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It took half a season to get to an episode about Red John, and though it was predictable in most aspects, it did offer a little more insight into Jane’s nemesis. I have an idea of who it is. Ready to place bets?

In “Red John’s Friends,” Patrick Jane gets a call from an inmate serving life for the murder of his girlfriend. The guy tells Jane he is innocent and if Jane proves it, he will provide crucial information about Red John.

Agent Teresa Lisbon tells Jane he’s getting played, but Jane is determined to find out the truth - especially if it means he can find and kill Red John.

Jane immediately knows the man is innocent and sets out to prove it. The man’s family is powerful and his brother makes some calls. CBI supervisor Virgil Minelli tells Jane to back off or he’s fired. Jane quits.

Lisbon and the team try to work on the case behind the boss’s back, but it doesn’t work. They all get suspended. Lisbon goes to plead their case, and ultimately Minelli backs down, saying he will not file the paperwork while he is gone visiting a sick relative.

Jane proves the guy is innocent and traps the real killer - sort of a surprise to fans. But as they try to take him into protective custody, he escapes. He calls Jane and tells him he isn’t getting involved. He goes to Mexico, where Red John finds him before Jane and his crew can. Written in blood on the wall, beneath the bloody happy face, is a message from the dead man:

“It was man…”

Jane and Lisbon are left wondering what the message was about. Red John calls the phone of the dead man. Jane picks it up to hear him laugh.

The eleventh episode of this CBS freshman phenomenon was good, but the predictability factor took away from my excited about clues to Red John’s identity. If the case they were working had had been totally whacked and twisted around more, I think this episode would have been the best this season.

What this episode did do was confirm suspicions I’ve had since the beginning about the ID of Red John. I figured he was in law enforcement. He needs some type of training to get in and out of these homes without leaving a trace. He has to have knowledge of how to access law enforcement databases. He has to be someone you don’t suspect.

I personally think it is the CBI supervisor, Virgil Minelli, played by Gregory Itzin. He acts like a dumb ass who is lead around by bureaucracy. He threatens to suspend everyone in this episode. When Agent Lisbon goes in to plead their case, he tells her he is going to leave the paperwork on his desk while he goes to visit a sick relative.

Huh? I get that he isn’t really going to suspend them, but suddenly he has a sick relative and is going out of town - just when the only person with a clue about Red John’s ID is about to go into protective custody? I don’t think so. This smacks of a Red John ruse.

Maybe I’m completely off base, but this is where my suspicion have laid since the beginning. The only thing that would throw this off is if the killer is, in fact, a woman, or a man and a woman (like redheaded agent Grace Van Pelt) , as Jane seems to indicate in this episode. Van Pelt would be a good add to Red John’s killing team - especially since she is the one who “discovered” that he was tracking law enforcement movements on the case via a protected database.

One thing that made me laugh: When I went online to rewatch the ending of this episode, there is an Applebee’s steak commercial, showing this bloody, juicy steak. This is right before the final minutes - and two very bloody bodies in a Mexican hotel bathtub. Not exactly a good mix, if you ask me. I didn’t get to finish the clip, because it kept buffering, but just knowing how the show ends - and seeing that commercial - made me want to throw out the steaks in my freezer.

The acting is always great, though I wish they would let Simon Baker use his real accent to give his character more flare and appeal. If the acting were terrible, this episode would have sucked.

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