Season 4

Obvious choice would be for them to reveal a new antagonist for Jane at the end of tomorrow's episode making it seem like Red John wasn't alone, and he some how gets the charges against Jane dropped, making it a person in power.

What ever they do, something as to happen to make Jane want to continue to crime fight

Well, I stand kind of corrected. I didn't think of the insanity angle and while the episode didn't try to convince us of that I still appreciated it a lot. Probably because Bruno Heller was smart about it and didn't try to cram the idea down our throats, but just put it out there and let it fester on its own.

And I have to admit the reveal that who he killed wasn't Red John didn't lessen last season's finale as much as I thought it would. I really liked that the reveal it wasn't Red John was a private one for Jane, not a public one, because it allowed Jane to get off scot-free, re-framed Red John as the target, and made Jane that much darker and less heroic. It is also going to put new strain on Jane's relationship with Lisbon and worked really well as a plot device.

"We're on the side of the demons, Chief. We're evil men in the gardens of paradise, sent by the forces of death to spread devastation and destruction wherever we go."
-- Colonel Tigh

You couldn't be more accurate on things..covered me absolutely..

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Regular old continuity error I guess. . . I like that she was using a Chevy Volt though.

As for the episode, I liked it. Patrick doing his thing with the jury was pretty good. . .

don't sweat the petty things, pet the sweaty things

I felt like he did manipulate the jury - not with a great speech, like we're used to from law shows, but with painting them a very vivid picture of Red John's atrocities across multiple victims and then bringing it home for the personal touch of his wife's and daughter's murder. He used projection to make the jury first hate Red John and then feel his loss of a dear one and giving them a way to banish those feelings by alleviating his suffering by setting him free. That pretty much is how those things work in real life. (But I am not suggesting that exactly the same situation would work in real life on a real jury - I'm just saying that juries are swayed without elaborate and sterling closing arguments, which are mostly an invention of popular fiction.)

I hear you with Lie to Me and Cal's explanations but that is really just TV writing shorthand. It would get repetitive and boring if every time Cal had to explain how he caught somebody's body language when they were lying. It's like KITT driving into or out of the truck that served as their mobile base in Knight Rider. We were shown that the first few episodes but after a while they just cut to the interior of the truck or Michael on the road already, because you know how he got where he is. You can have only so many shots of a car entering / exiting a semi and they would get repetitive and stale really quick. Conversely you have only so many body language "tells" that you can use and mentioning them in dialog every time gets boring very fast.

Having said that I would have liked if Jane's case would have ended in a hung jury, i.e. his skill was good enough to deadlock the jury and have the case dismissed rather than an out-and-out not guilty verdict. A hung jury would also have prevented Jane from returning to the CBI and the show from restoring the status quo, which is something they seem to be aiming at (even though most of the team is still suspended and the CBI boss was again playing politics and throwing Jane to the wolves so it's unlikely Jane will be welcomed back to CBI with open arms). Honestly, going back to solving cases-of-the-week in the second episode of this season would piss me off much more than the fact that they resurrected Red John.

"We're on the side of the demons, Chief. We're evil men in the gardens of paradise, sent by the forces of death to spread devastation and destruction wherever we go."
-- Colonel Tigh

You are right, we haven't, and I wish the writers would have handled it differently. But part of my argument was also that especially with juries and heinous crimes you don't really need to be a mentalist to get an "incorrect" ruling. It's simple human nature.

The thing that bothered me more about the trial wasn't Jane's manipulation of the jury's emotions but the fact that the DA let the girl who was held hostage by wannabe-Red John testify. That was the key that allowed Jane to paint wannabe-Red John as an evil monster, yet the girl's abduction had nothing to do with wannabe-Red John's murder, because Jane wasn't aware of it and couldn't have claimed to be rescuing her / investigating the kidnapping, so I don't see the grounds on which her testimony was allowed.

"We're on the side of the demons, Chief. We're evil men in the gardens of paradise, sent by the forces of death to spread devastation and destruction wherever we go."
-- Colonel Tigh

Predictably boring

Renewed also for season 6:
http://www.spoilertv.com/2012/06/mental … eason.html

Well, I couldn't stay away and watched the entire season 4 last week. I still don't like it how they handled the Red John situation at the beginning of the season, but other RJ episodes were better and the finale was ok. I'd also like to add that "normal" procedural episodes were more interesting than the ones last season and I'd call only a few of them weak. The new boss was also ok. What I didn't like about season 4 is what they did to some of the characters. Kimball hooking up with a hooker? Really? And I'm supposed to be sad when she left? C'mon... I also couldn't care less about Rigsby's life since they've only shown tiny portions of it. I understand that this show is primarily about Patrick, Teresa, Red John and solving normal murders, but if you waste air time on additional characters you should do it properly.