The Mentalist: Red Tide (Episode 103)

Best. Episode. Ever.A little girl and her mom frolic happily on the beach.  That never leads to anything good.  The girl picks up some seaweed on the sand, and is promptly traumatized for life when she finds the body of a blonde girl underneath it.  Cut to the CBI headquarters, where Lisbon and her new sporty ponytail are debriefing the team about the dead girl.  Her name was Christine Tanner, she was 15, and she was hit in the head with a surfboard and then drowned in a ditch.  Not in the ocean, as we would expect.  While she’s doing this, Jane is…waltzing with Van Pelt?  He calls it “finding where she hid the van keys,” but whatever.  Van Pelt seems to be mentally telling him to go in one direction, and Jane seems to buy it until he suddenly goes in the opposite direction and finds the keys.  The team shares a giggle at this tomfoolery, and God help me, but I think I might ship it.

Back at the beach, a group of surfer kids are throwing leis into the ocean in Christine’s memory.  Jane, Rigsby, and Cho arrive on the scene and are approached by two of the kids.  They claim to have been close friends of Christine’s, and introduce themselves as Hope and Win.  Yeah, his name is Win.  I can’t even joke about that.  It’s just too easy.  Anyway, they tell the team that the last time they saw Christine was three days before, at an “epic Northeast swell.”  They were out at night, because Christine loved to swim “’til it was darkest dark.”  I’m going to kill myself.  The kids also mention that Christine was frequently hooking up with their friend Danny.  Before they leave, Jane and his fantastically windswept hair ask what color and animal Christine would be, and her friends say that she would be an orange rabbit.  Apparently, this means that we are now looking for someone who doesn’t like orange rabbits.  Cho and Rigsby start to leave, but Jane decides to stay and lies down in the sand.  It’s a good thing.

Lisbon and Van Pelt go to Christine’s home to speak with her father.  He seems to be in a bad way, as there are several empty bottles of alcohol lying around.  He also proves to be a shitty father, as it took him two days to notice that Christine was missing.  Oh, and he only noticed that she was gone because she hadn’t made dinner for her two younger siblings.  Class.  Act.  He defends his actions by saying that he’s always working construction and thus can’t watch the kids all the time.  He also explains that he’s a single parent, because his wife was killed by a drunk driver five years before.  We get a good long close up of Lisbon’s face as he says this, so I’m guessing this is somehow significant to her.  Although she just looks vaguely confused, so maybe she’s never heard of cars or something.   After the accident Christine took on most of the maternal responsibilities of the household.  Lisbon mentions that Christine was arrested the year before because of marijuana possession, but her father asserts that that was her ex-friend Darlene’s fault.  Since joining the surfing clan, though, Christine and Darlene had stopped hanging out.  He thought the surfers were a good influence on her, and remembered a few names like Danny, Hope, and Flipper.  If Flipper is a dolphin I will actually have to cut some bitches.  Christine’s father interrupts the conversation by asking his daughter to fix lunch for her younger brother.  Methinks he has found Christine’s replacement.

At the beach, my dreams are coming true.  Jane is walking in the sand, shirt partly unbuttoned and hair flowing in the breeze.  Let’s just pause for a moment to savor that image.  He sits down near a young girl who is attempting to make a sand castle with buckets of various sizes.  Jane starts playing in the sand with his shoe until she finally offers him a bucket.  I just noticed that Jane still wears his wedding ring.  That’s sort of heartbreaking.

Lisbon and Van Pelt exit Christine’s house, and Lisbon fucking EATS IT on the stairs.  BWAHAHA!  Oh, that was good TV.  Van Pelt is clearly a better person than I am, as she manages not to laugh in Lisbon’s face.  “It’s gotta be tough,” she says.  “Drunk driver.  Isn’t that what happened to your mother?”  Is that back story I hear?  Van Pelt promptly regrets her question, because Lisbon tells her to STFU about personal business and go wait in the van like a good little bitch.  She then calls Cho, who discovers that Darlene is currently doing time in juvie.  They set up a meeting with her.

Back at the beach, Jane is shamelessly pwning that little girl at making sandcastles.  She’s basically made a pile of sand while he’s made the sandy equivalent of Hogwarts.  A group of people applaud him, and he seems genuinely proud of his efforts.  It’s kind of adorable.

At the police station, Lisbon meets with Darlene.  She doesn’t seem all that upset by the news of Christine’s death, and refuses to give up any information until Lisbon promises to put in a good word with the D.A.  Once she has Lisbon’s word, she says that the previous year Christine had been sleeping with an older guy she called Pops.  Darlene isn’t sure if they ever broke up or not, but she mentions that Pops was good in bed and liked Elvis.  She doesn’t have any more info, so Lisbon walks out without calling the D.A.  Cho has found some info on Flipper, whose real name is Philip Handler and who was arrested for severely assaulting a woman a few years before.  The team drives over to Flipper’s mobile home.  There’s loud rock music coming from inside, so they bust in.  In the back room they find Flipper, who was one of the people watching Jane at the beach.  And yup, you guessed it, Jane is with him, gleefully kicking Flipper’s ass at chess.  His awesomeness knows no bounds.

When they get back to the police station, Jane explains that he went after Flipper because he had colorful beads in his hair, just like Christine did.  I hate myself for thinking this, but Christine sort of looks like a prettier version of Heidi Montag.  Or, as my roommate puts it, “it’s Heidi Montag if she wasn’t a whore.”  Aaaaaand now I can’t unsee it.  Lisbon and Jane begin to interrogate Flipper.  When Lisbon mentions the woman he assaulted, Flipper flippantly dismisses his actions.  Apparently his ex was pouring some junk into the storm drain, which is basically the equivalent of mass murdering dolphins.  Lisbon asks if Heidi Christine was “damaging marine life somehow,” but Flipper asserts that “Chris understood.”  Wow.  That’s deep, man.  We also learn that Flipper is a complete pedo who loves kids because they are “pure in spirit and in flesh.”  He denies that he killed Christine, but he does admit that he wanted have sex with her in a big way.  But Flipper’s totally a stand up guy, because he always waits until girls are of age before he forces himself on them.  He’s an inspiration.  Luckily for him, Jane’s hair decides that he didn’t do it, and that vote of confidence gets Flipper to admit that he last saw Christine the same night that her friends did, at a late night beach party at Devon Point.

Christine’s father and siblings arrive at the police station.  Her father wants to know if Flipper killed her, but Lisbon simply deems him a person of interest.  Just then Flipper walks out of the interrogation room, and Christine’s father tries to attack him.  Lisbon body slams him into the wall as he breaks down in tears, telling him that he needs to go home and take care of his children.  The family leaves and Van Pelt watches Lisbon, a reminder of Lisbon’s back story just in case we viewers didn’t retain the information for the past nineteen minutes.

Lisbon and Jane head over to the local high school to talk to some of Christine’s friends.  Hope and Win are there, along with Danny and Andy.  Jane asks each of them which animal they would be, and they answer hawk, tiger, killer whale, and dolphin respectively.  He then asks why they didn’t mention the beach party the last time they talked.  They say that they were drinking and didn’t want to have that put on their records, and that they were trespassing on private land owned by Danny’s father.  Everyone left around ten except for Christine, who stayed behind to clean up.  Hope mentions that she thinks Christine was meeting someone there, are she didn’t go home with Danny when he asked her to.  And then the group awkwardly reveals that they have occasional orgies.  Yeah.

Over at Devon Point, Lisbon and Jane interrupt the construction of a bunch of condos to investigate Christine’s disappearance.  The construction overseer is none too pleased about this, and rants about how people aren’t showing up for work.  In fact, on the same night that Christine was killed, a night guard named Eddie Garcia just walked off the job.  I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.  Jane waltzes around until he notices something sticking out of a cement block.  He calls Lisbon over, and she looks hilariously horrified by what she sees.  And if you guessed that it’s the tip of Eddie’s nose, you are correct!  The overseer doesn’t believe it until her actually touches the nose, though.  Yuck.

A bit later, the chuck of cement containing the body is being removed.  Just as Lisbon is admonishing the overseer for being a dumb fuck, Danny’s dad Dane arrives.  He’s far more upset by the prospect of halting construction than he is by the fact that someone died.  They tell him that they think the scene may be connected to Christine’s death, and he won’t confirm whether he’s met her or not.  As he’s about to leave, Jane calls out “Hey Pops!” and Dane responds.  Busted!  When he asks what’s going on, Jane calls him a “sweaty little pervert” and says that he was “laying [Christine] like carpet.”  He then asks Lisbon to arrest him, solely based on the fact that his car is blasting Elvis.  I love this man.  Lisbon just apologizes to Dane, but Jane persists until Dane punches him in the nose.  Hee.

Since Dane assaulted Jane (heh, that rhymes), Lisbon has no choice but to arrest him.  Her boss is not particularly happy with this, since Dane has a good deal of influence.  She convinces him to let them hold onto Dane for a little bit longer.  In the interrogation room, Cho is grilling Dane about Christine.  He tries to appeal to him by pretending to like 15 year old girls as well.  Dane is flabbergasted that people actually fall for that shit, as am I.  Jane and Lisbon watch from outside, and Jane announces that Dane isn’t going to confess.  “What’d you think, he was going to break under the bad lighting conditions?” Lisbon asks.  Hee!  Y’all know how I feel about her, but she is actually starting to warm my cold, cold heart a bit.  Jane decides to put phase two of his “cunning plan” into action, so he calls Danny and tells him and his crew to meet him at Devon Point in two hours.  Lisbon wants to know what shenanigans they’re about to get into, but Jane doesn’t say.  As they’re preparing to leave, Dane is released and tells Jane that he’s suing the CBI unless he and Lisbon are fired.  Lisbon tells him to GTFO, and he tells her that he’d nail her if she wasn’t so old.  Alrighty then.

Jane meets the gang down at Devon’s Point.  He informs them of Flipper’s assault conviction and that Christine was doing it with Danny’s father.  Danny is shocked, but Hope announces that everyone knew about it.  Wait, so he was knocking boots with someone who he knew was also screwing his father?  That’s just gross!  They all walk down to the beach, which apparently takes several hours, because by the time they get there night has fallen.  Jane tells the kids that he wants to hypnotize them so that they can remember events of that night that they may have overlooked, like someone standing on the bluff or something.  He assures them that he won’t be able to hypnotize them if they don’t want to be hypnotized.  Reluctantly, they agree to give it a try.  They sit by a fire, and Jane tells them “to close [their] eyes and listen.”  But how will he hypnotize them if they can’t see his hair?  He tells them to listen only to his voice, but he keeps hitting his pocket audibly as he walks around them.  After a minute, Hope lets out a cry, and says that she can see Danny’s father standing on the bluff.  Danny’s like “um, the fuck?” but she insists that he’s there.  Jane snaps her out of her trance, and everyone but Danny becomes more or less convinced that his dad is the killer.  He storms off, saying that “you guys suck!”  Oh wow, I don’t know how they’re ever going to recover from that zinger.  The others go after him, leaving Jane alone on the beach.

The next day, Jane tells counts down the seconds until the gang arrives and points at the door, but no one comes through it.  ‘How cool would it have been if one had walked in right there?” he asks.  About two seconds later, Hope really down walk in, much to Lisbon’s amazement.  She asks if they’ve arrested Danny’s father yet, but they tell her that Dane has a rock solid alibi for that evening.  Which means that she was lying about seeing him on the bluff.  “Maybe it’s symbolic,” she says, and Jane points out the symbolism of her being a hawk while Christine was a rabbit.  He admits that he never really hypnotized her, and that she was simply trying to lead them in the wrong direction.  They take her into the interrogation room and she recounts the events of that night.  Eddie Garcia the security guard tried to get them to leave, so Danny punched him, causing him to hit his head fatally on some construction equipment.  Everyone promised to keep it a secret except Christine, who insisted that they had to tell the truth.  With his entire future at stake, Danny hit Christine over the head with a surf board and then drowned her in a trough nearby.    She says that no one said anything about it because they were afraid that Danny would hurt them as well.

Right at the end of this confession, Danny arrives at the station, saying that he can’t let his father take the blame for something he didn’t do.  Jane tells him about Hope’s confession, and they take him to the interrogation room with her.  He tells them that Hope was lying, and that she was the one who killed Christine.  “Hope was jealous of her,” he explains.  “It used to be Hope who was all that.  Then Chris came along and we would only hook up with Hope when Chris wasn’t around.”  Would you like some ice for that burn?  Hope finally breaks down and admits that she did it, because Christine “was a prissy hypocritical bitch” who just had to “show integrity and morals.”  The nerve.  Just as she finishes THIS confession, Win and Andy show up.  They insist that Flipper actually killed Christine.  Jane’s like “um, not so much,” and brings them into the room with Hope and Danny.  He says that all four of them killed her.  Hope, he says, “made all of you take part to make you all equally guilty, so that no one would tell on the others.”  They’re all arrested for murder.

Dane isn’t off the hook either, as he is arrested on a count of statutory rape.  Christine’s father comes down to the station and asks what his punishment will be, but Lisbon admits that he probably won’t even go to jail without Christine’s testimony.  Before he leaves, she tells him to be good to his kids, and he insists that he already is.  “Before my mother died, my father was a good man, just like you are,” Lisbon explains.  “After she died, he was a self-pitying drunk, just like you are.”  She confesses that he killed himself and almost killed her and her brothers.  She tells him to get some help on his children’s behalf.  He takes the card she offers and walks away, and Lisbon and Jane briefly exchange a glance before she returns to her office.

NEXT WEEK: Jane gets a crush!  And possibly gets capped!