Sunday, September 19, 2010

More on The Mentalist

As predicted, there are some things in my notes that didn't make it into the video. Most of them are little things, like that occasionally the background noise (footsteps, traffic, ringing phones) drowns out the dialogue, or that the camera during fight scenes has no desire to show us what's going on, or the myriad continuity errors from multiple takes. So I won't go in to those.

A big one though, is that, like his inspiration, Patrick Jane is occasionally wrong. Sherlock Holmes was wrong all the time, he frequently edited his theory as he got more information to accommodate the new facts, and on one spectacular occasion (Wisteria Lodge, I think it was), he was out-and-out wrong. Jane is outright wrong more often than Sherlock was, but it's usually about minor things, and he brushes off his mistakes with such savvy that it's difficult to notice when he's wrong. Which is a great thing from the actor. The writers made him wrong, yes, but a minor tweak to the way Simon Baker plays it, and the scripted mistakes could be glaring.

The other major thing is the way the show treats the supernatural. Early on there's an episode with a psychic, and it's heavily implied that she's a faker, but no undeniable proof ever comes up, and her insights provided one of the best "Awwww" moments in the show. She wasn't even the bad-guy-of-the-week, just a minor character antagonist.

There's also an episode with a "Wiccan," whose depiction is just about as stereotypically neo-pagan as is possible. I hates her, because she's... well... fluffy. For some reason that's the only satisfactorily descriptive that I've got. She does cast a couple of spells and, if you interpret it that way, they come true, but it could also be chalked up pretty easily to coincidence. Thankfully.

No comments:

Post a Comment