owainyeoman

(S01E12) The opening scenes grabbed me right away this week. The Mentalist is best when Jane is doing his divergent thing, and that's just what he does when the rest of the team goes into the flower shop to interview the missing boy's parents. He puts together the pink bike, the glance to the woods and the crows and finds the boy's body before the theme. Nice.

There were other parts of this episode that were throwbacks to the early days, when Jane was not only way ahead of the team, but also more over the top than some of the more recent episodes. Thank you, Bruno Heller!

(S01E08) I have a complaint about The Mentalist: there's just not enough Jane for me. Simon Baker is the heart and soul of this show and I crave more screen time for him, and more of the antics we saw in the first couple of episodes. Regardless, this is one great show and I won't hold it against the writers that they are attempting to go deeper with the rest of the cast; a good idea, really.

OK, maybe I have two complaints, and this one is aimed at the director: Is it possible to tell the actor who plays the killer to not be so shifty the second they get screen time? I knew whodunnit so early on that I actually second-guessed myself.

As someone who was a regular watcher of The Guardian, it makes me happy to see that the star of that show is coming back to the home screens. Simon Baker will star in the CBS drama The Mentalist. The pilot has been given the go-ahead by the network, which mean Simon could be back on the schedule by next fall (if the show is picked up).

The Mentalist sounds like it should be something like a Kreskin extravaganza, but it's not. Instead it's described as the story of Patrick Jane, a man with heightened skills of observation who uses his talents to solve crimes.