The Mentalist – Black-Winged Redbird

• Title: The Mentalist – Black-Winged Redbird
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While Lisbon (Robin Tunney) recovers from her brief encounter with Red John, Jane (Simon Baker) and the team investigate the murder of a samurai-obsessed drone engineer (David H. Lawrence XVII) whose car was apparently destroyed by one of his own inventions. During the course of the investigation the team talks with the heads of the company (Paula Marshall, Ivar Brogger), the engineer’s assistant (Vik Sahay), his favorite prostitute (Jessica Blank), and another aeronautics engineer (James Urbaniak) who was suing the victim and the company for stealing his work. Although one of them is culpable for the man’s death, none of them actually caused it.

When three of the remaining Red John suspects all meet, Jane takes the opportunity to plant a seed of doubt while disrupting the meeting between Bertram (Michael Gaston), Reede Smith (Drew Powell), and Thomas McAllister (Xander Berkeley). Unable to get a hold of Sophie Miller (Elisabeth Röhm), and fearing the worst that Red John may have reached out to her to gather information about Jane, the mentalist makes a trip to his former psychiatrist’s home where he finds a particularly gruesome present from Red John in the woman’s oven. Believing Red John may have masquerading as one of the psychologist’s patients to get closer to her. Although Rigsby (Owain Yeoman) discovers a recent client’s file is missing, Jane recovers the psychiatrist’s recorded notes which leads him to believe Sophie did sit down with Red John before he murdered her.

Bringing back Sophie, as an example of Red John’s displeasure with Jane and his list of names, is an interesting twist, but actually showing Röhm alive in more than just flashbacks would have helped sell her importance to Jane (especially as we only met her once, way back in 2008). Despite the fact that Jane hoped the recording would give him clues to Red John’s true identity, the final montage shows us any one of the remaining six suspects could be the serial killer. The mystery of the week works fine, although for a murder by drone strike it’s far from one of the show’s more memorable deaths and the opening scene gives away the ending long before Jane solves the crime.