The Mentalist: Red, White and Blue (5x17)

This episode was okay. I'll write just a very brief review on it, detailing a few things I liked and a few things I didn't.

The good: the set up. That's not something I usually praise about this show, but the idea of having a man with memory loss as your prime witness was interesting. Not revolutionary or unique necessarily, but it was utilized to good effect here.

The bad: The pay off. Jane uses a trick to catch the suspect. Very old hat. We've seen it on this show a million times. The perpetrator of the crime was really out of left field, too. The trick with a crime show is that the reveal must feel both surprising and at the same time inevitable. I was... surprised, I guess, but it seemed to come out of nowhere, and I was not given enough time to care about all of these characters so as to make the truth a big shocker.

The good: Cho. He was pretty awesome in this episode. He kicked ass and took names. I liked his side-plot with the girl who had been harrassed. I liked the payoff. I liked that we got to see someone other than Jane be competant for once.

The bad: Rigsby. Unlike Cho, he had virtually nothing to do. At least there was no repeated and stale mentions of Van Pelt this week.

The good: The humor, particularly in the opening scene, when Jane and Lisbon were singing. I also liked Rigsby's line to the murderer: "Well, look on the bright side. In prison, you won't have to pay for dates!" How Jane figured out that the guy was divorced was good, too (he used too much cologne). Very funny.

The bad: The victim. At first I was all excited about a hard-ass higher-up woman in the military. But then, it became apparent that her being a woman was basically a gimic for the plot. Sexual harrassment? Really? It just wasn't handled very well in my opinion.

The good: Jane's relationship with the soldiers throughout the episode. I loved it when he thanked them. Very sweet and sincere. It was great to see the moment at the end when Jane was teaching the PTSD patient about the memory palace. I liked this side of Jane, and I loved seeing him as a teacher and healer in a way. Very touching.

Overall: Not a particularly memorable episode, but it did have some good stuff in it. I'll give it...

6.5/10