The Mentalist "Red Letter Day" Review

 

The Mentalist in a nutshell: It's all an ILLUSION (read: VISUAL LIES) we have seen over and over (See B.S.).

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

Jane:  From the INCEPTION

"Red Letter Day" is marked as a day of special significance, but in The Mentalist episode it is more like "Deja Vu" and "Groundhog Day" as we've seen this movie before in "Red John's Friends": rich father's philandering past produces awkward incestuous situation for lovestruck son. The difference in "Red John's Friends"  is the mother killed the girl, while in "Red Letter Day"  the son kills the father, and it takes place in a WILD WEST make-believe setting.  The episode has the usual Mentalist suspects: drinking, "speeding," crashes, fires, "dangerous" inter-sex situations.  Of course, all these episodes take place in Jane's IMAGINATION because it is all an ILLUSION.  Patrick Jane and friends travel to Percy, California (anagram: A CARNEY PROLIFIC) to investigate a murder having no apparent justification other than the Wild West locale is as unbelievable. Jane has fun making fun of the amateur magician and eventually pulls a blank red letter out of his pocket to fool the murderer into revealing himself, as the son of the victim did not want to humiliate his girlfriend that they were more than kissing cousins...yeech. (which reminds me of that "Simpsons" episode of two hillbillies making out behind his house: "They're your parents too.")   Speaking of "yeech" situations, poor Lisbuns has to endure a lunch date with creepy Bob Kirkland, who is feeling her out for information on Jane's knowledge of Red John. Speaking of "Groundhog Day," Rigsby and Van Pelt's love life is interrupted again by a smooth talking outsider. If the writers wanted to do justice to this scene, Bill Murray should have walked out of the elevator.   Talk about "Deja Vu," I experienced it when Bill Murray - before he was famous- walked into my office and I knew I had seen that face somewhere before.

So what is the point writer Michael Weiss is trying to make?  One possible moral of the story: don't have sex with someone other than your wife else your son will end up having incestuous sex with the offspring. Wow, if Lisbuns was Jane's sister....IMAGINE THAT.  Maybe Jane's father  was  "a carney prolific" who toured America.  If so, Bob Kirkland, who says he is from "America," could be Jane's brother. But it's all an ILLUSION

 


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 (CBI = intensive burn care?)  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  and spends his days with the remote watching TV shows, which generate his ideas for the delusional episodes.  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).


Burning Clues: "The Mentalist" is obsessed with fire, as in half the episodes it plays a significant plot point. Items: 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.

THE WILD WEST-PHALL WORLD

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. 

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

 

Mentalist in a Box

.   Shaking hands with Red John

 Drink Scotch Whiskey all night long and die behind the wheel

Call me Deacon Blue

As the first episode of the sixth season of the MENTALIST has been revealed - "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 and aware of the need to let go of the past,  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. 

                                                                                  
  

Jane:  Lisbuns, deja view this:  Read John's "Seven" Come 11,  my mental list of  7 scripts so you can dream along with me: 


"DRAGON STAR     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_-_Final[1] 

“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 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