‘The Mentalist’ season 6 spoilers: Why Patrick Jane’s journey does not end with Red John

When the news first broke that “The Mentalist” was finally going to solve the mystery of Red John at some point during season 6, there was a question that inevitable rose out of this: If this does in fact happen, isn’t the series as we know it over? What other stories are there left to tell? This is something that CBS and the producers are hoping to show you through everything that happens following the midway point of this season.

In trying to explain the decision to continue the journey of Simon Baker’s character beyond the reveal, executive producer / creator Bruno Heller offers up the following shrewd explanation in an interview with TVLine, making an analogy to “Moby Dick” in the process:

“[Jane] has been out at sea hunting this creature for so long, I think people will want to know what happens to him after that. Does he live happily ever after? What happens when you’ve been searching for something as long as he has? And we are going to get into that. It would be cheating the audience not to tell them what happens after.”

We can assume that Jane is not going to stop fighting crime once Red John is over, but it will surely be an interesting sort of process to watch him try to figure out his life in the future. The one thing that we hope to not see here is pretty simple: Some sort of substantial time jump. We don’t want to see the show gloss over Jane’s post-Red John life; if you are giving us what we effectively like to think of as the story after the story, then why not present us with the full thing?

Click here if you want to hear another perspective on this courtesy of Simon Baker, who recently gave a pretty lengthy interview on “The Talk” about this and some other subjects.

Photo; CBS