Compromise and Conceit

There is an apocryphal story about Chinese government censorship, which holds that the ending of Fight Club was changed in the Chinese cinematic release. The story goes that the censor didn’t remove the final nihilistic ending, but added an epilogue before the credits to the effect that “then the police moved in and caught everyone involved in these crimes.” In this version of censorship the audience still gets to enjoy their destructive, purposeless attack on the emblems of the status quo, but we are reassured that the government will catch you if you do this sort of thing, with the obvious subtext that the main character’s entire schizophrenic mission failed, and the government survived his obnoxious freakout.

I don’t know if this story is true or not but I was reminded of it as I struggled to the fun but disappointing ending of the television show The Mentalist. There was potential for this show to be a genuinely trenchant critique of the carceral state in the USA, but something happened in the middle of season 6, so that by the end of that season my wife asked me, not entirely rhetorically, “did somebody get to the director?” This becomes even more obvious in season 7, when the entire cast essentially do a backflip on everything they have stood for over the past 6 seasons, and we discover that actually everything is fine and dandy in modern America and you only have yourself to blame if the police kill you.

The Mentalist’s grand conspiracy

[Warning: Spoilers!]

If you haven’t watched this show I recommend that you do so, and don’t read further. If you don’t plan to, or you’ve already seen it, let’s recap the basic premise. Patrick Jane is a fake psychic and carnival trickster who has made a lot of money bilking rich women out of their money by pretending to be a medium, but his life crashes out when a serial killer called Red John murders his wife and daughter. He somehow manages to convince the California governor to let him be a “consultant” on murder investigations with the state Criminal Bureau of Investigation (CBI) who are the good guys in this story who stand somewhere between the FBI and municipal police, taking on cases the latter can’t handle and the former can’t touch[1]. He acts like he’s simply a bored, clever guy helping the police, but his sole motive is to get involved in the Red John case, find Red John, and kill him. In most other ways the show is a typical police procedural, and we get the usual inter-office romance, corrupt DEA agents, everyone hates the FBI when they swoop in and take over cases, the FBI are all arseholes and the local cops are all dumb, the usual stuff.

Patrick Jane (the titular mentalist) is an annoying, silly guy, but his methods are fun and he’s a cheerful kind of dude, so it’s enjoyable watching him use dumb-arse psychological tricks, legedermain and smoke and mirrors to flush out murderers. It gets a bit tired after five seasons obviously but it’s fun, his colleagues at the CBI are generally fun (though Lisbon, his “boss”, can be a bit tiresome). Every season there are 2 or 3 episodes that get us closer to the serial killer Red John, and part of the conceit here is that Patrick Jane is super clever and devious, but Red John is strangely always one step ahead of him.

We find out why this is from about season 4, when we start to notice two compelling details about Red John’s work:

• He has people within the CBI and at least one district attorney helping him
• He seems to be running a cult of serial killers

The latter is particularly noticeable in seasons 3-4, where we regularly find that other serial killers are either directly or indirectly working for him, they all know of him, and they’re terrified of him. They also seem to be fanatically loyal to him, so that even when they have nothing to lose by helping Patrick Jane and a lot to gain, they’d rather kill themselves.

Tracking Red John becomes harder as the seasons pass and it becomes clear that he is spying on them through contacts in the CBI. The ring of people we begin to realize are working for him expands, to include local police, sheriffs[3], the FBI and, by the time we get to season 6, we learn that he has judges and senators in his pocket, as well as the CIA, NSA and DEA. In fact his network is so deep and powerful that he is able to force one of them to get engaged to Patrick Jane’s colleague Grace Van Pelt[4], and she is forced to put her own boyfriend down like a dog when they find out the truth.

These things combined lead us to suspect that Red John is very powerful, and it seems most likely that he is the leader of a cult called Visualize that is obviously modeled on the Scientologists. I guess some pressure got put on the producers or whatever because despite the obvious recurring blazing hints dropped all through seasons 2-5, he ends up being one of the good guys, and Red John turns out to be a simple, ordinary cop. By the time we learn Red John’s identity we discover that his network of crooked cops has a name (the Organization), has its tentacles all through every major bureau of law enforcement at every level, as well as politicians, and is fanatically loyal. Just like the serial killers, these cops who work for him will kill anyone, do anything, and kill themselves rather than let Red John down. This forces Patrick to use all his wits and trickery to slowly unmask Red John until eventually he finds him and kills him.

Undermining the conspiracy

Red John’s first killings appeared to happen 20 or 30 years earlier, on a farm belonging to Visualize, and his connections all through CIA, FBI, NSA, DEA, CBI, LAPD and the Sheriff’s office really made me think that he must be part of a government conspiracy. I was sure he was going to turn out to be an MK Ultra experiment gone wrong, someone who was genuinely super-intelligent and psychopathic and also very connected, perhaps using the secrets he had learnt through years of involvement with these agencies to play them against themselves. Perhaps the need to cover up the original experiments prevented the federal agencies from moving on him. Even when he was about to die another member of his organization, probably not a cop and possibly a priest, turned up to try and kill Patrick, giving Red John one last chance. In the lead up to the showdown we also saw obvious signs of the enduring power of this network he seemed to be at the center of: when someone from the FBI started asking questions they were killed, Patrick and his colleagues found a USB stick with an encrypted list, someone in the CBI was clearly feeding Red John information about their actions even after his identity had been revealed, and often their attempts to get subpoenas or search warrants are undermined by judges clearly working for Red John.

But then it all falls apart. The first clue that it isn’t going to go anywhere is the identity of Red John, who is clearly just not powerful enough or connected enough to make it all work. The second is his behavior when he dies, which can best be described as pathetic cowardice rather than the demise of a much-vaunted, devious psychopathic killer with 30 years’ history of satisfying killings. But the third, biggest clue is that he is found out, caught and killed in the middle of season 6, which is just weird. We have half a season still to go, and the entire point and purpose of this entire show is over. And then we have another season to follow! One and a half seasons left over, with no purpose. The obvious thing that should happen now, then, is the unraveling of Red John’s network. How did he form this cult of serial killers? What did he do to set up the organization of cops? How far does it reach? Remember we have the usb stick with the list, we have the sure knowledge of a spy in CBI, clues from the final mad pursuit, a woman on the run who appeared out of nowhere near the end and probably isn’t a cop, and of course whatever documentation and mementoes Red John kept. Lots of time to track down his organization and find out who he was, where he came from, and how deep the roots of his sinister organization reach into the American security state. We even know that the members of Red John’s organization have a secret tattoo – and they don’t we know! Great!

But what actually happens? CBI is disbanded by an FBI agent, who they never trick into getting naked so they can check for tattoos, and the next episode is two years later, with Patrick Jane lying low in Mexico. And then he gets recruited by the FBI. The FBI! Who he and all his colleagues spent six seasons complaining about! And who we were repeatedly led to believe are awful, mean cops who we should hate! And Patrick Jane agrees to join them, so then you think great! He’s going to find out who was working for Red John. Only he doesn’t. He and the rest of his former colleagues join the FBI, and then they spent the next 1.5 seasons solving cases for the FBI, which invariably involve busting really bad people doing really bad things, and helping the community, and being good for American national security.

At one point Jane threatens his FBI boss with the list that they got off the USB stick, but then we learn that they were never able to decrypt the list, and he gave a fake redacted list as a kind of bluff. And then we never again hear about this massive organization of deeply criminal cops that stretched from the local traffic police all the way up to the CIA and the NSA and included “senators and judges”. Nothing ever comes of it. It’s like we stepped sideways into a parallel universe where there are no corrupt cops and everyone is doing their best to protect the public and the nation, using all the intrusive surveillance tools and violence of the security state only for good ends. Where previously we were watching what seemed like the only five good cops in California doing their best to unravel an enormous conspiracy to protect a serial killer cult, now we have only the pure best intentions of the thin blue line that protects ordinary Americans from evil foreign criminal gangs[5].

It’s an incredible, obvious, and treacherous shift from a really interesting show that was uncovering a deep rot in the bedrock of American society, to a fever dream of American nationalism and police honor.

What happened?

Unlike most police procedurals the Mentalist was heading towards something different, a genuine confrontation between the viewer’s understanding of what cops are there to do, and what they actually do. I think it was going to involve the Scientologists – one of the major spiritual guides of the entertainment industry – in the center of this horror show, manipulating serial killers and protecting itself and them through a vast conspiratorial misuse of state power. Working slowly in the guise of a classic, slightly comedic police procedural, it was building towards an enormous conspiracy theory of American corruption at the same time as it was becoming more and more popular. I think someone realized what was going on, and they really did get to the show runners. I think they were somehow forced to end season 6 early, changing the main bad guy and then being forced to walk back from their conspiracy theory by making the main characters embrace the people they’d hated for five seasons and work with them in a standard, nationalist gang-busting format. I can see no other explanation for the massive collapse of the carefully-built plot, and the mid-season ending followed by the 180 degree volte-face of all the main characters.

That’s the situation we face now in modern entertainment. So let me make a prediction: it’s going to happen to Andor next. If modern American entertainment actually tries to lift up the rocks so we can see the squirming, evil things that lie underneath, it will get a directive from above. It might be a little subtler than the apocryphal Chinese addition to Fight Club, but not much, and for far more sinister ends.

fn1: There is a lot of corruption involved in this, since every 4-6 episodes we get a murder case that they’ve been assigned because a rich person pressured the state government to put the CBI on the case in contravention of its legislated authority[2]

fn2: But that’s the least of it, really; even aside from the primary conspiracy theory, petty corruption is widespread and unremarked upon in this show, as is the case in most modern cop shows, which don’t seem to have any sense of where the responsibilities of cops start and where their authority ends. Almost every episode, for example, they violently “arrest” an innocent person simply for running away from them (even though they’re in plain clothes with no visible badges, and nobody has heard of their bureau!), often before they’ve even announced themselves!

fn3: WTF even are these guys?

fn4: Not a bad assignment at all!

fn5: Aside from one or two cases, and the cops themselves, almost all the major crime groups in this show are foreigners – “the Italians” or “the Mexicans” or “Russian mafia” (always they have to add “mafia” to “Russians”). And also, if a murder is not done as part of an organized conspiracy, about 80% of the time the murderer is a woman, which is a weird and stupid inversion of reality.