Sonja Flemming/CBS
In 'The Mentalist' on Sunday, Patrick Jane (left) finally comes face to face with Red John, the serial killer he's tracked since the madman murdered his wife and daughter.
At the end, Patrick Jane became Dexter.
One of the longest-running story arcs on prime-time series television, the Red John drama on CBS's "The Mentalist," ended Sunday night with the finality of a 1970s-style vigilante vengeance movie.
Simon Baker's Jane at last caught up with Red John, the psychotic serial killer who 10 years earlier had murdered Jane's wife and daughter.
After Jane made the positive ID, a wounded Red John made one futile run for it, crashing through a house and ending up in a park - sort of a long ambulatory version of the police car chases memorialized in films like "The French Connection."
At the end, Red John had lost too much blood to go any further, and Jane caught him.
Jane then sat on top of him. After a few moments of conversation during which Red John still seemed to admire his own cleverness all these years, Jane strangled Red John with his hands.
None of this wishy-washy mercy stuff. No navel-gazing ruminations on how the guy wasn't worth it.
Jane had the chance, since naturally Red John had fallen where no one else in this fairly active park could see them, and he took it.
"That was the only way it could end," Baker said in a conference call late last week. "Jane has been wanting to kill him for almost six years. So when he caught him, that's what he had to do.
"And I thought doing it with his bare hands felt right."
Since it was on broadcast TV, not cable, the scene was not filmed in a particularly gruesome way. Viewers mostly saw Jane, not Red John.
Through its first five and a half seasons, "The Mentalist" interspersed Jane's quest for Red John with weekly cases investigated by the police CBI unit, for which Jane worked as a consultant.
After taking several wrong turns and even shooting a man who was not Red John, Jane caught up with him the last three weeks.
Even then there was misdirection. The week before, viewers and perhaps Jane were left with the impression Red John was CBI boss Gale Bertram (Michael Gaston).
Sunday night, however, when Jane outfoxed Bertram during a standoff in a church, Bertram said he was not Red John, but merely one of Red John's operatives in a ring of high-level corrupt police and politicians.
That sent Jane to the real Red John.
"The Mentalist" still has another dozen episodes left this season, and director Bruno Heller said it will be a very different show.
The next episode, on Dec. 1, will jump ahead two years, and Heller said the relationships among the characters, including Jane and CBI unit leader Teresa Lisbon (Robin Tunney), will be "different."
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