So messed up I love it
Perhaps I watch too many crime shows. There’s just something about tortured characters that I love. Not the criminals, mind you, but the protagonist who get to put the criminals in jail. All the heroes in cop dramas have some sort of tragic backstory. I’m actually taking a class called the Crime Film right now (which starts in twenty minutes, by the way), even though that really doesn’t have anything to do with what I’m saying now.
There’s a new show on CBS called The Mentalist. I watched the pilot online. It has a very similar premise to Psych, which I’ve never seen, so I can’t compare the two. But let me tell you, the end of the pilot got me hooked on this new show.
If you don’t want to be spoiled (even though this was like three weeks ago), don’t read on.
The main character, Patrick Jane, is a reformed former fake psychic. He helps investigators on cases, and has ever since he was a non-reformed, real fake psychic. On a live talk show, he pretty much taunts this one serial killer the police are after. This killer paints smiley faces on crime scene walls using his victims’ blood. So when Patrick gets home from that talk show, he sees a note hanging on his bedroom door, in which the serial killer, Red John, is taunting him right back and saying that if he were a real psychic, he wouldn’t have to open the door to see what he (Red John) has done to his (Patrick’s) wife and young daughter. So Patrick opens the door and…well, red smiley face.
Present time on this show is five years after this day. Patrick comes home at night, and his house has absolutely no furniture, but it is obvious that this is the same house he was living in five years before. He goes up to his bedroom, and lays down on a mattress which is on the floor. The mattress is right by the only decoration on the wall: a smiley face made up of his wife’s and daughter’s blood.
He sleeps there. Where his family was murdered. That’s beyond tortured or disturbed or even suicidal. There are no words for that.
Why do I have a feeling I’m not going to miss an episode?