The Mentalist 2X15: Red Herring

Ugh. All I could think about while watching this is how much I wanted to eat food prepared by these chefs.

So, we've got all these chefs getting ready to present their delicious looking food. However, when the first one gets up there, he starts sweating, gets double vision and passes out dead. CBI gets called to the case and Lisbon is cranky and unhappy to be there. While the coroner is inspecting the body, Jane asks him to pry the mouth open and he discovers that the guy has been poisoned with ricin. Fun.

At first the chefs all say that they were friends and family, but soon after, the backstabbing and name calling starts. None of them were as cool with each other as they claimed they were.

After talking to the widow, she tells them that she and the dead guy have been estranged due to his drinking. His brother shows up and tells her that he'd been sober for 2 weeks and she had no idea what she was talking about. So, Jane and Rigsby (I think it was Rigsby) head over to check out his apartment and test all the food and drinks for ricin. They come up empty. But Jane notices his apartment is a mess (how could you not?) and suggests maybe he relapsed. So, he starts looking around for hidden booze and they find it in the toilet tank. A quick test tells us it's got ricin in it.

Jane does some Jane stuff and decides one of the women chefs is guilty and they haul her down to the department. Turns out, she didn't poison him, but she did try to get him drunk so he wouldn't perform well. She's jealous that she's the only competitor without TV shows or cookbooks and wanted to level the playing field. But swears, she didn't poison him. Jane believes her.

He and Lisbon head over to the dead guy's restaurant and find his wife and sous chef pouring over receipts. The place is not doing well. Apparently the sous chef tried to get her own restaurant, but she couldn't get a liquor license, so she couldn't get funding. She then leaves to deposit payroll. And Jane and Lisbon see her get attacked by a guy in a ski mask and steal the money. Turns out, it's dead guy's brother who is trying to pay the brother's loan back to a loan shark. This is getting complicated.

Shortly after, another one of the chefs dies of ricin poisoning. Now it's getting serious. However, Jane has a plan (who's surprised?).

He gathers everyone together and tells them we're all tasting someone's dish. But as we all taste it, there is a ton of pepper spice in it. The chef who created the meal is surprised as she didn't use any spice, but Jane claims he added it to make it better. The sous chef is freaking out because, it turns out, she put ricin in the pepper. (Obviously Jane knew this and used un-ricin-ed pepper). But, we've got our culprit!

Apparently, the dead guy and the dead girl were having an affair and conspired to keep sous chef from getting her liquor license. She pretended to be cool about it when dead guy called her drunk to tell her about it, but she wanted revenge. And she got it. I mean, she's going to jail, but revenge is cool, right?

The odd thing about this episode is it was sort of hinting that maybe Lisbon has (had?) a drinking problem, but I don't recall any evidence of that prior to this episode. Hmmm.