- Title: The Mentalist – Blood and Sand
- wiki: link
When the body of a young woman washes up on the beach of San Felix Island the CBI is sent in to investigate. Although Jane (Simon Baker) finds the the locals charming, the rest of the team finds mostly dead ends with a group of people that don’t want to have anything to do with the mainland.
The episode’s B-story involves Van Pelt (Amanda Righetti) struggling with a short fuse after the events of last season’s finale. Not only does she assault a suspect in custody but she knocks coffee over on an uncooperative social worker. Despite telling Lisbon (Robin Tunney) that everything is fine, discovering that Rigsby (Owain Yeoman) is dating a public defender (Jillian Bach) isn’t likely to help her problem.
The episode includes a couple of Jane’s antics (including announcing to the entire island’s population that they have a murderer in their midst) as well as give us a twist as the team takes down a pair of killers for two separate murders.
The murder of the week works fine, Red John is once again on the back burner, and I like the the show is taking time to deal with the fallout from last season’s finale. Van Pelt did shoot her fiance (Eric Winter) after discovering he was an agent for Red John. That’s got to screw with you. We’ll have to wait to see how things play out for Van Pelt over the course of the season.
