The team dynamic works well, with funny banter ("Please don't tell me about Van Pelt") in places and it never sounds too stilted. They also have rewards for solving cases, which seems based in reality and it's like the kind of thing I would insist on if I were a detective (which, along with my complete inability to do the Sherlock Scan, is probably why I've not been snapped up for the Police Service).
For anyone like myself who hasn't watched it before this season, The Mentalist is easy to get into. You can go into it not having a clue what happened in the first season or the origin story and you will have picked up the plot from the dialogue in the first episode of this five-disc set.
Anybody interested in the techniques used in the show will enjoy the special features, which are a series of demonstrations of the techniques by real life mentalist (a word that I thought the show had made up) Luke Jermay. Some of the tricks you will be able to spot before he explains how they were done, but some will slip right by and trick you. Frustratingly, while the presentations are mostly good, some of the tricks aren't actually explained at all (see the pendulum trick). There is also a brief feature with the same guy and the executive producer of the show studying part of the season opener, as well as deleted scenes from some of the episodes.
If you are fans of police procedurals and Sherlock Holmes, then this is the show for you. You'd be mental (see what I did there?) to avoid owning this on DVD.
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