i know this has been said before, but why couldn't the RJ story line end with timothy carter.  the night i watched that episode was the most satisfied i have ever been with a tv show.  and it wasn't because of who RJ was, but the way it went down.  you had an arrogant creepy little man, who slipped up and got caught.  and for the first time in tv history, the hero of the show chose to flush morals down the drain and follow through with his plan.  and then the best part of all was when he sat down to finish his tea, know very well the consequences he would face.

also, up til then, the clues that had been put out could have been tied up.  you had a creepy guy who liked killing, he was dorky enough to be a computer hacker, maybe he had a relative in the fbi that he used for a couple of small tasks.  the true downward spiral started at the beginning of season 4.  mainly because RJ became more of a focus on an almost weekly basis.  before S4, he would pop up every few episodes, but after that we started getting more and more clues.  at the time it seemed great, but with more and more clues, it became almost impossible to ti them all together.

so what ended up happening, for me at least, is that once the RJ reveal was over, i not only felt cheated out of all of S6, but i felt cheated all the way back to S4.  and it is sad to think that in the past 3 seasons there was enough time to create and establsh an entirely new super villain for PJ to chase.  especially since they had options like stiles and laroche that they could have played off of.

i compare this to the matrix movies.  the first 2 were full of cool action and planted all these seeds about prophecy and revolution.  i went to the midnight opening of the 3rd movie, and at the end there was a giant "WTF" throught the entire crowd.

that being said, to take a page from stoopkid and post and outrageously optimistic theory, S7 could still save all of this.  i could even grow to ignore the jisbon crap.  basically we can all agree that the patrick jane story is complete.  he got his bad guy.  he got is new girl...speaking of which, in defense of the jisbon fans, even though to me it seems creepy and almost incestuous, i think a lot of us could appreciate the post RJ episodes a little more if you continue to remind yourself that there was a 2 year break between the CBI and FBI episodes.  in those 2 years there were a lot of letters shared between the two, and a lot of time for jane to start to move on.

but still, S7 will be worthless if they continue to focus on jane.  on the other hand, it will be great if they take 13 episodes to replay the entire series through the eyes of Red John.  just as we rooted for jane to catch RJ for years, we can see jane as rj's nemisis over the span.  also, that would give a chance to tie things up. they could show which clues meant something, and ones that are unexplainable could be shown as intentional misdirection by RJ.  it would be incredible. i know xander berkeley would be up to the task.