At least this time, it was supposed to be bad.

Oh, Flashpoint. I love your Canadianness.

I just found myself saying out loud that I thought Adrian Monk was considerably less fucked up than Patrick Jane. But now I'm wondering if I'm working on incomplete evidence, as I haven't by any means seen all the available eps of either series.

Based on the evidence (and I think I saw 4 or 5 seasons of Monk), I would agree with you.

Having watched all of both of them, Jane is more fucked up. There's medicine and therapy for what ails Monk. Or even a revelation...an epiphany...moving past the moment of discovering why his wife was killed.

Jane is a psychopath. He's just someone you keep from taking lives. Luckily he's only interested in killing one person.

It occurs to me now the premises of Monk and The Mentalist are more similar than The Mentalist and Psych. Huh.

And! Blam! At least he cried when he did it.

Just watched the finale again.

Psychopath? Oh, sure, Antisocial Personality Disorder, but as with Cumberbatch's Sherlock, I'd put Jane more at the sociopathic end of the spectrum - though with Sherlock, the personality disorder appears more certainly organic in nature. Unless they get around to showing a heck of lot more of Jane's backstory, so we get a clue as to what he was genuinely like with his wife and child, I doubt there will ever be a way to know for sure - there is a distinct possibility that with Jane, the complex of behaviors that appear Antisocial, may well be as much voluntarily put on armor as those three piece suits he wears. One clue is that he has been shown to have something other than a flat affect when he has no one to impress. Yes, I did spend a couple years with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Third Ed., Revised as light bed-time reading. Why do you ask? t /psychology nerd

Yeah, right, like that tag ever closes.

I love you, Andi. And I totally agree.

There was an interesting piece on the 'psycho test' on NPR yesterday, you might want to check it out...as, you know...light entertainment.

Jane would flunk the inventory, but he definitely has sociopathy.

linky for the NPR piece.

It was on This American Life and was very amusing.

sumi, I know, right?

It cracked me up that the TAL staff took the inventory and actually expected to score . Every client I see thinks they are much worse than they really are. (except for one, but we shall not go there) They were kind of cute confessing their 'sins' .

The line is classic, because it is so true. "I do not think that word means what you think it means."

Ooops. white fonting for a fun surprise at the end of the TAL piece.

I love that the one that stole that test manual never even considered charging for the tests. It was wrongheaded but hardly antisocial.