Mind Adventures

I watched the first episode of The Mentalist last night. It's a detective series that ran from 2008 to 2015 about a former con-man psychic turned consultant for law enforcement. It's kind of a psychic cop show for people who think psychic cop shows are stupid.

Patrick (Simon Baker) is still just as much a superhero as other psychic cop characters. He can tell by a coworker's demeanour that her father was a high school coach. He can spot a killer with absolute certainty from body language alone. It's just, at the end of the day, he says it's observation, not magic.

There's a bit of the usual Twin Peaks influence--he's a bit like Agent Cooper, who also could read more than what one realistically could from body language--and there's an ongoing mystery about a killer. Then you could also look at it as a descendant of The X-Files. The X-Files presents an ongoing debate between a sceptic and a believer while, by the time of The Mentalist, audiences were only willing to have absolute faith in a sceptic.

It kind of reminds me of the popularity of non-fiction and how people who prefer it often only have a dim understanding of just how much of a point of view non-fiction actually presents. I bet a lot of people who watched Blonde thought it was an accurate and definitive account of Marilyn Monroe's life. That's what happens when everyone's too cool for school.

But here I am ranting on a tangent when I didn't think The Mentalist was so bad. Simon Baker's charming--apparently the creator wanted someone like Cary Grant and, yeah, he kind of is, especially later career Grant but in a younger body. There are two beautiful women, Robin Turney and Amanda Righetti, on his investigation team. It's fun watching him verbally suss out suspects though, of course, the show isn't the meticulously clue-based Sherlock Holmes story it pretends to be. It's a superhero show for people who never made peace with their need for superhero shows.

The Mentalist is available on Netflix.