- Title: The Mentalist – Golden Hammer
- wiki: link
Jane (Simon Baker) and the FBI head to Houston to investigate the suspicious death of a government-paid cartographer working on Pentagon defense contracts who was investigating a potential security leak in the company before his unlikely drug overdose on an assorted cocktail of everything from amphetamines to horse tranquilizers. Although initially fingering the victim’s brother (Travis Schuldt) as a lark, Jane will use the man’s obvious motive to later lay a trap for the real killer.
Setting up an ongoing story and bringing a few old faces back to the fold, Lisbon (Robin Tunney) is suprised by the appearance of a paranoid Oscar Ardiles (David Norona) who asks her advice believing his phone has been bugged and that he’s being followed. Sending him to Van Pelt (Amanda Righetti) and Rigsby (Owain Yeoman), Lisbon’s old co-workers discover the man is far less paranoid than they initially believe as someone is keeping a close eye on all the former members of the now defunct CBI team.
While Lisbon and Fischer (Emily Swallow) talk with the victim’s co-workers (Erin Way, Devon Gummersall, Michael Mantell, Mark Saul, Brian Patrick Wade), Jane becomes obsessed with a financial newspaper found in the man’s apartment which he believes contains a code for the selling of top secret government information with the victim stumbled upon in the days before his death. With the help of Cho (Harry Groener) and Wiley (Joe Adler), Jane retraces the victim’s steps and tries to figure out where the paper came from to catch a spy (Navid Negahban) and set a trap to catch a murderer and traitor.
I was suprised by the number of old faces in “Golden Hammer.” Although Van Pelt and Rigsby aren’t able to save Ardiles their discovery means we might be seeing far more of them over the second-half of the season than expected. Also of note, the episode is important as Jane is given full security clearance to work on the latest case which I would assume is likely to come back and bite the FBI in the ass before the end of the season.
