Did Mentalist Writers Make This Character So Dumb Just to Advance Plot?
The Mentalist series has many memorable characters, and the show's fans love every member of Lisbon's team.
They are all different, and their dynamics are always fun to watch. And though they are all generally nice and interesting people, one character stands out when you think about it.
When we first meet agent Grace Van Pelt at the very start of Mentalist, she's fairly naive and dreamy, and over the course of the following seasons, the writers use her questionable choices to advance the story, as Reddit user Satansito pointed out.
She's a great character and a person, but she makes some really dumb choices.
First off, Van Pelt dated a psychopath who wanted to avenge his father by killing Jane. The man played pretend with her to get close to Patrick, and he did it well. You can't blame Grace for it, really: how could she possibly know that?
As the saying goes, "if I had a dollar for every murdering lying bastard Van Pelt dated"... You could've expected Grace to guard up after the first case, but she didn't — and eventually ended up engaged with a Red John's agent.
After his betrayal, she did close up and changed forever; but it's still weird that it somehow happened twice.
The way his betrayal happened, too: Grace revealed highly-classified information to him, and that's while he was one of the suspects!
He was still her fiance, but telling every last detail and bringing him along to a secret safe house for no reason? That was amateur, to say the least, and there's no justification here.
After that second, far worse betrayal, Van Pelt became really secluded and grim. That was until the leader of a hypnosis-based cult appeared, and she got enamored with him.
Luckily, this time nothing horrible happened, and he actually helped her instead of using. But come on, Grace. This man was a criminal and a cult leader, who was then a suspect in the Red John case.
One could say that Van Pelt had poor judgment; but also, she was used by terrible people.
It was not her fault as a character as much as the writers' fault for making her a scapegoat for advancing the plot further.
We only talked about her relationships, but there's much more to this: at some point, it feels like every significant mistake is Grace's, which is not fair since she's overall a great agent.