The Mentalist: The Complete Second Season Reviews

One of television’s highest rated shows and one of its most enjoyable is CBS’ The Mentalist. In this second season set, the show has built on its premise of a wily fake physic with incredible powers of observation and an ability to read not people’s thoughts but their faces, body language, and actions and put together all of this information in order to solve crimes. By expanding what we know about the regular characters, placing the team in jeopardy on more than one occasion, adding and subtracting to the cast of recurring characters, and giving its charismatic star even more room to delight and fascinate us, The Mentalist quickly became the most popular show on Thursday nights on any network eventually eclipsing CBS’ stalwart ratings-grabber CSI.

Simon Baker is back as Patrick Jane, still on the lookout for serial killer Red John who killed his wife and daughter and drove Patrick to the CBI (California Bureau of Investigation) in order to help catch him. While on his trail, Patrick assists the team in all of their investigations. The team is headed by Teresa Lisbon (Robin Tunney) with the taciturn Kimball Cho (Tim Kang), gullible but ingratiating Wayne Rigsby (Owain Yeoman), and rookie Grace Van Pelt (Amanda Righetti) in support.

Because the stories are mostly self-contained, the order in which they’re viewed isn’t always of paramount importance though there are a few continuing story arcs this season. The first half this year finds Patrick butting heads with another CBI unit who has been newly assigned the Red John case. The team is headed by Sam Bosco (Terry Kinney) who despises Jane’s ways of circumventing police protocol in order to close cases and thus chooses not to keep Patrick abreast of any new information in the Red John case. The romantic tension between Van Pelt and Rigsby reaches its apex this season, but since a sexual relationship between agents is forbidden by CBI regulations, the couple must sneak around to stay together. Halfway through the season, new boss Madeleine Hightower (Aunjanue Ellis) recognizes what’s going on between them quickly and calls an end to it. She also recognizes Patrick’s value to the unit, but his tendency to trample on the egos of pompous boors and bureaucrats makes her place Lisbon on the hot seat for his behavior adding an extra degree of tension to the episodes in the second half of the season.

Among this season’s most enjoyable episodes are those that find Patrick outside his comfort zone. In one, he’s thrown into prison for bugging Bosco’s office to learn about new clues in the Red John case. Naturally he’s able to use his uncanny ability to decipher some inmates’ fears, phobias, and hang-ups to ingratiate himself with some of the most hardened criminals. He has similar success with a biker gang that the team must deal with in a different investigation. Perhaps the season’s best episode takes off when Patrick is accidentally bonked on the head with a baseball sending his subconscious back to his youth when he and his father where scam artists for a traveling carnival. The episode offered great insight into Patrick’s past and illustrated why, apart from the tragedy of losing his wife and daughter, there lingers an air of melancholy about him even when he’s at his most flippant and charming. As with season one, season two ends with another encounter with Red John, the second one of the season after a surprise attack on CBI, which puts Patrick’s new lady friend Kristina Frye (Leslie Hope) in mortal jeopardy.

Here are the twenty-three episodes of the series’ second season contained on five discs in this box set:

1 – Redemption

2 – The Scarlet Letter

3 – Red Badge

4 – Red Menace

5 – Red Scare

6 – Black Gold and Red Blood

7 – Red Bulls

8 – His Red Right Hand

9 – A Price Above Rubies

10 – Throwing Fire

11 – Rose-Colored Glasses

12 – Bleeding Heart

13 – Redline

14 – Blood In, Blood Out

15 – Red Herring

16 – Code Red

17 – The Red Box

18 – Aingavite Baa

19 – Blood Money

20 – Red All Over

21 – 18-5-4

22 – Red Letter

23 – Red Sky in the Morning

Video Quality

The series is broadcast in 1080i on CBS with the 1.78:1 television aspect ratio, and these downconverted 480p transfers look on the whole very good indeed. Flesh tones are very natural and appealing, and color registration is perfection. Sharpness is good to very good. There are some problems with aliasing with tight line structures and moiré patterns on striped shirts and suits. Otherwise, the video quality is all one would expect from standard definition. Each episode has been divided into 6 chapters.

Audio Quality

The Dolby Digital 5.1 sound design is a lot more active than one would expect for a procedural series. Music is a constant inhabitant of the soundfield, and interesting uses of split surrounds into the various channels can be found in every episode. Much of each episode involves dialogue, and it's clear and clean in the center channel. This is one of the best sound designs for a series that is not science fiction oriented.

Special Features

All of the features are presented in anamorphic widescreen.

There are eight deleted scenes spread over four of the five discs in the set. Disc one contains four scenes than run 3 ¼ minutes. Disc two has two scenes running 2 minutes. Discs three and four have one scene each, each one lasting ½ minute.

“The Art of The Mentalist with Chris Long” has the show’s executive producer Chris Long and professional mind reader Luke Jermay analyzing the opening sequence from the season premiere, talking about the methods Patrick is using to read people and establish who committed a crime in a department store. It runs 13 ¾ minutes.

“Mentalism – A Subliminal Art” is a series of eleven brief featurettes featuring professional mind reader Luke Jermay interacting with the cast and crew of the show in a series of parlor tricks using his gifts in reading people. The segments featuring just Jermay has him asking the viewer to take part in an esperiment.

• The Art of Mind Reading with Simon Baker (8 ¾ minutes)
• The Art of Suggestive Imagery with Robin Tunney (7 minutes)
• Secrets of Cognitive Persuasion with Luke Jermay (5 ¾ minutes)
• The Art of Knowing Secrets with Owain Yeoman (5 ¼ minutes)
• The Art of Hidden Objects with Amanda Righetti (4 ¼ minutes)
• The Secret of the Pendulum with Luke Jermay (3 minutes)
• The Art of Suggestive Imagery with Tim Kang (7 ½ minutes)
• The Art of Intuitive Deduction with Bruno Heller and the writing staff (6 ¼ minutes)
• Secrets of Interactive Mind Ccontrol with Luke Jermay (1 ¾ minutes)
• The Art of Muscle Reading with Amanda Righetti (5 minutes)
• Secrets of Ideomotor Manipulation with Luke Jermay (1 ½ minutes)

In Conclusion

The second season of The Mentalist was every bit as entertaining and surprising as its sterling and very successful first season. This box set of its second season episodes offers good video and audio quality and a few bonuses that fans of the show will undoubtedly appreciate. Recommended!

Matt Hough

Charlotte, NC