise in season 2, when Rebecca is revealed to be a Red John associate, Jane deduces that she came from an abusive upbringing which caused a history of self-hatred on her part until Red John "rescued" her. Plus, at the time, these were just 2-3 associates of Red John. This started to become a problem from season 3 onward when that number increased to over a dozen and there was little to no explanation given for why these people were so loyal to Red John, or why they'd be willing to commit horrific acts (rape, kidnapping, torture, murder, etc) on his behalf. The show tried to hand-wave this by revealing in season 5 that Red John had been a member of the cult Visualize back in the 80s and picked up tips from there on how to manipulate people and in season 6 that Red John was the leader of the Blake Association, which was a group of corrupt law enforcement officials dedicated to covering up heinous crimes, but for many people, these revelations broke Willing Suspension of Disbelief as we never really get to see how Red John formed the Blake Association or his techniques for brainwashing people to commit morally reprehensible acts.
  • Red John's ability to pull off impossible feats have always been a source of controversy with fans because of how close they come to straining credibility. Some of the earlier examples include Red John being able to hack into the Department of Justice Network just to tell Jane to "Keep up the good work" ^note  This took place back in season 1 when a convicted murderer named Jared Renfrew claimed to have information about Red John that he would share if Jane helped Jared proved his innocence for a crime he didn't commit. At the time, Red John wanted Jane to succeed in getting Jared out of prison so he could kill him in the open before he talked. and being able to infiltrate the CBI in season 2 to kill an associate who had become a liability. At the time, fans rolled with this because they believed the show would eventually explain how Red John was able to pull his accomplishments off. However, as the seasons continued, there were fewer and fewer satisfying explanations, and meanwhile Red John's ability to run circles around law enforcement started to get more outlandish. This comes to a head around seasons 5-6 when it's revealed that Red John was able to figure out the names of the 7 suspects on Jane's list 2 months before Jane was able to. Aside from briefly hinting at the idea of Red John being psychic (which many fans saw as an Ass Pull), there is never a logical explanation given for how Red John was able to do this.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Or rather Europeans love Simon Baker. The show does extremely well in France and used to be huge in Spain too.
• He's Just Hiding: In a show with a fair amount of Faking the Dead, this is inevitable even for cases where the deaths do seem to stick.
  • LaRoche is last seen bleeding out from a gunshot, as Rigsby tries to save him but seems to get more upset. The next episode mentions him as dead, but the main characters' limited reaction to this and the fact that they might have seen an advantage in letting his attacker think he'd died do cast a little doubt on it.
  • After Stiles and Haffner were apparently blown up when McAlister faked his own death , but the fact that one death was faked in that incident doesn't necessarily mean that the others weren't, as while if Stiles and/or Haffner survived then they might have had reasons off their own to run — as members of Visualize, and with Red John running around — or been sent as potentially valuable prisoners for the Blake Association, with both organizations potentially having had the recourses to plant more bodies and DNA.
  • Some fans who don't think Red John is psychic wonder if Lorelai was really dead in order to explain how she appeared on a DVD, where Red John named Jane's seven final suspects, supposedly before Jane even started making his list.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Patrick Jane, arguably, yes he is quite the jerk, but considering that his wife and daughter were murdered by a serial killer, you do have some sympathy with him.
  • Richard Haibach. He's a former child abuser and eventually goes on to kidnapping and murder, but he was sexually abused by his own father and he and his sister are implied to have had a crappy life overall, and he is frequently harassed by the CBI- especially Lisbon- for things he actually did not do, including crimes as serious as child murder. The reason he actually becomes a killer is because Jane once framed him as being Red John and as a result he was kidnapped and brutally tortured, so naturally he has a grudge.
  • Leslie Sloop from "Throwing Fire" is an alcoholic serial adulteress. She's also outlived her son (who choked to death on a balloon at the age of three), watched her husband cope with it better than she does, and then finds him murdered. By the time she appears in person, she is on the verge of suicide and is barely talked out of it by Van Pelt and Rigsby.
  • Dreyer Whelan from "Red Badge" is an utter dick towards Lisbon throughout his brief interview scene but the reasons for this make him more sympathetic. His six-year-old daughter was raped by a man who he (somewhat justifiably) felt the police should have already arrested and stopped. Whelan is stated to be either divorced or widowed, and years later is still seeing a therapist about the trauma (and apparently recovering less well than his daughter, the actual victim).
  • Paul Kraeger in "Bloodshot" was an adulterer, but he was one who lost the child he deeply loved when his wife left him (due to Jane exposing the affair in a psychic act), suffered a breakdown and has spent the next decade homeless. The fact that his vengeful son is the culprit of the episode, and ends up dead as a result adds to his status.
  • Rachel Bowman from "Ball of Fire" is an Ax-Crazy murderer and kidnapper who wants to cause Jane as much physical and mental pain as possible before killing him. She also had her mother die giving birth to her, was raised by a father who was extremely close to her, and in the backstory, was callously manipulated by Jane to trick her father into confessing to murder, with him later dying in prison. The fact that she's explicitly shown to be suffering from some kind of mental disorder (mentioning taking her meds) also makes her seem a bit less cold-blooded.
  • Bob Kirkland has a somewhat unpleasant manner and is capable of great ruthlessness and Cold-Blooded Torture, but he grew up in a very abusive home with only his brother (who later disappeared and was probably murdered by Red John) to care about and has dedicated a large part of his life to a goal which he ultimately fails to achieve, or even come close to, something he is made aware of, and which gets him killed.
• Like You Would Really Do It: One very common reaction to the end of the season six premiere where Red John captures and seemingly kills Lisbon, smearing his trademark smiley face on her face in blood as he calls Jane with her phone to taunt him.
• Magnificent Bastard: ("Like a Redheaded Stepchild" and "Blood Feud"): Steve Rigsby is the father of CBI agent, Wayne Rigsby, and a cunning career criminal who was released from prison where Steve had his son give him an alibi to avoid suspicion from the parole board. In his first appearance, Steve ostensibly assists Wayne and the CBI to solve the murder of a prison guard, only to use them to shut down a rival cigarette smuggling business before giving Wayne an honest fistfight when Wayne learns of Steve's manipulations. Steve later gets shot trying to protect his friend in his second appearance before accepting his death, spending his last moments bonding with his son and giving Wayne a vital clue that would allow Wayne to find Steve's killer and kill him.
• Mexicans Love Speedy Gonzales: The episode "Russed Potatoes" is quite set against the Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) organization, portraying its members as charlatans, psychos or both, but real life NLP members have only praised the episode for portraying how bad NLP looks like.
• Narrowed It Down to the Guy I Recognize:
  • Subverted in an interesting way in both "Blood In, Blood Out" with Jon "Why squirrel hate me?" Sklaroff and "Red Letter" in Rick Hoffman. Sklaroff's character is guilty of some drug charges and Cho pretends to kill him to get the real killer to confess. Hoffman's character isn't the killer, but is running a human trafficking ring through his anti-human trafficking organization.
  • Seemingly lampshaded in "Blinking Red Light." Jane tells Lisbon to go with her gut and pick the suspect who looks like he did it. She immediately chooses William Mapother. Subverted in that he was innocent; double subverted when the killer turns out to be played by David Paymer.
• Nightmare Fuel: Patrick Jane's house is completely empty of furniture, except for the mattress on the floor where he sleeps (or tries to), directly underneath the smiley-face on the wall which Red John painted there with the blood of his wife and child when he murdered them.
• Older Than They Think/Serial Numbers Filed Off: The novel The Analyst by John Katzenbach features a mysterious murderer who signs with a bloody circular symbol, leads a little cult of helpers among which there is a seductress who is close to him, and fights a mind games war against the protagonist, who is also a professional of the mind with blond hair who got his life shattered after losing his wife. It even features a skeptical, dark-haired female police inspector who helps him for a time. The book was released in 2002, six years before the premiere of The Mentalist.
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • Patrick's deceased wife and daughter, Charlotte and Angela.
  • Thomas Volker one of the few villains to pull a Karma Houdini. Which doesn't last, however.
  • Bradley Whitford as the fake Red John.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Dennis Abbott was hated for his role in breaking up the team while Jane was trying to get to Red John. He is now universally adored by the fandom due to his blatant, shameless shipping of Jane and Lisbon.
• Special Effects Failure:
  • In "The War of the Roses," when Erica Flynn is supposedly sunning herself on a tropical beach, she's clearly just sitting on a soundstage in front of a rather cheap green screen effect.
  • While the show was usually good at avoiding this, it's pretty obvious that the background behind Jane in "Wedding in Red" is green-screened.
• Stoic Woobie: J.J. LaRoche. His mother was gruesomely raped and killed herself three months after. There are strong hints that he chased the rapist and tore off his tongue, and, according to Jane, he's been punishing himself with remorse ever since. Still one of the most stoic characters in the series.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Many believe that Brett Partridge was funny enough and had sufficiently interesting interactions with Jane to add him to the core characters in the CBI. Instead, he was a sporadic character who was only used as an incredibly unsubtle Red John Red Herring.
  • In the end, Red John himself — courtesy of his Ass Pull (see above) identity and Anti-Climax Boss death in the Season 6 finale.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • In season 6, a huge bombshell is dropped when it's revealed that there's an organization called The Blake Association which consists of corrupt cops, law enforcement officials, FBI and CBI agents who commit atrocities and cover up crimes for each other while silencing anyone who threatens to expose them. This arc alone could have taken up an entire season, especially when Reede Smith claims there are thousands of Blake Association members out there. Instead, the arc only exists for a few episodes and then fizzles out after Red John dies.
  • We never find out what happened to Visualize after Bret Stiles is killed in season 6.