Thanks DS Pallas, a timely reminder indeed. It shows that Jane has never given up on his quest against RJ and time hasn't been a healer for him. In fact I think he has become more desperate now to end this and I fear that Lisbon will be unable to persuade him otherwise!
Date: Saturday, 16-Nov-13, 2:12 AM | Message # 244
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Quotemarta75 ()
Poor Lisbon : she has never given up her illusions about a happy end !
´Right, but isn´t that very much "Little Prince"-like? Sometimes we just WANT to believe in things to happen...(Jisbon-ship is not my thing, but stuff happens...who knows;)?
Emily Swallow has been made a full-time member of The Mentalist 2.0.
The Monday Mornings actress — who was originally signed for just three episodes — has been promoted to a full-fledged series regular on the CBS procedural two weeks before her first episode even airs, TVLine has learned exclusively.
Very little is known about Swallow’s character, the enigmatic Kim Fischer, save for this little morsel: she will have a profound impact on Jane’s life. We can also confirm that she will first turn up on Dec. 1, which, not so coincidentally, marks the beginning of The Mentalist‘s post-Red John reboot.
News of Swallow’s upgrade comes a month after the show promoted fellow newbie Rockmond Dunbar to a regular. His no-nonsense FBI Supervisory Agent Dennis Abbott is scheduled to debut in this Sunday’s episode.
Swallow and Dunbar are being introduced in advance of the impending departures of Amanda Righetti and Owain Yeoman.
This Sunday on The Mentalist (CBS, 10/9c), Patrick Jane will quite possibly best his most incessant adversary ever: NFL overrun.
After being penalized by successive Sunday football delays and in one instance outright sidelined for a week, “My understanding is that’s not going to be a problem,” says co-producer Jordan Harper, who penned the penultimate episode of the Red John arc.
And it’s a good thing, too. When last we tuned in, Jane had lured the five remaining possi-Johns to his house, where it was revealed that Sheriff McAllister, Reede Smith and Gale Bertram all bear the “three dots” tattoo on their shoulders. Shortly after a shotgun-toting Jane separated the extra-suspect trio from Bret Stiles and Ray Haffner, we saw from outside that the gun went off. And then just as Lisbon arrived on the scene, the whole house went boom.
What exactly transpired inside? “The blanks that don’t get filled in [this week] will get filled in,” Harper answers.
With the promise of the Red John mystery being wrapped up over the course of these first eight episodes of Season 6 (concluding No. 24 with an installment written by show boss Bruno Heller), Harper agrees that he and the other writers have sort of been “passing a baton” from one to another, each tackling a piece of the climactic arc.
“It’s obviously a more serialized set of stories than we’ve ever done in the past, so it’s been a tremendous amount of fun,” he shares. “Particularly [last week']s ‘Fire & Brimstone,’ this one, ‘The Great Red Dragon,’ and the one following it, ‘Red John,’ which are basically seen as a trilogy” — meaning, Harper had to handle a specifically special set of circumstances. “There aren’t many things harder to write than the middle of a story,” he notes. “I was handed a cliffhanger ending, and had to tee up something for the next episode. It was very tricky fitting in both pieces of that puzzle while keeping the story moving.”
The end result of Harper’s efforts? “A lot of things happen in this episode that can’t be taken back, and things are going to change permanently,” he offers up.”The whole world we’ve built gets shaken to the core.” Then, with a nudge, he confirms: “There are some deaths.”
Speaking of the Grim Reaper: Harper, when presented with one Red John theory that’s swirling around, teases that the arguably uncertain fate of one “eliminated” candidate, Brett Partridge — who some fans still have in their virtual betting pool — will be addressed.
“One way or the other,” he previews, “there will be an answer to the fate of Brett Partridge — in one of my favorite scenes, actually, in an episode that’s full of big scenes.”
What will go down on The Mentalist Season 6 Episode 7 this Sunday? I've seen the episode and can offer up a few hints...
The explosion does cause some casualties and our Red John list is narrowed even more. Despite being in an explosion and in the hospital, Jane's hair never looks less than amazing. Someone utters the dialogue warning, "This is going to hurt." We will learn more about this secret society that seems to be growing with the number of members. Rigsby and Van Pelt get caught in some crossfire. If you need a reminder where "Tyger, Tyger" comes from, you'll get one. Rockmond Dunbar arrives as Dennis Abbott - and doesn't waste any time stirring things up. Some key fixtures of the show do not survive the episode. A big change happens in the final scene that will make things more difficult for our team moving forward.
Check back first thing Monday morning for my interview with episode writer Jordan Harper, who explains some of the big moments in the episode, and visit TV Fanatic the moment this installment ends for a full review.
Matt from TVLine says he's seen 'Red John' the final episode of the arc and it's even better than expected.
In his own words, you're misreading his words. :P
Here's the full series of Tweets: @MattMitovich: "Watched @MENTALIST_cbs' Red John finale last night (airing 11/24). Even better than I anticipated." In reply to @SimonBakerFP: "Strange that somebody thought it won´t be epic...after this season so far...but happy you liked it :)": "I am unable to elaborate on my opinion, but you're misreading my words." In reply to @ilonarcari: "you promise? I dont like that viewers know more things then Jane. Is unsetteling..." "Do they, though...?"
That last one is, in my opinion, very interesting and settles a lot of worries of my own.
Message edited by kul65 - Saturday, 16-Nov-13, 8:13 PM
Actually I read it in the comments after the article he wrote about 6.07. Apparently the press already has access to it - itsameric has tweeted he's seen it as well.
From all these spoilers, I'm very happy with the way the season is evolving. In the beginning of the show, I thought the writers would never have dared to break the rules of the networks like CBS (for example Jane exacting his vengeance and still surviving). A Jane even more lunatic would be a very good news for me.
The Dove in Mary's right hand in the church...feel the hammer of symbolism...not sure whose voice RJ is...They have cloaked it well, sounds like old Richard Harris as Dumbledore...
Excerpt (excludes episode summary preamble): “Gale Bertram is being hunted, and he is the head of a law enforcement agency,” notes Mentalist co-producer Jordan Harper , who wrote the episode. “Because of that, actions have to be taken.”
To drive home the seriousness of the CBI’s dismantling, Harper points out, “The scene opens with Jane’s couch being carted out, which was an idea from [director] Chris Long. That goes a tremendous distance towards underscoring that we’re not joking here.” Another telling touch came courtesy of series star Simon Baker. “During rehearsals, he had the idea of the teacup breaking. Again, these aren’t idle decisions. We are trying to send a message.”
And what about the message Jane sent Lisbon at the end, declaring his decision to give up the hunt? “He’s very clear that he’s not quitting. He’s letting go. And there’s a huge difference,” Harper stresses. Employing a martial arts analogy, the scribe says, “In Judo, there’s the idea not to always push, because while you may feel in control, you’re using your energy and that doesn’t mean you’re going to get your way. To ‘let go’ means to allow things to happen. To move with the flow.”
Meaning, maybe Red John will come to Jane, craving final closure as much as his longtime pursuer does? “I think that’s an interesting idea,” Harper allows.
Looking ahead to next Sunday’s episode, the grand finale of the CBS drama’s Red John storyline, Harper confirms that there’s “tremendous significance” to where where we last saw Jane, seated in a chapel. And as for the eventual face-off between serial killer and adversary, Harper promises it will be a battle of wits worthy of the two men.
“Both Jane and Red John have always fancied themselves as the ‘smartest guys in the room,’” he notes. “And one of them is right.”
The Mentalist: Has Red John Finally Been Revealed? Should we trust that Haffner, Stiles and McAllister are dead? We haven't seen any bodies ... Jordan Harper: I think it's always safe to say there's more to come, but I want to be very clear: That was a foot that you saw. It was not, in the world of The Mentalist, a rubber foot. There are dead people in that house, absolutely.
By the same token, is Bertram definitely Red John, or is there going to be another twist in next week's episode? Harper: You'll have to watch and see, but with The Mentalist, there's always another twist.
Will next week's episode explain what exactly happened in the explosion and the shot heard in Jane's house? Harper: It will be addressed, yeah.
Smith says that there are hundreds and possibly thousands of members of Tiger Tiger. Is this a story line that will be revisited in future episodes or seasons? Harper: Yes, absolutely. I really wanted to lay out with that scene exactly how a dirty cop who is not a Red John acolyte could come to help a serial killer. And so I wanted to do my best to paint a portrait of a conflicted man who's in over his head, which I think would be a lot of these guys in the Tiger Tiger organization. Even if they're not good people — and they are, to a man, not good people — that doesn't mean that they are serial killers. But once you're in deep, you're in deep. It's as close to a mutual trust society as a mutual distrust society in a lot of ways.
The way Smith describes it, it seems to be almost like a cult, with Red John targeting these vulnerable people. Harper: It's a different kind of vulnerability, and Red John as a master manipulator knows how to pull more than one kind of string. I always thought of the Manson family when it comes to Red John acolytes. But again, Smith is not part of the Manson family. He's part of the Rampart division. He's a bad cop. Once you've done a favor for a serial killer, what are you going to do? Come clean? You can't do that, so you've just got to keep swimming ahead.
What's Smith's motivation for confessing? Is it just that he finally realizes the game is up? Harper: I think after narrowly escaping death twice, he knows that his only chance of surviving is to give up. And not only that, I think it's also a deep relief to stop carrying secrets like that. This guy isn't just carrying one secret or two secrets. He's got a whole backpack full of really heavy secrets that he's able to dump out on the table in front of them. And I think even if he spends the rest of his life in prison, he'll feel maybe better about himself because he was able to come clean.
Back at CBI, Rigsby and Van Pelt are just learning about the Tiger Tiger conspiracy and are at the point where they don't even know which of their work colleagues they can trust. Harper: That was one of my favorite things about this episode. The viewer has known about the Blake Association for a while now, but when you think about how quickly things change in that scene — from [Rigsby] not trusting Oscar, to walking back in an alley and seeing a cop about to execute a man, and then being able to respond to that and being involved in a life and death shootout with two law enforcement officials, to finding out that one of those law enforcement officials has the dreaded tattoo — all in the space of a couple of minutes, it really messes with their minds quite a bit.
We finally meet Rockmond Dunbar's character, and he and Jane are already not off to a good start. How will Jane react to the FBI taking over the Red John case? Harper: First of all, Rockmand Dunbar's fantastic. I was really glad that I got to introduce him to the show and to be able to create that character of Dennis Abbott. Clearly, he's a no-nonsense type of guy, but I hope it comes off right away that he is not stupid. And one thing that somebody who is not stupid does is not try and butt heads with Jane. Jane is a master bullfighter, and just trying to butt heads with him will get you turned around. I think while Abbott is very serious about what he's saying and his intent to catch Red John, Jane might not be taking him seriously yet. But this will unfold.
What should viewers take away from the final scene, where Jane leaves Lisbon at CBI and goes to the chapel? Harper: [Lisbon] tells him that she doesn't believe that he's giving up, and he makes very clear that there's a difference between giving up and letting go. And I leave that to the viewers and to the next episode to get into exactly what that means. ... It's difficult to comment on Jane's mental state in the best of times. As a Mentalist writer, there's always the challenge of trying to write somebody who is smarter than you. Therefore, you can only give a vague approximation of what is going on in his head. To answer what is actually going through his mind is pretty difficult, but it's safe to say that his brain is firing on all cylinders at this point.
For viewers who are happy to put the Red John story line to bed, what can they look forward to in the new post-Red John world? Harper: The one thing I want to make very clear is that there's no going back from this point. It's not just a Red John-less world. It is a new world. We're still finding it ourselves ... and I'm really looking forward to the audience seeing it.
Does Abbott's announcement that he's shutting down CBI have to do with the new direction? Harper: The world that we have spent six years building is crumbling, and we're going to see the remains pretty soon. In my head, this is a three-part episode and this is the middle part. The audience is going to come out of this episode with a lot of questions, but they just are going to have to wait a week and then see Red John, and I promise their minds will be blown — their socks blown off.
Perhaps literally, if the end of last week's episode was any indication. Harper: Indeed.
What was the most challenging thing to get right? The hardest part was knitting together the episode that comes before it and the episode that comes after it, at least that was the first challenge. I really saw this as the middle part of a trilogy, so I had to make sure I delivered on both those fronts. The episode basically takes place entirely at a spring, which is not the normal tempo for The Mentalist. I had a lot to get done and I wanted it to be fun to watch. There's a version of this story that could have been told with a lot of exposition and less shootouts, but I wanted to do the shootouts.
What was your favorite scene or moment to write? There are a lot of things about this episode I really, really liked. I think director Elodie Keene and our crew did a great job with the shootout with Owain [Yeoman, who plays Rigsby,] and Amanda [Righetti, who plays Van Pelt]. It was by far the most intricate action scene I had ever written and while it comes off as chaotic on the screen, it was anything but in the planning. I really enjoyed introducing Rockmond Dunbar as FBI Agent Dennis Abbott, and we will be needing him again.
This episode knocks off several Red John suspects right off the bat following last week's explosion, leaving Bertram as the person Jane, Lisbon and the rest of the CBI team believe is the culprit. Are they correct? You'll have to watch and see. I don't want to tip anything from the upcoming episode other than Jane has a lot going on in his head and he's going to have even more going on in the next episode.
Was it particularly difficult seemingly killing three Red John suspects -- Sheriff Tom McAllister, Visualize leader Bret Stiles and FBI Agent Ray Haffner -- at the beginning of the hour? Was that always the plan? To be honest, that was one of the easiest things I had to come up with because Ken Woodruff wrote the episode before mine [titled "Fire and Brimstone"]. All I had to do was write, "Fade in. The house has blown up." I will say, less body parts made it in than were on-set that day, which was a personal regret of mine. I understand that you can't get everything out of life but there was more than a foot there. Our show isn't normally that gory but we wanted to make very clear that that was a human foot and there were dead bodies in there. Choreographing Lisbon coming into that scene and how fast her mind has to move from who survived this, did anyone survive this to Smith surviving it to thinking Smith is Red John, not knowing there were other people with tattoos, she's exactly where Jane the episode before that. And keeping track of what everybody knows and don't know in that time span was very challenging.
Jane's press conference revealing to the public the identity of Red John was a big move. What does that mean for everyone involved moving forward? One of the reasons that that is an important scene is Jane knows and as the audience quickly sees, he's exposing the leader of the CBI as a killer and that's something that will have repercussions and does in the episode. It's not something he does idly.
You touched on Abbott's entrance, with him shutting down the CBI and relieving everyone of their duties. What is Jane and Co.'s next move and what is their state of mind at the moment? These are questions that are going to be addressed very quickly in the "Red John" episode. It's a big move to have CBI shut down. It means Jane doesn't have the backstop he's always had, a veneer of law enforcement that allows him to operate in the way that Jane operates. When he loses that -- well, you can't count Jane out -- he does lose one of his best cards in his hand.
Talk about the scene between Lisbon and Jane after they find out the FBI is taking over, when Lisbon essentially tells him that he won't give up. I'm glad you picked up on that. To me, that's a big difference between quitting and letting go. The alcoholics say you gotta know the difference between the things you can change and the things you can't and you can't always force things to go the way you want but if you let go, you might be able to find other ways of making things work.
Will more information be divulged about The Blake Association? We're going to keep talking about it. Now that CBI is evidence, how do Jane, Lisbon, Van Pelt, Cho and Rigsby come back together? It's going to unfold in the next few episodes. As someone who's written on the show for a long time, it was fun to destroy parts of the world that I had helped create and have great fondness for. We have taken a monkey wrench to our show and to the world that the show lives in. Quite a bit of enjoyment came out of that.
What is the world like without CBI at its core? It's bigger. That's about all I can say, because there's a lot unfolding. It's a brave new world.
With the Red John mystery looking like it'll wrap up soon, are seeds planted for the next big arc? It's fair to say that while there is going to be a huge shift in the story after this it's not going to come out of nowhere. Everything that precedes is going to have logical antecedents in these run of episodes.
Without revealing too much, how would you characterize Jane and Bertram's encounter? I realize that this episode raises a lot of questions. Normally at the end of one of our episodes you're able to say more definitive things than I am able to say right now. Jane and Bertram will meet again. (Laughs.)
What are you hoping to explore further? We're in a whole new world now. I'm currently working on my next episode and I'm getting to do things I've never gotten to do on The Mentalist. It's nice after this many episodes to open the world up and feel like a new show.
Preview next week's episode, which you've said is the last of the "trilogy," so to speak. It's called "Red John." It's written by Bruno Heller and directed by Chris Long, one of our executive producers, and it's a big, big episode. In the history of our show, it is easily the biggest episode we've ever done. In a lot of ways I'm just setting up the table.
