So - why does The Mentalist need another recurring villain? Volker is a lot scarier than Stiles and even Red John but, like Stiles, really has no place as a recurring character.
This is a matter of taste for me: I don't like recurring villains, period. I prefer episodes to be episodic; beginning, middle, end and onto another story altogether. And this episode has an almost really good ending, Volker watching his proxy strangling his soon-to-be former assistant with an expression of sexual arousal on his face. I kept expecting Lisbon and Jane to break in and save the day, especially since Lisbon had promised to make sure that no harm would come to her. Instead, we get a dead assistant and fake suicide, which any M.E. would discount immediately; finger marks do not look like rope burns.
If the assistant had been saved, my rating would have been 8. No higher because the principle victim was a positive character, which is another minor quirk of mine - I prefer victims who either deserve their fate or are in some other way sleazy low-lifes.
Instead we have a morally attractive victim killed through a third-party proxy and a really slimy, ultra-wealthy perp who was also guilty of massacring an entire Amazonian village.
If Lisbon and Jane had come to the rescue, saved the assistant, caught Volker and his thug in the act, then this would have been a very strong episode. And, if the writers really, really wanted Volker to reoccur, he could of broken out of jail and started whole new lines of mayhem, totally independent of this episode. Alas - we wind up with Volker getting away with killing the principle victim, his own assistant and a whole village full of Amazonian natives.
What we get is unfinished business.
A point I've made often: TV is fantasy, not real life with all of its moral ambiguities and injustices. We look for affirmation with bad guys losing and good guys winning. The stories can mirror real life, can even include a lot of the grit of real life and badly roughed-up good guys, but the fantasy demands justice and affirmation of our primary values in the end. This episode fails in that regard.
A note - didn't like Stiles, groaned every time he popped-up but enjoyed his demise.
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