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.

This isn’t wisdom from on high, doled out to us in the audience by mad-genius investigators. It’s more like seeing Bill and Holden and Wendy slowly clean out a messy room until only the important things remain. Watching the hard work and leaps of intuition that go into what we now take as common sense is what sets Mindhunter apart from the rest of the procedural pack.

I reviewed episode 3 of Mindhunter for Decider.

In Mindhunter Season 2 Episode 2, we pay a visit to a Mr. David Berkowitz. This enterprising young man brought the largest city in America to its knees and sent cryptic communiqués to the press and police before finally getting caught over a parking ticket. He’s one of the most famous serial killers of all time, known to one and all as the Son of Sam. And he’s damn lucky that’s the self-applied nickname that stuck, as opposed to alternate choices like “The Wicked King of Wicker” or—well, let’s hear it from Bill Tench.

Oliver Cooper guest stars as Berkowitz in the latest of Mindhunter‘s series of serial-killer cameos. His waxen features and schlubby, slouching posture in the role are perfect for illustrating the disconnect from these creeps’ delusions of grandeur and their often pathetic reality. Indeed, by fluffing up his ego, FBI Agents Bill Tench and Holden Ford are able to gain insight not only into their current quarry, Son of Sam wannabe BTK, but into Sam himself, getting him to admit that his demonic-possession story is bullshit. With a smirk, even!

It’s enough to make you fantasize about a version of Mindhunter that’s just these sit-down face-to-face interviews, like In Treatment with the Boston Strangler.

I reviewed the second episode of Mindhunter for Decider. This is a much better show than it used to be.

The killer is already inside the house. The woman doesn’t know it yet. She puts down her groceries and calls out, but only the sinister sound of Roxy Music’s nightmarish song “In Every Dream Home a Heartache” can be heard in response.

That, and the sound of a door shaking under the strain of a rope tied to the knob.

She makes her way down the hall, calling out “Honey?” She sees the door shake. She opens it, and a man collapses forward—rope around his throat, a cheap kewpie-doll mask on his face, a woman’s slip on his body.

She runs away, gasping, in slow motion. He calls after her, saying he was just playing around. He’s not her killer, then. He’s her husband.

This is how Mindhunter returns after nearly two years—though only a week has passed in the world of the show. Right away we see the series, created by Joe Penhall and directed here by David Fincher, is leaning into its strengths.

Season One was an aggressively mixed bag, its deeply compelling serial-killer scenes interspersed with interpersonal drama that you’d need a Behavior Science Unit to try and make sense of. So opening things up with a visit to the BTK Killer, who for the first time is brought to the attention of the pioneering agents of the BSU later in the episode, makes sense.

What’s exciting is how the interpersonal stuff seems to have played catch-up during the time off. For the first time, Holt McAllany’s Agent Bill Tench, Jonathan Groff’s Agent Holden Ford, and Anna Torv’s Dr. Wendy Carr all feel like thoughtfully drawn characters whose problems, and responses to those problems, are those of real people, not just styrofoam packing peanuts shoved into the story at random to pad out the time between visits to psychopaths.

I’m covering Mindhunter again for Decider this season, starting with my review of the season premiere. It’s a step in the right direction.