Original Air Date: 15 December 2011
Lisbon: Excuse me?
Jane: Well, you're a cop, that's obvious, but you're not treating me like a suspect. And I can't see any other reason for a police officer to come to my bedside unless we're... unless we're sleeping together.
Lisbon: You don't know who I am?
Jane: Please don't take it personally. I'm sure you're quite memorable. I just--I-I've been through a lot...apparently.
Review: There are two kinds of procedurals: the pure ones, as I like to call them, where the focus is strictly on the investigation and there's not much room for anything on the side (and I believe currently the CSIs are the only ones falling into this category) and the impure ones, mixture of procedural stuff and drama, which nowadays makes for most of the genre shows out there. In these ones - The Mentalist included - it's hard to find the perfect balance between the weekly case and the personal aspects of the characters' lives. Sometimes trying to mix the two makes the episode feel too crowded and sometimes focusing more on one aspect than on the other makes it feel like not enough things have happened.
This episode also made Lisbon seem cold-hearted and selfish. Is Jane a better man because of what happened to his wife and child? Yes, and no one is doubting that. He was definitely an egotistic bastard who didn't mind conning people into believing he could talk to their loved ones just to get their money. But did Lisbon really have to jog his memory in that cruel way, instead of listening to his plea and letting him be happy for a chance, even if that meant him not working for the CBI anymore, at least for a while? She surely didn't, and I feel she acted more out of fear of losing his skills than out of fear of his reverting to his old self.
I skipped right to the end and maybe I shouldn't have done that, but Lisbon's actions really bug me. Not to mention all the other stuff I mentioned before.
The focus on Jane's memory loss took away from the procedural part and, while this arc is big enough to fill in more than one episode, its development was poorly done, in my opinion, and the action felt lacking something crucial, and that is suspense. The case was mostly left aside and, though even in his lost state, Jane managed to pull some tricks, I wasn't satisfied about how things went down, especially since Lisbon & co kept expecting Patrick to find the killer, despite his medical condition.
The episode had some good moments, though, and the funniest were Jane thinking that Lisbon was his lover and then asking Rigsby about tips on how to hit on Van Pelt. The emotional part was not to shabby either and it gave us yet another peak into the relationship between Jane and the other three, especially at the one between him and what may be his only true friend, Lisbon. But I still wish this would have been stretched over at least two episodes, to let the arc develop a little bit more.The Mentalist 4x09: The Redshirt Back to Season 4
