8. Mindhunter: “M.E.” by Gary Numan

After a shaky first season that was all over the map in terms of what we were supposed to feel about its main characters — remember the stiff Holden Ford romance subplot? — Mindhunter settled into a comfortably macabre groove in its second season, chronicling the drudgery involved in tracking down some of the world’s worst people. In the case of the musical montage set to “Cars” singer Gary Numan’s synth stomper “M.E.,” the drudgery is the whole point.

The sequence follows FBI Agents Holden Ford and Bill Tench as they stake out bridges where they hope to trap the perpetrator of the Atlanta Child Murders. It’s a joyless slog of bad sleep, shitty room service, buzzing mosquitoes, muggy weather, cigarette smoke, and ever-shortening patience. Numan’s song, sung from the perspective of a machine that survived the apocalypse alone, provides a surprisingly apt accompaniment to a routine that breaks Ford and Tench down until they feel unmoored from the very humanity they’re trying to protect.

In case you missed it—I know I did!—I wrote about the ten best TV music cues of the year for Vulture.

As Mindhunter Season 2 winds down—as Bill returns to an empty home and finds his wife and son have moved way without him; as Wendy throws out her ex-girlfriend’s trashy magazines; as Holden tends to a spaghetti stain on his shirt while Atlanta officials officially close the book on the so-called Atlanta Monster; as BTK poses for masked bondage photos with his souvenir gallery on full display—I feel it tried to do those 29 murders, those 29 victims, justice. It had to work as an engaging television story to do so, not just a current-events report or a Wikipedia article. And it did.

I reviewed the season finale of Mindhunter for Decider. This season was a tremendous step up from its predecessor.

Did you know: This season of Mindhunter is just nine episodes long. If you’re reading this, it means the chances are good that you’ve just watched the penultimate hour of that season. Did it feel penultimate to you? Have things been building to a head? Or is it more like, I dunno, you followed a whole bunch of false leads and wash-out strategies, only for the climax to fall into your lap pretty much out of nowhere? If you’re like me, it’s the latter scenario. That tells me Mindhunter Season 2 is doing its job very well.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Mindhunter Season 2 for Decider. I really think this show has turned around.

If you’ve been reading these reviews of Mindhunter Season 2, you know one of my main (or really only) complaints about this season has been the lack of interesting things for Nancy Tench to do. Not the lack of interesting things done with her—when your little boy crucifies the dead body of another little boy in hopes of bringing him back to life, you’ve got a lot on your plate, to understate the case to an absurd degree. But her reaction has consisted mostly of fretting that everyone else, from his case worker to his father, is doing more harm than good, and only she can see it. My term for this character type is “mama bear,” and my go-to example of the syndrome is Catelyn Stark during the first season of Game of Thrones. (The book version of the character was far livelier and slipperier.)

I’m not leveling this complaint anymore, not after this episode. For one thing, Nancy is evincing unspoken feelings at last, when she is clearly but (and this is key) not vocally perturbed that even the goddamn caseworker investigating her child’s welfare after a goddamn killing is as spellbound by hubby Bill’s stories of serial killers as your average small-town cop or D.C. bigwig.

But more importantly, she denies the mother of a victim closure, and we’re made to sit with this decision, and we’re forced to live with it. I can’t tell you how much good it does a show to have this kind of faith in its audience, to let a character do something seemingly unsympathetic and ask you to sympathize anyway.

I reviewed the seventh episode of Mindhunter Season 2 for Decider.

If there’s a chink in Mindhunter‘s armor right now, it’s Nancy Tench. That’s not the fault of actor Stacey Roca, mind you; her performance is sharp and vibrant. But between Catelyn Stark–style “You have a choice, and you’ve made it” dialogue, shopworn stage business like lying secretly awake with her eyes open as her husband climbs into bed, and a relationship with the two other characters with whom she comes into contact, Bill and Brian, that consists solely of reprimanding them, she’s a reactive and predictable character. A type, even.

Being a concerned parent, or a concerned mother specifically, doesn’t suddenly rob you of the potential for a rich emotional life—it might even enhance it—but you wouldn’t know it from watching this. Where’s the Behavioral Science Unit when you need it?

I reviewed the sixth episode of Mindhunter Season 2 for Decider. It’s not perfect.

If you couldn’t tell, I’m finding all of this rather compelling this time around. Without that weird clipped dialogue from last season dragging it down, Mindhunter is able to live its authentic self: a smart period crime drama asking questions about human behavior that its characters don’t have the answers to.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Mindhunter Season 2, which feels almost like a new show, for Decider.

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.

I know it shouldn’t, but it shocks me how people who devote time to criticizing arts criticism can understand so little about arts criticism.

BTW, not that you should go by letter grades, but my averaged-out grade for the show I tried really hard not to like for some reason? B.

(PS: That’s not really Nev from Catfish)

Holden’s meeting with Ed Kemper, who attempts suicide and names Ford as his medical proxy in order to force another meeting, is the first time any of his conversations with murderers has felt like something out of a serial-killer-as-supervillain movie. It’s not actor Cameron Britton’s fault—he plays Kemper with the same unnervingly conversational affect as ever. Rather, it’s the mechanics of the meeting: revealing the stitches from his suicide attempt like he’s a breath away from one of the Joker’s “Do you wanna know how I got these scars?” speeches, leaping from his hospital bed with cat-like reflexes, threatening to murder Holden and make him akin to the “spirit wives” he gained when he killed his previous victims, then reversing course and hugging Holden, thanking him for his honesty. When Holden says he doesn’t know why he came, it turns Kemper into a criminal mastermind, luring the FBI’s best and brightest into a potential deathtrap just to show he could. I’m sure it’s supposed to say something about Holden’s increasingly agitated state of mind, but it just makes him look dumb and indecisive, two things he’s never been.

The follow-up is even more of a misfire. The instant Holden hits the door out of Kemper’s hospital room, Led Zeppelin’s “In the Light” kicks in. The song’s creepy-cool John Paul Jones synthesizer opening had been used to great effect during Holden’s flight to California, but this time the track is fast-forwarded to Jimmy Page’s triumphant, upward-climbing riff. The transition is so abrupt, the musical sentiment so poorly matched to the moment, that I actually laughed out loud—yet that’s not even the half of it. Holden staggers down the hallway and collapses, in the grips of a full-fledged panic attack so severe he thinks he’s dying. As the hospital staff frantically tries to aid him, he hears the voices of other characters in his head, reliving times they called him on his bullshit and warned him about his behavior: Bill, Shepard, Wendy, Kemper, even Principal Wade. “Wait,” you may be thinking, “you mean like the ‘I made my family disappear’ scene in Home Alone?” Yes, exactly like the “I made my family disappear” scene in Home Alone. Add a few floating-head visions and a “You’re what the French call les incompétents” and not even David Fincher and Chris Columbus could tell the difference. The device is so hackneyed it comes across like a joke from a children’s comedy.

Worse, it’s unnecessary. Did we really need to hear people telling Holden he fucked up for us to understand, while watching him have a panic attack brought on by a serial killer who took advantage of him and could easily have murdered him, that Holden fucked up? I can’t remember the last time I saw a season finale swing and miss this hard.

I reviewed the season finale of Mindhunter, which I did not care for, for the A.V. Club.

For the Behavioral Science Unit, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The penultimate episode of Mindhunter Season 1 shows the team operating at the peak of their powers, working in in tandem to create the term for which they’ll go down in history: “serial killer.” It also depicts faultlines forming that could jeopardize the whole project (if this weren’t verifiable historical fiction, anyway). If you’ve been following along, it’s not hard to understand why the former aspect of “Episode 9” works much effectively than the latter. Mindhunter is always better when its characters are all on the same side.

The “serial killer” scene is the most satisfying example of this phenomenon yet—a conference-room scene between Holden Ford, Greg Smith, Bill Tench, and Wendy Carr that feels like watching a tight jazz quartet trade eights. Wendy tries to come up with a term for murderers who carefully prepare for their kills versus those who go on a spontaneous rampage. Smith asks if that isn’t simply organized versus disorganized killers. Wendy says, no, that refers to the process during the crime, not the pattern behind it. Killers like Charles Whitman or Richard Speck, she says, take random victims during rapid-fire rampages, so their existing term of art “sequence killer” doesn’t work. “Whitman was on a spree,” Holden says, with Wendy and Greg backing him up. Bill agrees too, but then expresses doubt about the “sequence killer” label for a killer like Ed Kemper: “It feels too…cadenced,” he explains, starting to actually sound like a musician. Debbie thinks he might be on to something. “It should feel like a long story,” Holden follows up, “continually updated.” “A series of killings,” Bill replies. “Serial?” Holden murmurs. “Serial murderer?” Greg suggests. “Serial killer?” Bill says, refining the concept, and you can see on everyone’s face that he’s hit the mark. “That’s better,” Wendy says, impressed. “Let’s see if it sticks.” Yeah, let’s see!

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Mindhunter Season 1, with David Fincher back in the director’s chair, for the A.V. Club.

For Mindhunter to succeed, its investigations have to be successful too. That doesn’t mean Holden, Bill, and Wendy need to solve every case or understand every unique pathology they encounter. It simply means that the temperament and technique that help them produce their best work — the blend of curiosity, cooperation, openness, and uncertainty I spelled out last time, during an episode where those traits were largely absent — help the show produce its best work as well. Given what came before, “Episode 8” makes the biggest leap in that direction since the series began, in what for my money is its most riveting and revealing interview with a serial killer to date.

I reviewed episode eight of Mindhunter, powered by <deep sigh> a great Jerry Burdos scene, for the A.V. Club.

To paraphrase the great Yakov Smirnov, on Mindhunter, case cracks you!

I reviewed episode 7 of Mindhunter, in which the team meets cartoonishly nasty serial killer Jerry Brudos and starts to lose their shit because of it, for the A.V. Club. I get why the show did what it did here—I just don’t enjoy it as much.

But once again, Mindhunter refrains from the mistake it made in its earliest episodes, where Tench and Ford’s boss was a mouthpiece for outdated and ignorant views—a convenient obstacle to be overcome by the real visionaires. It’s true that the D.A. doesn’t quite grasp the complex interplay of impulses and triggers that shaped Benjy, Frank, and Rose’s respective involvement in the murder and its aftermath. But it’s not that he can’t understand it, or doesn’t want to understand it. Wendy, Holden, and Bill simply haven’t figured out how to express it in a way that will get a guilty verdict out of a jury. When Wendy asks him “How do we translate this so you can use it?”, it’s neither a rhetorical question nor a passive-aggressive dig—she really wants to find a way to make their findings useful outside the laboratory conditions of their office.

And when the D.A. approaches them after allowing Frank to cop a plea, he’s sincere when he tells them why his hands were tied. It’s a utilitarian numbers game—“the lowest cost for the highest quality justice”—and he couldn’t take the risk of confusing a jury and letting justice of any kind slip away. Even when Holden and Bill grumpily reject his offer to take them out for dinner by way of an apology, they still shake his hand when he offers it. There are no hard feelings. How can there be? “What difference does any of this make if we can’t communicate it to the people who matter?” Holden asks Bill before they drive away. “I don’t know,” Bill sighs. Their own uncertainty about the trail they’re blazing makes them more forgiving when others demur from following.

I reviewed episode six of Mindhunter for the A.V. Club. Solid and thoughtful.

The late great Halt And Catch Fire famously took a while to actually become great. It got there because its writers figured out a new way to create personal and professional dilemmas for its characters. Rather than present black-and-white choices in which someone was clearly in the right and someone else in the wrong, or follow the shades-of-gray antihero-drama approach where the interest lies in studying why people do the wrong thing to begin with, Halt took a third route: It constructed scenarios in which the protagonists faced two equally compelling options and had to choose between them with no clear-cut right answer at all. For example, should they gut the creative innards of their new computer, lowering the price tag and guaranteeing competitiveness in the marketplace at the expense of what made the product special? Or should they keep their innovative interface intact and take a shot at something great, risking not just their livelihoods but those of everyone who worked for them in the process? Each path had its partisans, each argument was persuasive, and in the end they had no more idea of what would be best than any of us do when we face turning points in our own real lives. The show’s total lack of hand-holding for either its characters or its audience made for riveting viewing.

I thought about this a lot while watching this episode of Mindhunter. Focused almost exclusively on the murder and mutilation case that Bill Tench, Holden Ford, and local cop Mark Ocasek started working in the previous installment, it’s the story of three investigators hashing things out as they go, testing competing theories of the crime with no slam dunks in sight. It’s not about winnowing out false leads until the one true answer is found—even though they make an arrest by the end of the hour, the exact circumstances of the killing remain a mystery. Rather, it’s about trying to figure things out in a field, and a world, where there are no sure things. It’s a very different way to write a procedural.

I reviewed episode five of Mindhunter for the A.V. Club. It’s become a much better show. There are still music-cue misfires and problems with Debbie galore, but it’s settled into a highly watchable groove, particularly if you’re a serial-killer buff and are interested in seeing how the conventional wisdom got hashed out conversation by conversation.

Twitter is a portal straight into hell, but every so often a li’l angel of insight manages to spread its wings and fly out of its maw. So I offer a sincere thank you to the twitter userwho put into words something I might not have been able to put my finger on otherwise: The more like a procedural Mindhunter becomes, the better it gets. Sure enough, the show’s fourth episode spends nearly all of its time watching Holden Ford, Bill Tench, and their new partner Wendy Carr at work, and it’s the best episode yet.

I reviewed episode 4 of Mindhunter for the A.V. Club. It’s like VH1 Classic Albums, but about the concept of serial killers.

Kemper [is] back for another round of interviews so thick with gallows humor you can almost see the nooses. “Big Ed” had a sick sense of humor during his murders, one he can’t help but chuckle about to himself as he recounts the details to Bill and Holden—like how he shoved his mother’s severed vocal cords into the garbage disposal to shut her up permanently, or how he buried the decaptiated heads of his victims face up near her window, because “Mom always liked people to look up to her.”

These exchanges say a lot about both the killer and his questioners. Ed thinks he’s winning them over with his gruesome gags, but he’s really revealing the depths of his disregard for other people: The women he killed meant nothing more to him than becoming potential punchlines for sick jokes played at his hated mother’s expense. Bill and Holden, meanwhile, react with the reluctant but irrepressible exclamations you might hear from the crowd at comedy club where the stand-up said something particularly off-color—until they get to their car afterwards and simply stare at each other in disbelief. They’re good enough at their jobs to instinctively transform their shock and disgust into reactions that will keep them on Ed’s good side, so they can keep getting what they want from him in turn.

Bill spells all this out to Holden on the flight home, in one of the show’s best conversations yet about the nature of their job. “There’s nothing behind Kemper’s eyes,” he says. “It’s like standing near a black hole. And he thinks we’re his friends!” He pauses. “Well, he thinks you’re his friend.” Then he leans in to Holden for the conclusion: “Which makes you a pretty great FBI agent.” These guys are uniquely equipped to gaze into the abyss without its returning gaze getting the better of them, for now at least.

I reviewed episode three of Mindhunter for the A.V. Club. It’s improving for sure, but the conversations that don’t include serial killers still sound like they were written by aliens.

Edmund Kemper is not your average pop-culture serial killer. That’s the point. Mindhunter’s second episode may be dogged by many of the same problems as its premiere—we’ll get to that later—but its decision to cast “The Co-Ed Killer” at the Hannibal Lecter to restless FBI Agent Holden Ford’s Clarice Starling is as smart and sinister as the man himself. Played by actor Cameron Britton, whose performance is already one of the most chilling of its type, Kemper is the embodiment of Ford’s argument that this new breed of killer is too crazily complex for the existing rulebook to cover.

The “we’ll get to that later” is doing a lot of work in the above paragraph, but nevertheless I enjoyed the Ed Kemper material in episode two of Mindhunter, which I reviewed for the A.V. Club, a great deal. Just be prepared for my very different thoughts on the music cues and the female lead.