So I was watching this week’s episode of The Mentalist, and a couple of things about it bugged me. Overall, I really enjoy the show (and this episode), which I think coasts by on some clever writing, hints of darkness, and Simon Baker’s not inconsiderable charm. But the show isn’t perfect, and this week’s episode was no exception. Some spoilers follow.
First, there was the Taser scene. Agents Lisbon and Rigsby are trying to take a suspect in for questioning. The suspect gets angry, pushes Rigsby away, then moves threateningly towards Lisbon. And then she, very calmly and with a smile on her face, Tasers him. Leaving aside the potentially ugly subtext of this being an angry black man going after a white woman — which I suspect was unintentional — I was a little disturbed to see a Taser depicted as the acceptable, immediate go-to for law enforcement. (That’s what it’s increasingly become, but there’s plenty of evidence that that’s not a good thing.) It was a quick scene, played mostly for laughs — but I think that’s maybe what bothered me most about it.
Then there’s the fact — and this is the much bigger spoiler — that the episode is all about revisiting the sins of Patrick Jane’s past and the consequences of the lies he told as a “spiritual medium.” Except it turns out that this one wasn’t a lie. He told a woman that her husband was cheating on her. She divorced her husband, and now he and their son blame Jane for the whole thing. But the husband was cheating on her. Jane may have been lying about how he knew this — more direct observation, less spiritual connection — but I would have liked it more if he’d told her what she wanted to hear, ruined a man’s life, and then been wrong. This way offered too quick a redemption — See? He cheated some people, but he probably helped this woman. Heck, she even went on to happily re-marry. The show has demonstrated it’s willing to take Jane into some dark emotional places; I wish they hadn’t pulled their punches like this.
Oh, and while I’m speaking of spiritual mediums, it turns out that my former Jujitsu instructor is one. I don’t know exactly how — if at all — to feel about this, largely because it’s been close to twenty years since I was a student with him. But I find the whole medium thing rather morally dubious. I suppose there’s something to be said for providing comfort to grieving family and friends, but that comfort comes with a pretty high price, as well as claims to psychic abilities I’m fairly certain I don’t believe in.
I like The Mentalist quite a bit, and thought that particular episode was one of the best to date, but I do agree with you that it would have been a bit stronger if he’d turned out to be wrong. Which I was kind of expecting to happen, actually. I don’t think, though, that the problem is that they were deliberately pulling a punch on the “how much did he actually hurt people?” thing. Both the show and the character seem to me that have been pretty consistently clear on the idea that Jane’s former career was a really douchebaggy way to make one’s living. (Something I personally very much agree with. Exploiting the troubled and grieving for money is reprehensible. There are better and more honest ways of providing comfort, so that’s not an excuse.) I think the reason they played it that way probably has a lot more to do with not wanting to let the audience believe that Jane is likely to make that kind of mistake. The whole premise of the show is based on his super-duper powers of rationality and people-reading, and they probably didn’t want to do something that might undermine our faith in them. Which I think is unnecessary, personally. I don’t expect anybody to be perfect, and people who make mistakes are more interesting than ones who don’t. Ah, well.
By the way, on a completely unrelated note, do you have any idea why your blog isn’t showing up in my RSS feed at the moment? The comments do, but I’m not seeing the entries.
I think all it would have taken was showing us that he knew he was getting it wrong. His keen observational powers wouldn’t have been called into question, but we would have gotten a better sense for the slick huckster he used to be. Here, he wasn’t even really pretending to contact the spirit world, just telling a woman to trust her intuition — which turned out to be right.
I just think they went a little too far in trying to preserve the character’s likability.
And what RSS feed are you using? I plugged both http://www.unreality.net/weblog/?feed=rss2 and http://unreality.net/weblog into my aggregator (Google Reader), and it worked fine. I got my most recent entry.
I don’t disagree, even though the episode as a whole worked for me anyway. I think far too many shows err on the side of trying to preserve character likability.
I’m also using Google Reader, but it seems to be there again now. 10 posts just showed up there all at once. I have no idea what happened, but as long as it doesn’t happen again, maybe I don’t really care. 🙂