Badass Women – The Mentalist: Teresa Lisbon

This isn’t my favorite Lisbon scene (there are far too many to list) but it is the moment The Mentalist went from being a show I really liked to a show on my top ten list. It had already shown great skill in creating strong, likable characters, but this Lisbon moment just blew me away.

By the sixth episode, we were already developing a good picture of the main characters: Jane, charming, brilliant, a smug know-it-all who would almost be annoying if he didn’t hate himself more than anybody else ever could; Cho, stoic and with a dry humor, loyal and a good cop; Rigsby, earnest and a little eager to please but also a solid cop; Van Pelt, new and a bit quiet and shy, instantly winning sympathy by having Lisbon be strict with her; and Lisbon.

Lisbon was, to my pleasant surprise, shown to be tough but fair, a good cop and a good boss, not as stupid as most Watsons to Jane’s Sherlock, and not the usual antagonistic supervisor for Jane to play off and against. They could have left it at that and I would have still liked her as a female character and, more importantly, as a character.

They would have had good reason to give that tackle to any of the others to add another layer to their characters: Cho to round out his then relatively thin characterization, Rigsby to show us that his naivete didn’t extend to handling bad guys, and probably what would have been the most effective, a chance for Van Pelt to break out of the timid rookie position. (I’m glad they went with Jane being completely inept at physical confrontation.) But it was Lisbon, the smart, competent, diplomatic female boss who got to be the action hero too. Well done.