The Mentalist Insider's Blog - The Red Tattoo

For this week's The Mentalist Insider's Blog, Ex. Producer Eoghan Mahony about 6x05 "The Red Tattoo":

A dead man with shadowy connections to the Visualize cult. A killer who might be some kind of magician or wizard. And, of course, the specter of Red John looming over it all. Jane has a lot on his mind these days. The fun and the challenge of Season 6 is that we’re closing in on Red John and there are a lot of questions, that Jane wants answered, and leads that the team needs to track down. In this episode Jane finds himself forced to investigate a case with Ray Haffner, ex-CBI Agent, Visualize cult member, and one of the seven names on Jane's list of Red John suspects. So not only is Jane faced with a mysterious and seemingly impossible crime, but he must also question whether Haffner had a role in it, and to what purpose? Of course, anything having to do with Visualize must have the unseen hand of Bret Stiles behind it.  But you'll have to stay tuned for the next episode to see where that leads! And if that isn't enough for the team to deal with, they also are discovering what happened to Homeland Security Agent Bob Kirkland. The more they learn, the more questions they have. 
As our dedicated followers know by now, we've got one of the greatest casts imaginable, and each and every one of them is stepping up their game as we build towards the final showdown with Red John. We always rehearse the scenes before we shoot them, once for the actors to get a sense of how they want to deliver their lines and how they want to move around the fantastic sets our art department builds for us. Then a second time, in what's called a 'marking rehearsal,' so our crew can see how the scene will play out and how to get the lighting and sound just right. You'd expect this to be a sort of dry purely technical exercise, but when Simon and Robin finished the run-through of the scene where Jane and Lisbon explain the murder to Haffner, Cooper, and the head of Hotel Security, the crew spontaneously broke into applause as if they had been the audience at a play. 
And here's where I want to take the chance to thank our cast and crew for the amazing work they do. The scripts we writers turn in are nothing more than a framework for all these other great artists to build on. From the moment pre-production starts and locations, production design, costumes, props, and casting get to work, through the actual grueling work of shooting the episode in only eight days, to the post-production work of our editors, sound designers and music composer, it's humbling and awe-inspiring to see how what's on the page is transformed into a television show. Hope you all enjoy watching it as much as we enjoy making it. And look out, the ride is about to get wild!

Written by
Executive Producer Eoghan Mahony