** Warning ** – This recap will reveal Red John’s identity.
Last week’s episode of The Mentalist left us with the CBI being shut down by the FBI, after the big revelation that its Director Gale Bertram is Red John.
This new episode, “Red John”, opens with Lisbon (Robin Tunney) and her team being warned by F.B.I. supervisory Agent Dennis Abbott (Rockmond Dunbar). They will be questioned in the following days, and they are considered suspects.
As Lisbon says to her team later, “the C.B.I. is gone now. We’re on our own.”
Meanwhile, Bertram calls Jane. He wants to meet him, to talk.
While Jane meets Lisbon, Bertram calls again and they arrange a meeting, at the Alexandria cemetery (the same cemetery where Jane’s wife and daughter are buried).
While Jane is trying to get to the appointment in time, the FBI is chasing him, and agent Abbott manages to stop him. But, thanks to Lisbon and the team, Jane can leave and arrive in time at the Alexandria cemetery to meet Bertram.
Lisbon, Cho, Rigsby and Van Pelt are all under arrest after they helped Jane. Once again, another beautiful scene with our team fighting for Jane. They didn’t esitate a second to put their lives at stake for him.
Jane finally arrives at the Alexandria cemetery, and he meets Bertram in the cemetery’s chapel.
Bertram tells Jane that he made a big mistake. He’s not Red John, he’s just a member of the Blake Association. Red John is “the top brass”. Bertram doesn’t even know who Red John really is. He was just told to call Jane, and make him meet him… to kill him.
And, just as Oscar Cordero (the agent escorting Bertram during his escape) is about to shoot Jane… he shoots and kill Bertram instead.
Red John, the real Red John, appears and tells Oscar to leave him and Jane alone.
Sheriff McAllister (Xander Berkeley) is Red John.
What follows is a confrontation between Jane and Red John, the moment Jane has been waiting for since so many years.
Red John tells Jane that he “built a secret empire. I control the lives of thousands of people. My word is life and death, and nobody knows who I am.”
Red John calls Jane “rude and contemptuous”, and that’s the reason why he killed his family.
The confrontation continues, and Jane explains how Red John managed to survive the explosion. There were actually two explosions at Jane’s house. The first, to knock everyone out. Red John dragged Jane and Bertram’s bodies out of harm’s way. And then, the second explosion killed Stiles and Haffner. McAllister easily faked his own death, by switching his DNA with a body he had at disposal.
Red John, gun in hand, is ready to kill Jane, but Jane tells him he has something to show him. In Jane’s hand there are some bread crumbs. Suddenly, a pigeon comes out from Jane’s jacket and attacks Red John (in the previous episode 6×03, we saw that McAllister was afraid of birds). At the same time, Jane takes
a gun he had previously hidden under a bench and shoots Red John, who falls down, severely injured. Jane knew since the beginning that Bertram wasn’t really Red John, and says: “I knew that whatever the truth looked like, the opposite must be true.”
Jane is about to kill Red John, but a woman interrupts him, screaming. She has a knife and she tries to kill Jane, while Red John manages to escape.
Jane runs after him, while Abbott figures out where Jane and Red John could be, but when he arrives at the chapel, he finds Bertram dead.
Red John can’t run for too long and he falls to the ground. Jane reaches him, and after a final dramatic confrontation, in which Red John admits to be afraid to die, and that he’s sorry he killed Jane’s wife and daughter, Jane strangles him. He leaves the gun in Red John’s hand.
The last scene shows us Jane calling Lisbon, but she can’t answer because her phone has been confiscated by the FBI. Jane leaves her a message saying: “Lisbon… It’s over. It’s done. I just want you to know I’m okay. And I’m gonna miss you.”
Jane runs away, finally free from Red John’s dark shadow, that dark shadow that he has been fighting since more than ten years. All the pain and the burden seem to fade away as Jane runs away.
The last image shows us a mother walking with her little daughter in a park, and the last thing we hear, is a little girl’s laugh.
This is the end of Red John. Jane managed to exact his revenge on him.
But is Jane really free now? His life is going to change forever, but how? And Lisbon? And her team?
From next Sunday, a new The Mentalist will answer all these questions. A new The Mentalist post Red John.
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