The Mentalist Season Finale 2011: Red John is (killed dead) Josh Lyman

Well, you saw most of that coming. The Mentalist season finale offered up some easily, perhaps too easily, deciphered red herrings, but they were all mere sideshow for what was coming at the end. Don’t keep reading unless you want the 2011 season finale and the apparent fate of the Red John plot spoiled for you. Still with us? Alright then. So it was actually Van Pelt’s fiance who was Red John’s mole puppet within the bureau, which could have been seen a mile away both for the shock value and for the door it suddenly re-opens for the Van Pelt – Rigsby romance storyline. So they make him the bad guy, they kill him off, and it’s all neat and tidy heading into next season (although the prospect of Van Pelt having to kill her own fiance within a second of learning that he was the bad guy was pretty chilling). But wait a minute now, because if during the earlier mall scene it occurred to you that “Hey, that guy sitting at the table next to Patrick Jane looks an awful lot like Josh Lyman from the West Wing” then you saw what had to come next. Because you don’t bring on actor with the profile of Bradley Whitford just to have him randomly sitting next to a table.

Sure enough, in the final minutes of the episode, it turns out Whitford’s character had been following Jane all along. And once Jane does a bit of on the spot detective work and figures out that the guy sitting next to him is in fact Red John (or at least the mastermind who was pulling Van Pelt’s fiance’s strings), you knew the show was never quite going to be the same. After admitting to being Red John and revealing details about Jane’s family which only their killer could presumably know, a thoroughly broken Jane stares helplessly at Red John as someone shoots Red John dead. But just as you wait for the pullback scene to see which other cast member arrived just in time to take out the armed Red John, it turns out those bullet holes are in front not back – and sure enough, Jane had been hiding a gun in his pocket the whole time.

So was that really Red John who Patrick Jane just killed? We’ll find out, but certainly no sooner than in the fall – and maybe longer than that. After all, the show’s big picture has been based around Jane’s pursuit of Red John all along, so there will almost certainly be some “was that really him?” hand-wringing next season, if not from Jane himself then from the justice system which will undoubtedly descend upon him. In the mean time viewers are left with the closing image of the season, which saw Jane, after killing Red John in a shopping mall food court, calmly sit down and continue drinking his tea before asking the waitress for the check. We’ll see if Jane’s self satisfaction at having avenged his family’s murder in cold blood remains intact next season. Here’s more on The Mentalist.