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Monday, December 31, 2012

The Mentalist "Blinking Red Light" Review

The Mentalist in a nutshell: STOP and think, (see B.S.) it's all an ILLUSION (read: VISUAL LIES).

 Dr. Linus Wagner: Everything you told me, Mr. Jane, is total fiction, isn't it?
Jane:  From the INCEPTION

Sheryl Lee, July 16, 2014. 

Crossing Red John is as deadly as crossing a "Blinking Red Light."   The  "Blinking Red Light" episode was Bruno Heller's  homage to "Twin Peaks,"  packed with allusions from the opening shot of Patrick Jane changing a flat tire in the San Fran Twin Peaks district and the twin peaks of the TransAmerica building and the California Center in the background.  Jane investigates the San Joaquin serial killer, whose first victim, Molly Maier (anagram A Memory Ill), is a young blond Laura Palmer-type.  Jane and "Lisbuns" interview Molly's hysterical mother, a deadringer for Laura Palmer's.  SJK's victim is found murdered in Golden Gate State Park.  The state park venue could be another fairy tale excuse for the CBI to claim jurisdiction, as the San Fran homicide squad, in reality, would tell "Lisbuns" to get her pretty ass back to Sacramento. 

 

 In contrast to "Twin Peaks" where "Bob" did it (note Bob is also the name of the store Rigsby and Cho visit - my, that's a tasty hotdog), Molly's father didn't do it but he, like Leland Palmer, loved dancing.  As in "Twin Peaks,"  Panzer's victims were women aged 16-20. After abducting them, he would neatly bind them with wire around their wrists and ankles, take them to an abandoned warehouse and kill them by slitting their throats slowly and deliberately with a sharp instrument. The bodies were then dumped, face-up and still bound, in some random public area. His calling card was putting small objects from the dump site, such as pebbles, pieces of glass or bottle caps, on their eyes.Jane suspects a blogger, James Panzer, who lived near the victim is SJK and sets him up in a "Karen Cross" TV interview to cross Red John.  Panzer's hubris mimics Jane, saying that the SJK killings were the work of a genius and Red John by comparison was a "common sociopath; lazy, sloppy, delusional", and becoming so absorbed in building up SJK's image that he was unaware that he was making the same mistake that Jane belittled Red John in a public forum. Panzer paid for his hubris with his life. Shortly after the television appearance, Panzer was found murdered in an alleyway with Red John's trademark Smiley Face painted in blood on the wall near his body and the drawing of the owls; "things are not what they appear to be."


CROSSING A RED LIGHT

If you think "Twin Peaks" was a puzzle, David Lynch has nothing on Bruno Heller. Heller has pushed the envelope in the "suspension of disbelief" in each episode of "The Mentalist."  This may explain why the San Joaquin killer dropped his victim next to the biggest suspension bridge built at the time.  What is the point Heller makes with the "Twin Peaks" and "Mentalist" connection?  In the "Twin Peaks" final scene we discover Laura Palmer was killed by her father, who didn't mean to but was possessed by evil spirits.  In the final scene we discover Patrick Jane had a hand in his daughter's death but didn't mean to as he too was possessed by (liquid) spirits.




Scrambled Eggs: Jane appears to be a Sherlock Homes super-sleuth character but in reality is a mental patient with a cracked eggshell  who suffers from paranoid delusions due to feelings of extreme guilt in the deaths of his wife and child who were burned as he was  in a horrific car accident involving a driver named Tanner when he failed to stop at a BLINKING RED LIGHT CROSSING AN INTERSECTION - hence the RJ symbol - while he was driving intoxicated. (Note: Jane's eggshell blue car - a vintage 1972 Citroen DS 20 that Warner Bros., producer of "The Mentalist" for CBS, had in its inventory. It was used in the 2008 movie "Speed Racer." For "The Mentalist," the car was shipped from Germany and painted eggshell blue. It was originally red. Patrick Jane (anagram "Captain Jerk") spends his days watching TV shows, which generate his ideas for the delusional episodes.

Burning Clues: "The Mentalist" is obsessed with fire, as in half the episodes it plays a significant plot point.  Jane burns his Red John files with a bottle of booze.Out of the Frye-ing pan into the... As Kristina Frye discovered, when you get too close to Red John, you get burned.  "Tiger, Tiger burning bright, they were "Au-burned.In the "Red Mile" episode Jane arrives at a crime scene outside Auburn, California.  Shouts from Alabama football fans of "Roll Tide" first appeared during the Alabama-Auburn Tiger IRON BOWL game in 1907. Curiously, a corpse was found in a burned car in "Ruby Slippers," in which Jane discovers the identity of Fifi Nix, like Jane's Phoenix, has risen from the ashes of his past life.  In "Red Dawn" Jane is given a desk next to a fire extinguisher that is there, then it's gone, then it's there again.   Fake Red John read all about it - catch the fire-y headline on the front page of the newspaper Tim Carter was reading before Jane shot him.  Red John appeared to Jane in the burn mask.  Jane:  It's not my fire. 

Total Fictional Recall: The truth is Red John is Patrick Jane's imaginary evil twin, his "perfect symmetry" alter-ego (Jane/John),  Professor Moriarty character in a Tommy Westphall" imaginary world like "St. Elsewhere's" snow globe and "Life on Mars" that is the dream state of  Jane.  NB. The fake Jane character in "Red Moon" where a corpse was found in a burned car was named Ellis Mars (El - He is Mars).  

Ellis Mars: The mind is a powerful weapon. It can create reality.

 Who's a Lyin'? Jane or Mar-tinsS

Jane: Perhaps we can see each other again.
Lorelei: That’s not up to me.
Jane: Oh, you have no say in it?
Lorelei: None at all. It’s very "Westphall."
Jane: I don’t follow you.
Lorelei: I do what Red John tells me to do.



 
                         Red Face to Face



The Mentalist logo.svg

Mentalist in a Box:

  
Call me Deacon Blue

 "The DESERT ROSE" - perhaps Bruno referred to a song that Sting made famous.  The lyrics will burn in your imagination and perhaps provide a clue about Patrick Jane's:

I wake in pain
I dream of love as time runs through my hand
I dream of fire
Those dreams are tied to a horse that will never tire
And in the flames
Her shadows play in the shape of a man's desire

This desert rose
Each of her seven veils, a secret promise
This desert flower
No sweet perfume ever tortured me more than this

And as she turns
This way she moves in the logic of all my dreams
This fire burns
I realize that nothing's as it seems


The Man with Two Names - Red John's alias is ROY Tagliaferro (read: "cut iron").   The ROY CUT IRON  anagrams are "court irony" and "you r citron."  How ironic that Jane, the court jester who arrives at the crime scene in his Citroen,  a master reader of how others' emotions control them,  was a prisoner of his IRON-ic chains to the past.  Until Jane leaves his old life behind, The Mentalist is on the mental list, a PRISONER of his own device.


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 Jane:  Lisbuns, Simon says STOP and think, people.  Read John's "SEVEN" Come 11 --

"DRAGON STAR    (2014)   Logline:  Code-cracker tracks a serial killer who returns after seven years to terrorize his hometown. Tagline: You can go Holmes again - the second greatest story ever  told.  DRAGON_STAR_-


MIDNIGHT RIDE”   Logline: Garage band cruises a small Pennsylvania town on a stormy night that changes the course of rock music.  Tagline: “She loves you and you and you, yeah, yeah, yeah.”

"DIVE"   Logline: An American naval officer is forced to pilot a Colombian cartel submarine loaded with cocaine into San Diego harbor. But there's something else on board.  Tagline:  Sub-text: Hidden between the lines.

"COLUMBIA ROADS"    Logline:  US embassy investigator discovers Aurora prophecy that threatens  the US.    Tagline: All Roads lead to Columbia.  Download -COLUMBIA ROADS-

 “FACESPACE    Logline:  CIA Deep Throat recruits a conspiracy writer to stop a mind control op using social networks.    Tagline: Who is like FACESPACE and who can defeat it?    Download FACESPACE 7-21


"SPYDER AND THE FLY"     Logline: A black op team gets caught in its web of deceit.   Tagline:  "Come into my parlor said the Spyder to the Fly, but who was the Spyder and Who was the Fly?"

 "THE 11 O'CLOCK NEWS"   Logline: Two bloggers, Richie Scalia and John Scott,  get in way-over-their-head trouble.  Tagline:  Hindsight is 2021

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