mswyrr:

She’s sorry for what happened. But she’s not sorry for the person that it made him. Which is an interesting form of complicity.

First we had Cho literally saying the excuse Red John uses, which is that what he did made Jane a “better person.” And then we have Lisbon unable to let go of what RJ’s gift made of him, despite her protestations and earlier agreement to let him “be happy.”

So there’s the smiley face between them. The thing that brought them together and made Jane someone that Lisbon could love (yep, I’m bringing that word out! I usually try to be shy of overstating it, but I feel it’s justified here) and who could care about her. Even though it’s also the thing destroying them both.

I have some objections to how this episode was executed, in that it could have gone so many different, deeper routes, and that there seemed to be things overlooked, like would Jane not have googled himself, would nobody have told him he had a house, etc, but the ending was well done, if painful.

I think that Lisbon might have let him go, if it hadn’t been for him taking the money. Because that changed the situation from Jane being “happy” and ignorant into a thief. Given the choice between the tortured Jane they knew and this happy jerk in jail, Lisbon went for the former and I can’t say that I blame her.

I also don’t think that Red John killing his family necessarily was the only thing that made Jane better but that his family itself probably started him on that path. I think there was a goodness in him, as Lisbon said, and his wife and daughter were the ones who awoke that and had Lisbon and the rest of the team, people who cared about him, had a chance longer than a day or two to work on him, it would have slowly come out again.