Riona (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rionaleonhart) wrote2014-05-28 08:15 am
rionaleonhart) wrote2014-05-28 08:15 am
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I Didn't Get These Scars Falling Over In Church.
The sixth-season finale of The Mentalist didn't really sit well with me, sadly, for a number of reasons.
The first of these reasons is really just a personal thing: although I do 'ship Jane/Lisbon, I also 'ship Jane with four other people simultaneously. Jeff Winger of Community is another character I 'ship with an entire group of people, but the difference is that I can still enjoy individual pairings involving Jeff. With Jane, it's all or nothing. I was always going to be a bit sad if Jane ended up in a non-polyamorous relationship.
The second: the 'dramatic confession of love at an airport' is far, far too overdone, although there were a couple of aspects I liked about this particular take on it (the first was Jane running and jumping the fence, which felt extremely significant because he hates physical exertion; the second was Jane getting arrested, because of course he got arrested, he just jumped a fence and ran onto a plane without going through security).
The third: the 'I love you' confession felt a bit odd because Jane has always loved Lisbon and Lisbon has always known he loves her. That's never been in question. The revelation that Jane loves Lisbon is no revelation at all; the significant thing for that scene is that Jane romantically loves her. I suppose 'I ROMANTICALLY LOVE YOU' doesn't really sound great in a script, but an 'I'm in love with you' somewhere would have made it feel less 'wait, you just broke onto an aeroplane to tell me something I already knew?'
Well, I suppose you can probably guess that 'I love you' means a particular thing in the context of someone having broken onto an aeroplane to say it, but I'm still a little sad at the conflation of romantic love and other types of love. I can usually accept 'I love you' as a confession of romantic love, but I become uncertain when another love so clearly and so intensely exists already.
The fourth, and really the most significant: apparently, nobody expected The Mentalist to be renewed for a seventh season. When this episode was created, someone involved must have considered it an appropriate final episode for The Mentalist.
This worries me, because there are things that really, really need to be addressed and were not touched on in this episode. In the preceding episode, Jane roped Lisbon into psychologically torturing a confession out of someone. Earlier than that, she shielded him after he murdered Red John. Jane has shot a man to death, strangled a man with his bare hands, buried a man alive, deliberately set a serial killer on someone, carefully arranged things so Rigsby could kill the person who killed his father. Jane is a very dark character, and Lisbon by this point is more his accomplice than his friend. How could the potential final episode just... not acknowledge that? We haven't been watching a romantic comedy; we've been watching a man's gradual descent into becoming a serial killer. It's been unsettling and fascinating, and it's really not the sort of thing you can discard to focus on relationship drama!
Maybe the seventh series will deal with this? I hope so, but the fact that this could have been the final episode has shaken my confidence a little.
For all this, though, there was one scene I absolutely adored: the one where Lisbon storms off and Jane gets miserably drunk and completely forgets that he set up an elaborate trap for a killer and is incredibly confused when people start showing up with guns. PERFECT.
The first of these reasons is really just a personal thing: although I do 'ship Jane/Lisbon, I also 'ship Jane with four other people simultaneously. Jeff Winger of Community is another character I 'ship with an entire group of people, but the difference is that I can still enjoy individual pairings involving Jeff. With Jane, it's all or nothing. I was always going to be a bit sad if Jane ended up in a non-polyamorous relationship.
The second: the 'dramatic confession of love at an airport' is far, far too overdone, although there were a couple of aspects I liked about this particular take on it (the first was Jane running and jumping the fence, which felt extremely significant because he hates physical exertion; the second was Jane getting arrested, because of course he got arrested, he just jumped a fence and ran onto a plane without going through security).
The third: the 'I love you' confession felt a bit odd because Jane has always loved Lisbon and Lisbon has always known he loves her. That's never been in question. The revelation that Jane loves Lisbon is no revelation at all; the significant thing for that scene is that Jane romantically loves her. I suppose 'I ROMANTICALLY LOVE YOU' doesn't really sound great in a script, but an 'I'm in love with you' somewhere would have made it feel less 'wait, you just broke onto an aeroplane to tell me something I already knew?'
Well, I suppose you can probably guess that 'I love you' means a particular thing in the context of someone having broken onto an aeroplane to say it, but I'm still a little sad at the conflation of romantic love and other types of love. I can usually accept 'I love you' as a confession of romantic love, but I become uncertain when another love so clearly and so intensely exists already.
The fourth, and really the most significant: apparently, nobody expected The Mentalist to be renewed for a seventh season. When this episode was created, someone involved must have considered it an appropriate final episode for The Mentalist.
This worries me, because there are things that really, really need to be addressed and were not touched on in this episode. In the preceding episode, Jane roped Lisbon into psychologically torturing a confession out of someone. Earlier than that, she shielded him after he murdered Red John. Jane has shot a man to death, strangled a man with his bare hands, buried a man alive, deliberately set a serial killer on someone, carefully arranged things so Rigsby could kill the person who killed his father. Jane is a very dark character, and Lisbon by this point is more his accomplice than his friend. How could the potential final episode just... not acknowledge that? We haven't been watching a romantic comedy; we've been watching a man's gradual descent into becoming a serial killer. It's been unsettling and fascinating, and it's really not the sort of thing you can discard to focus on relationship drama!
Maybe the seventh series will deal with this? I hope so, but the fact that this could have been the final episode has shaken my confidence a little.
For all this, though, there was one scene I absolutely adored: the one where Lisbon storms off and Jane gets miserably drunk and completely forgets that he set up an elaborate trap for a killer and is incredibly confused when people start showing up with guns. PERFECT.