'The Mentalist' recap: I predict you'll love it

If you’re a fan of “Law and Order,” “CSI” and “Medium,” you will love CBS’s new drama “The Mentalist.”

The show focuses on a man who has spent most of his life convincing people that he has special powers. Now that his secret is out - that he has no psychic abilities - he must redeem his job and the respect of his peers. And while he may not be a true psychic, there certainly is something special about the way Patrick Jane solves cases, something that no one can deny.

We first meet Agent Patrick Jane and Agent Teresa Lisbon, both of the California Bureau of Investigation, in an upstanding neighborhood turned murder scene. Another officer explains that he doesn’t think the team will be needed because they already believe they’ve caught the killer, a local teen.

Patrick seems to have other ideas though. He focuses in on several things, including the suspect and the tattoo on the arm of the man loading the dead women’s body in to a van. Patrick then enters the house while no one is around to canvas the scene of the crime.

While in the kitchen, Patrick notices some photos of the fridge of the dead girl and her father; the two don’t look like they’ve been getting along lately. The girl’s mother soon enters the kitchen, and the two sit down over a cup of tea to discuss what has happened. Patrick tries to convince the woman that he can help, that he knows things, and when she doesn’t believe him, he begins to spout out information about her that strangers wouldn’t know. “What, you’re psychic?” she asks. “No, just paying attention,” he replies. He then tells her that he used to make his money pretending to be a psychic and that there is no point hiding things from him. “Why do you expect him (her husband) of murdering your daughter?” he asks her. At first she won’t admit, but soon she explains to him that lately her daughter, Mercy, and her husband have been acting weird and not getting along. “Do you think he did it to?” Mrs. Tolliver asks him. “I don’t know, but I trust a mother’s intuition.”

The situation escalates when Mr. Tolliver enters the kitchen, and Patrick introduces himself by asking if he killed his daughter. Mr. Tolliver freaks out, Mrs. Tolliver starts to panic, she picks up a gun and she shoots him. Gosh, I hope her mother’s intuition was right.

That case was simply a jumping off point I guess because the next thing we see is two men getting out of a car at a Palm Springs mansion. When the gentlemen enter the house they find two bloody bodies and a golf club.

Agent Lisbon is on the case and is surprised to find that Agent Jane is also, well, according to himself he is. Even though he was put on suspension, Patrick knows he needs to be a part of this case.

The two deceased are one of the golfer’s wives, Alison, and her physician, Gregory. They aren’t quite sure of the connection between the two other than old family friends, but are convinced it is a “Red John” case, which at the moment I have no clue what that means.

Patrick goes in to the bedroom, where Alison was found, to look around and finds a smile face in blood on the wall. For some reason this triggers a flask back to five years ago, where we see Patrick in a John Edwards-like setting, claiming to talk to the dead on a talk show. When Patrick comes back to reality the rest of the group is in the bedroom, and he tells the group it is not a “Red John.” The other agents don’t seem to open to Patrick’s opinions.

Later on the agents head back to the office to watch video of the crime scene. This is when the agents finally admit that Patrick is right, it isn’t “Red John,” who by the way we now know is a person, a person that Patrick was trying to find five years ago.

Teresa says that it is possible the killer is a copycat or just “Red John” making mistakes. She sends the remaining two agents, whose names are still unknown, to talk to Alison’s husband. She then calls Patrick that he may be right and tells him that she wouldn’t hate it if he came back to the team. The two share a little banter back and forth, and she tells him to “screw himself” when he asks her to say please.

The two agents who were assigned to Alison’s husband seem very skeptical when Price Randolph isn’t so up front about his whereabouts between the time he left his professional golf tournament and the time he arrived back home. He tells them he was with a massage therapist but can’t remember the name. His friend tells the two that the name will show up on his credit card.

Patrick and Teresa are also off to see a medical staff member. At the Oaks Wellness Center they speak with a doctor about Alison, who was a patient of his. Dr. Linus Wagner tells them that Alison was extremely healthy, but that her husband had recently asked him to start buying her birth control under the table. He also tells them that Mr. Randolph had had a vasectomy years ago.

As the two are leaving, Patrick asks Dr. Wagner if he can get some sleeping pills without the consultation, just something to get him through right now. Dr. Wagner says no. I doubt he needed those sleeping pills.

After a long day trying to fight crime, everyone sits down for dinner, of course the case is a topic of discussion. Kimball, one of the agents, believes that this is an open and shut case – the husband did it, but Patrick is convinced otherwise. Based on his golf game Patrick says, Price is a choker who could never get the courage up to kill his wife.

During dinner the topic of Patrick’s previous life is also brought up. One of the newer agents, Grace, asks Patrick if other psychics he met with could tell he was faking it. “There is no such thing as real psychics,” he tells her. She then says her cousin can talk to the dead, but he thinks she is a liar. He then goes off on her just as he did Mrs. Tolliver. He tells her that later on when Wayne, another agent, asks her in to his hotel room she should go, even though right now she doesn’t want. “The kingdom of God is a real place Mr. Jane, and you have an immoral soul,” she says to him.

While in his room alone that night, a letter is slipped under Patrick’s door. We don’t see much of it, just “old friend” and a red smile face. Patrick immediately takes off out the door, spotting a man dressed all in black, but never catching up to him.

He invites the rest of the team in to see the letter, and while they are all convinced diner to write in a journal. He writes all night, not sleeping a wink; maybe he did need those sleeping pills.

Finally, a break in the case! A single hair was found with Alison and her doctor, and that hair does not belong to her husband. It belongs to his brother, Tag Randolph. He says he did not do it, that he must have been framed by his brother because Alison and he were lovers, something Patrick already knew.

Breaking away from the crime, we learn a little bit more about Patrick when he goes in to talk to Dr. Wagner in order to get the pills. The doctor wants to know what is keeping him awake, which shows us a flask back of him talking about Red John on the talk show.

We also learn that the reason catching Red John is so important to Patrick is because his wife and child were victims of the killer years ago. This isn’t the story Patrick tells the doctor though. Instead he tells Wagner about how he was a lazy child, always paying his brother to do his chores for him. On one particular day, he paid his brother one dollar to cut firewood for him. His brother cut an artery and bled to death. “You know, that’s almost the exact same thing that happened to Johnny Cash,” the doctor says. “Wow, that’s spooky,” Patrick replies.

Dr. Wagner tells Patrick that he knows his stories are fiction, but he gives him the pills anyway.

When Wagner escorts Patrick out of the building Patrick asks him one more time whether or not his partner, the second victim, kept a diary. Wagner doesn’t remember telling him he did, but Patrick says he knows that someone did tell him that. Patrick also tells him that the forensics team will be doing one more sweep of the deceased doctor’s office tomorrow. He gives him a hug and then heads out the door.

Wagner then proceeds to rummage through the deceased doctor’s office, as if he were looking for, I don’t know, a diary. He is unbelievably surprised though when Patrick shows up in the office as well. He looks caught, but doing what? Patrick asks Wagner what he is doing, and Wagner simply tells him he felt the strong temptation to play detective. He says he has found no diary, but Patrick believes otherwise. He holds up his hands, closes his eyes and moves around the room, trying to feel out the diary.

Finally, he finds it! It was tucked up underneath a cabinet. “Eureka,” is all he’ll say to Dr. Wagner. He walks out of the room, but Wagner stops him. He had originally told Wagner that he left his phone in his office, which was why he came back in, so Wagner wanted to make sure he got it. But when the two are alone in his office, Wagner pulls a gun on him!

Wagner pleads with Patrick to give him the diary, so he hands it over. He doesn’t find it funny though to find out that the diary is actually Patrick’s. Patrick then goes over the reasons he knows Wagner is the killer. One – Wagner said he didn’t know who Red John was, yet he has books in his office with Red John in them. Two – He is the Randolph family doctor, so he could easily get a strand of Tag’s hair. Three – He’s a doctor, so cutting up people is really no problem. “It’s obvious it was you,” Patrick says. The doctor isn’t impressed though and thinks he has no evidence against him.

Wagner says he understands that Patrick is upset about the loss of his family, but Gregory and Alison had to be killed, “for the greater good.” Gregory was about to unveil the fact that Wagner was stealing money, but Wagner rationalized in his head that the child in Africa that he had been working so hard to save would die if he was in jail, so it was OK to kill Gregory. Alison was killed just because she was there.

Wagner swears he’ll shoot, but Patrick tells him he took the bullets out earlier for his own safety. Patrick then throws something in Wagner’s face to distract him and takes off. Thankfully, when he reaches the doors Wayne and the other agents have arrived. Wayne draws his gun, stopping Wagner in his tracks.

Having caught the man that has terrorized his thoughts for some many years, Patrick is ready to celebrate. Unfortunately, the rest of his team is not. They’re upset that he has known it was Wagner for days and that instead of telling them, he let them torment the family and themselves.

He tries to make amends with Teresa, which he’s been trying to do all night, but she won’t hear of it. Although, when he plays a little magic trick on her, she cracks a smile. She knows he isn’t all that bad.

I’ll be honest, when I saw the commercial for this show I wasn’t impressed. I wasn’t thrilled about watching it, and if it wasn’t for this recap I probably wouldn’t have. But I am really glad I did.

This show had me constantly questioning who had really done it. At first I was convinced it was the husband. I mean, he couldn’t tell them where he was. Then when the brother’s hair turned up I said, now wait a minute, here is DNA evidence. And when the killer was finally revealed, the doctor, I was shocked! Until he explained why he did it, I couldn’t guess to save my life. After watching so many episodes of “Law and Order: SVU,” I truly thought I could see the plot line of this show coming a mile away. I guess not!

The only thing really lacking in this show is a strong cast of characters. While I like Simon Baker as Patrick Jane, the rest of the case just doesn’t hold up to him or the story line.