More of The Mentalist! I started this rewatch four days ago. I watched one episode on the first day, two on the second, three on the third, four today. This is not sustainable. I can't just keep increasing my watching pace; I've got things to do!

(I'm glad I rediscovered it now, though. I'm preparing to move house, which is stressful, and it turns out that The Mentalist really calms me down.)

There's so much that's great in 'Flame Red'. It's the first episode in which it really becomes clear that Jane isn't just 'playful exterior, tormented beneath'; he's 'playful exterior, tormented beneath, genuinely horrifying below that'. I love Jane going 'look, I thought this went without saying, but you know I'm absolutely going to murder Red John when I catch him, right?' and Lisbon going 'uh, just so you know, I'll arrest you.' I love Jane cheerfully extorting a confession by threatening to burn a man alive.

Also, this isn't to do with how terrifying Jane is, but this exchange was pretty great:

Rigsby: Are you thinking what I’m thinking?
Cho: No.
Rigsby: How do you know you’re not?
Cho: I was thinking how I wish I could go back in time and have sex with my eighth-grade history teacher, Miss Huffaker. Is that what you were thinking?
Rigsby: No.

All I really remembered about the episode 'Red Brick and Ivy' was that the writer was too eager to go 'hey, that was a joke just then! did you get the joke?' after every joke and it frustrated me. That still holds true, but this time around I was struck by the dynamic between Jane and Sophie Miller, his former psychiatrist. I wouldn't say I 'ship it, but Jane kissing her at the end of the episode really intrigues me.

I think what I love is the fact that he kisses her right by her mouth. A kiss on the cheek, a kiss on the mouth: these are gestures with clear meaning attached to them. What does a kiss by the mouth mean, if it's with someone you're not already in a romantic relationship with? Too intimate to be entirely normal, not quite intimate enough to be unambiguously romantic. It hovers in this weird, awkward, ambiguous space and I love it.

The flashback to Jane thanking her for helping him when he's leaving the hospital is also intriguingly weird. They're standing waaaay too close to be normal, but there's no sense of movement to suggest that they're pulling apart after a hug. So it kind of looks like they've just kissed, but presumably they haven't, unless Dr Miller is a fantastically unprofessional psychiatrist.

I'm so intrigued by weird almost-intimacy, and Patrick Jane is a great character for it, because he's very tactile and inclined to be overfamiliar and cares very intensely about the people he's close to, but he also has enormous 'if I fall in love with someone I'm betraying my wife and also they might get murdered' barriers to making actual romantic gestures.

He's so screwed up. It's so good. I've said before that Patrick Jane is a candidate for my all-time favourite fictional character, and that still absolutely holds true.