'The Mentalist' - 'Blood In, Blood Out' Recap

(S02E14) "You are one strange freak, man." - gang member to Jane.

Detective Cho is like the Sgt. Friday of 'The Mentalist.' He's serious, determined, no nonsense, by the book. Only I think Jack Webb used to smile a lot more than Cho does. It's great to see Cho (Tim Kang - a good actor), my favorite character on the show after Patrick Jane, get an A plot in an episode.

Wow, Cho is a bit of a hard-ass, eh? You can see how hard he has worked to get away from his past, joining the Army and all that, and he really doesn't have any patience or sympathy for the people he left behind. At least we think that at first.

As I've said before, I'd watch a spinoff with Cho as the lead.

Occam's Razor is the theory (and I'm simplifying it a bit here) that the most simple explanation is probably the right one. That could be the title of a lot of detective/mystery shows on TV, couldn't it? Too often the identity of a killer is way too easy to figure out. But you really couldn't say that about this episode. Just when every early scene is screaming "THE EXEC AT THE COMPANY DID IT!" you find out that he actually had nothing to do with the murder of Cho's friend.

Sure, it was easy to figure out that he didn't have anything to do with it when his secretary told the cops it was him and there was still 20 minutes left in the hour (one of the downsides of knowing the formula of a TV show and having several commercial breaks I guess), but it was a nice bit of misdirection for the first 40 minutes.

And with eleven minutes left we ALL knew that the last fifteen minutes of the episode was a ruse to get the cleaning guy to admit that he killed Cho's old friend. The way Cho was acting was too out-of-bounds, the way they showed (or more accurately, didn't show) Cho shooting the exec outside, the way Jane wasn't even remotely believable in the way he was talking to Cho (at least not believable to viewers who see Jane all the time), it was obvious at that point that this was one of the 'Mentalist' fake-outs.

More thoughts:

- Note to Lisbon: since when do members of your CBI team not investigate things on their own? Hasn't that been pretty much the M.O. of the entire team (including you) since the show began?

- Not sure how much of Cho's personal life in the future, but it was really great to see him at home with his girlfriend. At first I thought they were going to kill her, but that certainly would have taken the show in whole other direction.

- The scene with Jane and Cho confronting the gang members, everyone pulling guns on each other but calmed down by the soothing voice of Jane? That would never happen in real life. Someone in that room would have been dead.

- I think it's time for another Red John episode. But that won't happen for a while: the show is going into repeats for a couple of weeks.