Mentalist Recap – Red Tide – Season 1, Episode 3 – air date June 30th, 2009. The main storyline for this show is the CBI investigation of the drowning death of a teenage girl. The program starts out with Jane being Jane – he has Grace hide the keys to the van, and he attempts to find them (which he does, of course!). Then the team gets the call about the drowning victim, and they head out to the beach, with an ongoing discussion going on between Jane, Rigsby and Cho about the finding of the keys.
At the beach, there is a memorial going on with friends of the victim (Christine) holding a memorial, and throwing leis into the water. Jane talks to the group of friends, and then decides to stay on the beach (yes – in his suit!). He ends up borrowing a plastic bucket from a young girl and building a very large scale medieval castle – which, needless to say, attracts a crowd!
Back at the station, the rest of the team is looking into the background of Christine’s friends. They visit an old friend of Christine who is in jail on drug charges – she tells them the story of an older man – that Christine refers to as “Pops” – that Christine is having an affair with. And he likes 50’s music. But that is all she knows.
Detectives Lisbon and Van Pelt visit Christine’s home to talk to her father. It turns out that after her mother’s death several years before, Christine took over responsibility for her younger siblings, as her father turned to alcohol. Her father tells them about her old friend, who is now is jail, and that her new surfer friends are all from a better background, and that they are good for her. He mentions a new friend – Flipper.
Flipper turns out to have a history of violence, so they decide to go visit him. His domicile is a very old, trailer park trash type of trailer, with loud music playing. The detectives knock on the door, and get no answer, so they break in. No one is there. They walk to the end of the trailer, and pull back the curtain. There sits Flipper – playing chess with Jane!
The surfer friend still has to go to the station to be interrogated, where he admits beating up a woman in the past (she was seriously polluting a drainage system), but denies killing Christine. This gentleman also has some porn issues, so he is interesting.
The detectives also visit a construction site near where the death took place. While they are there they happen to note a human nose rising out of a cement slab. Yes, there is a body under the slab that goes with it – the night watchman! Oh, and the company is owned by the father of one of the young surfers.
He shows up on the site, denies responsibility, turns around when Jane calls him “Pops”, and is playing 50’s music in his truck. Jane wants to arrest him, but there isn’t sufficient cause, so Jane goads the owner into hitting him, so they can take him to jail for interrogation.
Jane has an idea – he asks Christine’s friends to meet him on the beach, and then asks to hypnotize them. So, around a campfire on the beach at night, he hypnotizes them. Christine’s female friend – Hope – suddenly remembers seeing an older man on a cliff, staring at Christine. She claims that it is Danny’s father – the owner of the construction company.
However, Danny’s father has an alibi for that night – there is no way that he was on that cliff! It turns out that the guard for the construction company asked the kids to leave the site on the night that Christine was killed. Danny hit the guard, and he died. That is how he ended up in the cement slab. Danny admits to that – but says that Hope killed Christine in a fit of rage.
So, who killed Christine? Hope admits that she did – but did she? It turns out that all four of the friends killed Christine. She wanted to do the right thing, and call the police about the death of the construction company guard. Hope, who had always been jealous of the attention that Christine got, demanded that they all take part in killing her – so that they would all be bound to silence.
The biggest key to Jane’s success in this episode – he kept asking the kids what kind of animal they saw themselves as. Hope saw herself as a eagle– and she saw Christine as a rabbit (a much weaker person).
At the end of the show Dane Kurtik, Danny’s father, is charged with statutory rape, for his affair with Christine. Detective Lisbon talks to Christine’s father, Jack Tanner. She encourages him to address his alcohol issue, as he has two young children that he is responsible for. She tells him her own story – her mother died, and her father turned to alcohol. He ended up killing himself, and almost killing her and her brothers.
I love the depth of the storyline on this show – there is always something serious going on, on many different levels.