‘The Mentalist’ season 7, episode 10 reaction: Exec on reasons behind key death

You knew for a solid week that someone was going to die on Wednesday night’s “The Mentalist,” and maybe some of you saw specifically who the deceased would be coming. (Spoilers ahead!)

Does that make it any less sad? We’d argue that the answer to that is “no.” The truth here is that Michelle Vega was a fun addition to the show in the time in which she was around. While she was never the most dynamic person in the cast, her enthusiasm and wide-eyed ambition made her very different than the more jaded members of Dennis Abbott’s team at the FBI.

Obviously, it was clear during the episode that this was something that needed to happen in order to have Patrick Jane start to truly question his future, and speaking to TVLine after the episode aired, executive producer Tom Szentgyorgi made that clear with the following message:

“We knew that we wanted in this last batch of episodes to sort of take the show back to the beginning. Jane’s character was born out of trauma, in effect. The person that we watched for seven years was shaped very much by violent death. And though we had captured Red John and put that part of the story behind us, we knew we wanted to go back to that world — and that would involve killing someone.”

Josie Loren, who played this character on the show this season, also told the website that she had been told early on that this was where the story was heading, and while it may be hard to say goodbye to a character, she also wrapped at a time to start auditioning for pilot season. There’s always a plus!

Still shocked? Share in the comments.