The Mentalist (TV Series) Ball of Fire (2010) User Reviews

The Grudge

[claudio_carvalho · 8/10 · 31 December 2021]

While in a grocery shopping fruits, Patrick Jane is kidnapped by a man that puts him in the trunk of his car and kills the grocery's owner and is wounded. Patrick is handcuffed to a pipe in the basement of a house. Meanwhile a female witness provides the car model and color and the direction the kidnapper has taken on the road. Patrick offers to help the kidnapper to relief his pain, but out of the blue his accomplice arrives and shots him twice on his back. Soon Patrick Jane learns that she is Rachel, the daughter of a man that died in jail, and she says that he will have a painful death to revenge her father. Meanwhile, the CBI investigates the list of people who hold grudges against Patrick while Lisbon is attracted to a trap.

"Ball of Fire" is another great episode of "The Mentalist", where the gorgeous Jessy Schram is the evil villain. The old case of her father should have been a great segment in the lead storyline, and Hightower arriving in the exact moment to save Patrick and Lisbon is too cliches. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "Ball of Fire"

Cool story made stupid by a bad telling

[yavermbizi · 1/10 · 30 November 2021]

My overall rating of "The mentalist"'s Season 3: 4/10.

So first of all, I do think that the premise of this episode is very strong: it breaks up the monotony of the usual case-of-the-week with something that is higher-stakes but not Red John-related, and it builds off existing plot continuity rather well, saving the story from the vacuum of episodic, unrelated plotlines. Moreover, there are a few quite praiseworthy elements. The problem is, it's executed very poorly, and the strong elements sink together with the rest.

The return of the killer psychologist is great - while he's not necessarily the one character I would've loved to see more of, he's certainly an interesting one and his presence and allusions to all the processes happening outside the usual framework of a "The mentalist" episode are a welcome bit of grounding for the series. However, while leaning on that bit of continuity the authors pass up on another, and conjure up Rachel without us having met her before. Yes, it's a given that the case from "Pilot" (the very same killer psychologist's, incidentally) is not to be taken as Jane's first nor second on the job, and we're in fact to believe that there are cases getting resolved even outside the scope of the episodes we do see, but it's certainly a missed opportunity to increase audience investment by harkening back to another remembered plotline. And it's not like the reveal would've been lessened this way, as we know who the villain is very close to the beginning, even if we don't necessarily know her backstory, so having actual prior backstory would've been a boost... Don't get me wrong, Rachel is an amazing villain, both strongly-written and well-acted, I don't really have many complaints, but taking any character from "Red Tide" or Ashley Johnson's one from "Seeing Red" (her incidentally being a similar-looking actress) , or perhaps a villain (or some relation thereof) from an actually good episode such as "Ladies in Red" or "Blood Brothers" would've been a better choice...

Further, let's talk about Rachel's plan. The whole "capturing Lisbon" part is stupid, too unlikely to pull off, especially alone - what if Lisbon wouldn't be there, or would have a teammate?.. It also sure is convenient that even though Rachel's deranged, she doesn't actually do any lasting damage to anybody - as far as psycho torturers go, she's practically a humanist saint, which breaks credulity. Also, what if the firemen arrived and extinguished the building, what'd she do? It's also stupid that she's killed at the last second, and by none other than Hightower. That final confrontation was actually cool when Jane's plan failed, but they had to immediately segway onto a happy ending - and then again, why did Rachel even care that much about Lisbon's death? And Jane sure could've done more with his knife once she got close, but gotta keep him sympathetic, I guess...

Jane's capture is badly done. So is Rigsby's strange, cringeworthy gunpoint negotiation. Hightower recognises Rachel easily by a photo without having seen her in the past, but Lisbon's team don't IRL; but remember her and her case's details by name alone?..

I guess I should hope for a Rachel prequel story further on in the run, but what are the odds it'll be there?

Not much realism in this episode

[CrimeDrama1 · 3/10 · 4 May 2022]

The shootout at the beginning is a bad omen. Neither the shop keeper nor the kidnapper ever take cover once the shop keeper opens fire? Human instinct is - take cover when a person fears shots are being fired in their direction - but the shop keeper, even though wounded, walks right at the kidnapper as they both continue shooting and he is killed. The kidnapper is shot in the upper right area of his torso and is still able to SPRINT and then take several attempts to break through double wood doors that are latched?

The female kidnapper doesn't make sense either. One of my uncle's committed suicide in prison after being convicted of murder. His two kids, my cousins, refused to use his last name ever again. They made that decision as teenagers. Is the female kidnapper so delusional that she will forgive her dad for anything? She has no morals or ethics? It seems to me that what is much more reasonable - and likely - is for her to be mad at her father for his selfish decisions that took him away from her. Also, the woman is smart enough to set-up alerts on her home alarm system but has nothing set-up at the cabin, where the victims are? She had no idea Hightower was behind her.

I feel a conflict between the Patrick Jane character and the writers. How can I believe Jane is skilled in both observation and deduction when the writers don't seem to get it, sacrificing believability for added conflict and drama? So much sarcasm is added to both Jane and Lisbon it takes away from what I expect, a no-nonsense team that closes cases. I don't watch crime dramas for comedy or even sarcasm. Overall, I am really confused by Jane's character. I wonder if there was conflict between Simon Baker and the writers on how to portray Patrick Jane. There have been so many instances where what Jane said or did was counterproductive. I love the crime drama, "Elementary", which debuted during season 5 of this show and I wonder if lessons were learned by that crew and cast on what not to do in a crime drama involving a brilliant consulting detective. The similarities between Sherlock Holmes and Patrick Jane are intriguing. I rarely write reviews for that show because I had very few issues. I watch both shows almost every day now.