Even as Bill investigates a series of child murderers, the investigation of the child murder that was discovered in his wife Nancy’s real-estate listing takes a disturbing turn. Their son Brian, it seems, was part of a group of children who killed their toddler playmate; it was he who found the key to the vacant house, and he who suggested arranging the boy’s body on a makeshift crucifix. The episode ends almost the moment the disconsolate Nancy reveals this information to her husband, as it probably should. Nothing more can be said.
Except that the real-life Bill Tench, Robert K. Ressler, never went through this with his own son. By all accounts, the show made this storyline up from scratch.
The question is whether this large a leap from the reality of the situation is worth the effort. It wasn’t on, for example, Masters of Sex, a similarly high-minded period piece about cutting-edge research on human behavior. Michael Sheen and Lizzy Caplan’s Masters & Johnson had their family lives changed around to give them obnoxious teenagers with screentime-devouring personal problems, an infamous prestige-TV pitfall the show actually went out of its way to create for itself.
We’ve already sat through a season-plus of Dr. Wendy Carr, Lesbian, with minimal difficulty. Her queerness is a solid method for establishing her as different from the straight and narrow (in every sense of the words) FBI world, and the pathologization of homosexuality commonplace at the time is a way of demonstrating the blowback bad research can have on innocent people; both of these are important aspects of the BSU for the show to tackle. Plus, it simply gives Wendy, and actor Anna Torv, a bit more to do than show up and be smarter than everyone else—nice work if you can get it, but hardly enough to make a character out of.
The situation with Bill’s son strikes me as very different, and potentially very detrimental. If it turned out that one of the founders of the serial-killer concept had a child murderer for a son—well, that would come up in virtually everything every written about the study of serial killers, right? America’s Most Wanted founder John Walsh’s son fell victim to serial killer Ottis Toole, and that gets talked about every time Walsh and his program are discussed, to cite a comparable situation. There will be a marked drop-off in verisimilitude unless this is made central to the saga of the BSU going forward.
Perhaps even more crucially, it has to be central to the show as drama. Maybe this is just me repeating my oft-cited principle, via Mad Men‘s Matthew Weiner, that when you kill a child on your show, your show must then be about that death, since life itself would be, too. This has to go double if the child is killed by another child, triple if that child is the son of your main character, quadruple if your main character studies killers. Anything less would throw off the emotional machinery of the entire show.
A good procedural needs to be taught, tight, and relentlessly logical in how its characters think and act. Is Mindhunter Mach 2 a good procedural? We’re about to find out.
I reviewed the fourth episode of Mindhunter Season 2 for Decider. This is an unusually long excerpt because I think everything it discusses is vitally important.
Tags: decider, horror, mindhunter, reviews, TV, TV reviews