The Mentalist – Season 1, Episode 18 – Russet Potatoes – air date 9/08/09. In this episode Jane and the CBI team work to find out who is hypnotizing people into doing their dirty work for them. Things to remember here – hypnotism is a tool that Jane himself uses. In fact, he makes a major point in that when someone is hypnotized, they will never do anything that they would not be morally or ethically capable of if they were not hypnotized.

In the first scene we see a very ordinary looking man in a suit, carrying/dragging a large, heavy object down a busy city street, mumbling to himself the same phrase, over and over. Where is he taking this bag? To the precinct! He informs Jane, when asked, that the bag contains potatoes! Jane takes one look at him, and decides that the man has been hypnotized. You see, what is in the bag is a young girl who has been shot in the head.

The body is identified, and her sister, just back from a business trip to San Francisco, comes in to find out what happened. It seems that both she and her sister work for a large NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) center. Hello – here is where the hypnotherapy connection is! Not only that, but the gentleman that was hypnotized to bring the body in is a client at the center.

Jane, Lisbon and the CBI team take the man who brought the body in to the NLP center, where a seminar is going on. They take the head of the company, who is leading the seminar, with them for questioning. His assistant then takes over the seminar.

Up above, Lisbon is standing with the gentleman that they arrested. He looks down at the assistant NLP trainer, and starts talking to him. The NLP trainer bolts off of the stage, with Lisbon racing after him. She tackles him on the stairs, and takes him down. During questioning, he at first says he does not know the girl who was killed. Then Cho gets him to admit that he asked her out the day before, and she refused. Then he gets him to admit that he went on a drinking binge, and woke up standing over the girl, who is dead, with a gun in his hand.

Jane immediately sees this as a trance issue, and not an alcoholic blackout. The team then brings the NLP program director in for questioning. The man denies any connection with the girl’s death. (The sister also denies that there was a connection between her sister and the NLP director.) Rigsby then goes in, yells at the man, and smashes his head down on the table! Yes, Rigsby was hypnotized too!

Jane theorizes that Rigsby had to be hypnotized by someone that he interviewed at the NLP center. Jane and Van Pelt take Rigsby to a children’s playground, in an attempt to try and see what triggered his trance. Rigsby gets upset, and runs away. (He had been saying that there was “something that he needed to do” – i.e. something that someone else expected him to do.

Rigsby goes to the NLP center, to the director’s office. There’s the director, in his chair … all tied up! Who tied him up? His assistant, the victim’s sister! She was jealous of his attention to her sister! And yes – he had been dating her sister, and she knew it. She has Rigsby roll his chair onto the top of the building. She keeps telling Rigsby that the director is bad, that he hurt her, and that Rigsby needs to protect her.

Jane, Lisbon and the CBI team show up, Jane talks Rigsby back into reality, and the sister (and the assistant director!) are taken into custody!