The Mentalist: Red Hair and Silver Tape (Episode 102)

You can't touch this.This week, show has decided to clarify what the title means for those audience members (read: me) who didn’t think to Google it.  Apparently, a mentalist (noun) is “someone who uses mental acuity, hypnosis and/or suggestion; a master manipulator of thoughts and behavior.”  Thanks, Webster’s!  Although that might have been helpful last week.

Agents Lisbon, Cho and Jane are at a vineyard, along with a substantial police force.  The bumbling local sheriff leads them to the body of a young redheaded woman who is bound with silver tape.  They examine her body and find a wound on her stomach, but determine that the cause of death was probably strangulation.  Though Sheriff thinks that an evil city slicker did the deed, Jane insists that it was a local. “It was an accident,” he says, which he knows because her clothes are still on.  Jane insists that the abductor accidentally smothered her because she was making too much noise.  Yeah, it’s always such a bitch when potential rape victims can’t keep it down.  Since her body was dumped in a spot that “only a local would know,” the killer had to have been someone from the town.  Jesus, CSI should scoop this guy up.  He basically just covered an entire episode in twenty seconds.

Cho isn’t convinced that it wasn’t drug related.  “A drug trade smothering?” Jane asks.  “By who, the Sesame Street Crips?”  BWAH!!  That was almost as funny as the Price and Tag incident of last week.  Sheriff asks Jane if he’s psychic “or some gizmo,” because everyone from small towns uses corny phrases like that.  Sigh.  Didn’t you watch the pilot, Sheriff, or do you not have televisions in Hicksville?  Jane only pretended to be psychic.  It was his hair that was really doing all the work.  And then the hair, its honor having been besmirched, challenges Sheriff to a rock paper scissors match of DOOM.  The hair wins over and over again.  As if there was any doubt.

The agents and Sheriff drive up to a small house.  They meet Mr. and Mrs. O’Keefe, and inform them that their daughter Melanie was found dead.  Jane slips away from the grieving couple and enters Melanie’s room, where her little brother Frankie is holding a picture of her.  Frankie asks if someone killed Melanie, and Jane says yes.  Back outside, the O’Keefe’s tell the team that Melanie was a waitress at the Shand Creek Winery Restaurant.  Her shift ended late, so they didn’t notice that she was missing right away.  They tearfully admit that Melanie was supposed to start U.C.L.A. in the fall.  Lisbon asks if she Melanie had any jealous boyfriends, but her father says that she was “shy of boys.”  Isn’t that code for lesbian?  Her mom insists that she wasn’t pulling a Lohan, she was simply honoring a purity pledge she’d made in high school.  She seriously fell for that shit?  Listen, we took purity pledges like that in Catholic school, and let’s just say that didn’t work out so well for everyone.

Inside the house, Jane is looking at the pictures on Melanie’s wall.  He focuses on a collage in the shape of an “H,” which has a picture of Melanie and another woman in the center.  Her lover, perhaps?  He notices that part of the picture has been town away.  How curious.  Frankie asks Jane to tell him when they figure out who killed Melanie and he agrees, even though it’s pretty clear that the kid is out for blood.

Over at the CBI headquarters, Rigsby is gawking at Van Pelt like the creeper that he is.  I just noticed that Van Pelt is also a redhead.  Hey, me too!  You represent, girl!  Lisbon phones in and tells Van Pelt to fax something or other, and completely shuts Rigsby down when he makes a desperate ploy to get out of the office.  Jane comes outside and says that Melanie had a secret lover whose name began with an “H,” and it was someone she didn’t want her family to know about.  The Sheriff of Perpetual Stupidity chooses this moment to reveal that he was at the Shand Creek the night Melanie was abducted.  Lisbon’s like “Wow you’re dumb” and asks him if he saw anything.  Sheriff finally connects his two brain cells and remembers that he saw a black truck speeding out of the parking lot.  He almost went after it, but that would require motor skills, which would require upper brain function, and I think we all know that expecting that of Sheriff would be wildly optimistic.  Lisbon tells him to start doing his job and check the woods around the restaurant while she has Cho check Melanie’s car.  She and Jane then meet with the restaurant’s owners, Sandra and Malcolm Boatwright.  Malcolm’s a bit of a fatty and Sandra’s a bit of a lush.  Oh, and she’s a redhead.  I’m beginning to sense a theme here.  They’re practically force-feeding the pair every dish they serve and Jane can’t get enough.  Apparently the secret ingredient is “a lot of butter.”  I heard that word.

Malcolm gives Lisbon and Jane a tour of the kitchen before Sandra shows them to her office.  They check Melanie’s timecard and find that she left work at 11:25 pm.  Sandra mentions that she saw her leave.  Just then Raquel, the woman from the picture in Melanie’s room, enters the restaurant.  She insists that she and Melanie weren’t friends, but Jane and his observational skills beg to differ.  They interview her, and she has no idea why Melanie had a picture of her.  “Maybe she has a secret crush on me,” she offers.  See?  I’m not the only one getting gay vibes from this episode.  She also claims that she doesn’t know who was cut out of the picture because she was stoned when it was taken.  When Lisbon leaves, Jane—who is clearly giddy about the whole situation—convinces Cho to step outside of the room so he can hypnotize Raquel.  He sits in front of her and says something along the lines of “Raquel, look at my hair.  When you’re relaxing in your bed tonight I want you to think of my hair.  Think of it, and imagine you are running your fingers through my golden curls.  They are soft and luxurious, and you can even put mousse in them if you want to.  Imagine how nice that will feel.  The next time you see me and my hair, when I say hello, I want you to tell me the truth, because if you do you will be rewarded with 30 full seconds of finger to scalp contact.”  Okay, so maybe that’s not what he said exactly, but it was in the subtext.

The team opens up Melanie’s locker and finds a note that says “Sorry” and her discarded purity ring.  Tisk tisk.  What would the Jonas Brothers say about that?  Instead of having the handwriting on the note analyzed, Jane decides to fuck with the entire kitchen staff.  As he does.  He stands in front of them and says that one of them wrote the note, and whoever did is the killer.  He says that they will take a handwriting sample from everyone and have Cho analyze it, since in this lie Cho is an expert in handwriting.  At this point one of the chefs, Randall, faints dead away.  Problem solved.

At the police station, Cho is interrogating Randall.  We discover that on the night of Melanie’s disappearance, Randall flirted with her and then tried to kiss her.  She responded by kneeing him in the balls.  He left the note the next morning to apologize so she wouldn’t complain about him to their bosses.  Once they’re done with him, Lisbon gets a call from Van Pelt, who has found another case from the area in which a woman was abducted and bound with silver tape.  This woman was not sexually assaulted, and she was also a redhead.  Damn.  How many redheads can they squeeze into one episode?  They know we’re going extinct, right?  Jane is very intrigued by this correlation and thinks that maybe the criminal is a budding serial rapist/killer whose crimes are escalading in scale.  Lisbon pretty much thinks he’s an idiot and tells him that they need to focus on finding Melanie’s lover.

Just then Raquel walks into the station, charming as ever.  Jane says hello to her, and she goes from proclaiming she doesn’t know anything to spilling her guts in two seconds flat.  She explains that Melanie was in a relationship Hector Ramirez, Raquel’s second cousin.  She didn’t mention it before because Hector runs all of the drug trade in the area and “has had people killed for way less than snitching on him like this.” Lisbon immediately figures out what Jane did and bitches about it before having Rigsby and Van Pelt join them to go after Hector.  The police force assembles outside of Hector’s home, while Jane waits a few streets over.  When the police try to enter the house, Hector throws himself through a window and runs for it.  He makes it over to Jane’s street and Jane just watches him as he runs towards him.  Just when he’s getting close Lisbon flies out of a side street and tackles Hector to the ground.  DAMN.  That’s the first awesome thing she’s done in the entire series!  Rigsby asks Jane what he was planning to do if Lisbon hadn’t gone WWF on the guy’s ass, but he says he knew it was going to happen so he didn’t bother planning.  Alright, I’m willing to buy most of this stuff, but how could he have known that?  Did he know the layout of the streets or how fast this person he had never met before could run?  Whatever.

Back at the station, Lisbon and Jane are interrogating Hector.  At first he doesn’t say anything, but then he starts going on about how knew their relationship would end like this, but he thought that he’d be the one who died.  He says that they wouldn’t understand his relationship with Melanie, but clearly he hasn’t yet seen the powers of Jane and his hair.  “You made her feel like a captured princess instead of a small town choir nerd and she made you feel like a pirate instead of what you are…sort of a bad tempered pharmacist.”  Awesome.  Hector says that he got to the restaurant ten minutes after he was supposed to meet with Melanie and assumed that she hadn’t come out yet.  He waited for a few minutes before getting impatient and peeling out of the parking lot.  “I will always hate myself for that,” he says, and I honestly don’t know who has less emotion, him or Lisbon.

Jane thinks that Hector is telling the truth, but Lisbon says that he’s just “a good actor.”  The irony.  Logically, it does seem like Hector did it.  Just then, Jane notices that Frankie has entered the building, and he decides to take him out for ice cream.  Once they’ve got their delicious frozen treats, Jane asks Frankie to show him whatever weapon he was planning to kill Hector with.  When Frankie doesn’t respond, Jane calls Van Pelt and asks him to check for any motel rooms with known cash bookings on the night Melanie died.  Jane asks Frankie about his weapon again, and the kid pulls a hatchet out of his backpack.  Jane points out that Hector might not be the murderer.  Frankie asks if they’ll kill the murder once they find out who he is.  Jane says no, but he promises that they will make him sorry.  Frankie thinks that’s bullshit, and I can’t exactly blame him.  Jane tells Frankie about how he inadvertently caused his wife and daughter’s deaths, and how sorry he is about it.  “Being sorry is a far worse punishment than being dead,” he says.  Aww.  This scene is a great reminder that Jane was a father and knows how to interact with children.

Van Pelt comes through with the motel info, and Jane heads over to the address she gives him.  The motel owner tells him that the man in question showed up in a disguise, and that he is renting the room for the month.  Jane figures out that the killer has been in the room within the last two days, and finds some rape and murder necessities under the sink.  When he goes back to the station to tell Lisbon about this discovery, she relays that they found traces of Melanie’s blood in Hector’s car.  They ask him about it, and he says that “she was disrespectful, so [he] had to tune her up.”  Asshole.  Jane still believes that he’s telling the truth, and Lisbon still thinks that Hector did it.  She does ask what he found, though, but he makes a phone call instead of telling her.  He’s made reservations at a restaurant, and he wants a table on the terrace because it’s “more romantic.”  Lisbon looks like she’s about to shit herself, and who could blame her?  Simon Baker is, in the words of our lovely recapper Annie, “OM NOM NOM.”  Of course Jane notices her reaction, and teases her accordingly.  The anvils, they are a’fallin’.

Jane takes Lisbon back to the motel room so they can have sex.  He’s set up a video surveillance system that is giving them a live feed from the Shand Creek restaurant.  Van Pelt—who is looking mighty fine—is wearing the wire, and Rigsby is posing as her date.  Methinks Little Rigsby is very happy about this situation.  Back in the room, Jane explains to a very pissed off Lisbon that one of the 20 restaurant workers had to have been the killer because of the timeline.  Since all 20 of those people are working today, they’ll be able to catch the killer when he tries to abduct Van Pelt.  And he will, because he’s not in control of his desires.  We redheads have that effect on people.

Back at the restaurant, Van Pelt and Rigsby are bonding over their love of cheeseburgers.  I mentioned the anvils, right?  Much to Rigsby’s disappointment, they have to get the show on the road, so Van Pelt slaps him across the face and he storms out.  While he’s making this scene, the camera cuts to a few other diners, including a redheaded woman.  Yeah, another one.  As Van Pelt goes to leave, Sandra the restaurant owner offers to get her a cab, but Van Pelt turns her down.  She’s walking towards the main road when she bumps into the Sheriff of Perpetual Stupidity.  Lisbon remembers that he was there the night Melanie disappeared, but Jane looks completely shocked by the turn of events.  The Sheriff walks with Van Pelt, and is either being really friendly or the creepiest creeper ever.  Rigsby, who is watching the feed with Cho in a van, had decided to go with the creeper theory, and attacks the Sheriff.  The local police come, and the whole plan basically goes to shit.  Smooth.

In the motel room, Jane tells Lisbon that he was sure Malcolm would fall for the trap.  When Lisbon asks why he thinks Malcolm did it, Jane tells her that he “uses way too much butter.  He’s self-indulgent.  He wants what he wants, and he takes it.”  Oh, now that’s just bullshit.  Lisbon thinks so too, and she storms out.  Jane stays behind, though, and a few minutes later Sandra and Malcolm enter the room with the redhead we saw in the restaurant earlier.  Sandra’s in on it too?  Looks like my gaydar isn’t broken after all!  After a minute they notice Jane, and draw a gun and a knife on him.  Jane tries to bullshit his way out of the situation, but they aren’t buying it.  Right when things are looking really bad, Lisbon kicks down the door and plugs the couple.  You know, she’s sort of badass when she’s not speaking.

A while later, the team attends Melanie’s funeral.  Van Pelt can’t fathom that two psycho killers could end up married to each other, and Jane says that they were a twisted kind of soul mates.  They see Melanie’s family, and exchange significant looks with them.  As they walk away, Jane puts his hand on Lisbon’s shoulder, the only measure of comfort he can offer.