'The Mentalist' Still Has Simon Baker, but the Stories Are Becoming Boring

For the second time in as many weeks, I tried to tough out an entire episode of "The Mentalist" and actually be able to come away saying something positive about it, other than that I like Simon Baker and his flippant remarks, as when he was asked in this night's episode, "Don't you ever get tired of your own cynicism?" and he responded, "Oh, weary as hell."

The problem with the episodes of the past couple weeks seems to be that the writers attempt to shove in too many current topics in almost random fashion. The first week it was a murder connected to cage fighting. (The resolution had to do with switching blood samples of prospective fighters). It's not just one murder victim thrown to the hungry crowd. It seems as though extraneous victims are de rigeur.

Tonight's episode involved Simon's attraction to and rivalry with a female spiritual psychoanalyst, the murder of a man who was about to give a controversial speech about human trafficking, and whether or not the murdered man, Hector Brava, (who was married to a fat-faced blonde named Ilsa English), employed prostitutes himself. Did he, in fact, have a secret townhouse love-nest in Oakland and an illegitimate daughter. (And can we be made to care during a 60 minute---minus commercials---episode, when bodies are dropping like flies and the story lines seem very thin and very poorly developed?)

Boghun Mohoney wrote this episode; John F. Showalter directed it. My advice to them would be to streamline these plot lines. By the time the writer started throwing in a seance and references to "two Carmens" and another dead body, I had totally lost interest. Same thing happened last week with the cage boxing episode. Many "meh" moments.

There were still a few bright spots, as when Ilsa called a character named Farik Sharif (thrown in as a spurned suitor and potential suspect) "a pig and an ass." Simon responded, "That can't be good." I also liked the remark from the spiritual psychoanalyst, "You think you manipulated me into coming with you" and Simon's saucy retort, "No, I don't. I think I manipulated you into thinking I manipulated you." Anything Simon delivers with his winning smile will come off as witty, and that line, writers, was clever and thought-provoking. But I digress and that line does not lead to other good ones.

The plot became murky almost immediately, with Russell, the black aide to the dead man, revealing that he sometimes "pimped" for the victim. Characters rotated through the plot faster than Khardashians through the talk show circuit. There was a prostitute named Clarette onscreen for about 25 seconds, presumably only to deliver the key to Hector's love nest. Sally Alvarez, who died of blunt force trauma near the end of the program, was onscreen for about 2 seconds and nobody cared. The previously mentioned "2 Carmens," one being Carmen Reyes, the purported illegitimate daughter of the dead man, was another confusing theme for the night.

I became so bored so quickly---just as with last week's episode dealing with the cage fighters---that my mind wandered totally off.

My advice to the writers: Streamline your plots. Reduce the number of characters you attempt to present in one show. Make us care whether this one or that one gets murdered, because, right now, you're wasting the talents of Simon Baker in this series.

I hope this charming Australian actor quickly moves on to feature films, because I'd like to see more of him, at least, if not too many more of these disjointed, overly-packed episodes with Dickensian character development (i.e., Dickens was famous for his cardboard cutout characters with NO character development) on full display.