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.

The final episode of The Act is titled “Free,” and the irony is hard to miss. This is, after all, the episode where Gypsy and Nick are imprisoned for the murder of Dee Dee Blanchard — Gypsy for ten years and Nick for life. But despite the foregone-conclusion resolution of this true-crime drama, there are two scenes of actual freedom here, by my count, and each serves to drive that terrible irony deeper into your brain.

The first is the flashback to 1997 that opens the episode. This is the night when the Blanchards’ bedtime routine begins: Dee Dee comforting Gypsy, who’s spooked by the Spanish moss swaying from the branches above them as they lie in the grass, telling her that the stars are angels who will protect them, just as they will protect each other. They’re sleeping under the open sky, in the great outdoors, yet Dee Dee is forging a crucial link in the chains that will stay wrapped around her daughter until the night she herself is killed.

The second takes place on that fateful night, which we see in flashback near the end of the episode. After the murder, as Nick and Gypsy prepare for their farcical flight to freedom in Wisconsin, Gypsy grabs her two pet guinea pigs and sets them free on the lawn outside the pink Blanchard house. These two small domesticated rodents stand about as much chance of surviving out there on their own as the other two life forms who emerge from that house on that night. By freeing them, Gypsy has unwittingly sentenced them to death.

A literal sentencing awaits, but that’s not even the half of it. Gypsy’s imprisonment, her ongoing sense of being trapped no matter what she does and no matter where she is, is the guiding principle of the episode.

I reviewed the season finale of The Act for Vulture. What a show.

The way you played him, it seemed like every moment he wasn’t actually saying or doing something, he’d be running through a script in his own head: “Okay, here’s what I’m supposed to do next.” You mentioned the actual notes he wrote for himself to that effect, like the one that lists how you’re supposed to treat a girlfriend. It seemed sweet, somehow, despite everything we know.

It’s interesting you say the word “sweet,” because that’s the exact word that the police officer who interrogated him used at his trial. When she was on the stand, they asked, “What were your first thoughts after you finished the interrogation?” She said, “I thought he was a very sweet, kind man.” That was a key piece of information for me: Oh, okay. She thought that in that moment, knowing what he had done? Then the audience has to feel that way, too.

It’s also interesting you used the word “script.” One of the notes I had from my research was that Nick felt like he was in a play, and everyone in the world had been given the script ahead of time except for him. He didn’t know where to stand or what his lines were or when to say them. That was the basis for how I dictated scenes for that character.

I interviewed actor Calum Worthy about his extraordinary work as Nicholas Godejohn in The Act for Vulture.

“Gypsy is excited to start over with Nick in Wisconsin, but their new life doesn’t match the happily ever after she imagined and her anxiety worsens as past transgressions begin to catch up with them.” That’s the descriptive text that accompanies this week’s episode of The Act, and it’s… well, that’s definitely one way to describe it. “Their new life doesn’t match the happily ever after she imagined” is a technically accurate summary of the half-day they spent in Big Bend before getting arrested. “Her anxiety worsens as past transgressions begin to catch up with them” captures the letter of Gypsy and Nick hiding in a closet as a heavily armed SWAT team surrounds the house, if not quite the spirit. Let’s just say I admire the blurb’s commitment to understatement and leave it at that, shall we?

I reviewed the seventh episode of The Act for Vulture.

For the first time in her life, Gypsy Rose Blanchard has plans of her own. It’s 2015 now, and as The Act resumes for its fifth episode, she’s dressing up in provocative clothing to have cybersex with her internet boyfriend Nicholas Godejohn. She does this several times throughout the episode. It’s all kinds of blackly comic given Nick’s woeful lack of proficiency with regards to the dom-sub power exchanges the two enjoy. (In Gypsy, a woman whose entire life has been defined by her Munchausen-by-proxy mother and Disney movies, Nick, a man who blows his promotion at a pizza parlor, may have found the one person on earth he could convince to call him Daddy.) And since we know where it’s all headed, it’s sinister too.

I reviewed the fifth episode of The Act for Vulture.

This week’s episode of Nick Antosca and Michelle Dean’s extraordinary true-crime series begins with bodies. The body of the landscaper Gypsy Blanchard sees through her window and lusts for. Gypsy’s body — Gypsy’s adult body — as she submits meekly to Dee Dee’s infantilizing bathing routine. (Gypsy’s menstrual cycle rebels, at least, much to Gypsy’s delight.) Dee Dee’s body, rebelling against her, as she is diagnosed with diabetes — though Dee Dee snatches victory from the jaws of defeat when she realizes the care she’ll require will force Gypsy into even tighter enmeshment with her. “I’m gonna need you now,” she drawls to Gypsy, “every…single…day.”

I reviewed episode four of The Act for Vulture.

[Batman TV voiceover] Dee Dee and Gypsy, putting the con in “comic con”? Looks like our Dependent Duo are cosplaying with fire! Will the “Two Wolverines” who give our adventure its title sink their claws into these lovely lawbreakers? Will the Blanchards blanch at forming costumed connections with their hirsute suitors? Find out next week — same Act-time, same Act-streaming service!

I reviewed episode three of The Act for Vulture.

Genre art uses spectacle to convey in images what words alone can’t. That’s baked into the premise of genre from the start. In real life we’re not going to be eaten by a zombie horde, burned by a swooping dragon, abducted by alien spacecraft, or caught up in a major musical number. Nevertheless, zombies and dragons and aliens and big song-and-dance routines that end with an entire street full of people doing jazz hands toward a crane-mounted camera help us articulate the big ideas and emotions we do experience in real life — terror and awe and rage and passion and joy — but lack the commensurate vocabulary to describe.

I reviewed the second episode of The Act for Vulture.

“I like you special.” In an hour of television that includes the aftermath of a murder, the possibility of a kidnapping, and the evidence of year upon year of medical child abuse, these four innocuous words are the most frightening thing we hear. Dee Dee Blanchard isn’t lying when she says them, either. She treasures Gypsy, her frail and charming daughter. Dee Dee loves Gypsy for the things anyone would find lovable about her: her cheery disposition, her reassuring optimism, her own love of all things bright and beautiful. Dee Dee also loves Gypsy for the what others might find burdensome: a bottomless cocktail of illnesses, including epilepsy, paraplegia, a heart murmur, anemia, a lethal sugar allergy, a condition that required the surgical removal of her salivary glands, her need to be fed through a tube in her stomach. Gypsy’s suffering, and her endurance of it, are a part of what make her special, and just as she says, Dee Dee likes her for it. That Dee Dee also manufactured this suffering makes what she’s saying no less true. It just makes it horrifying. Like the little pink house after which this episode, “La Maison du Bon Rêve” (The House of Sweet Dreams), is named, “I like you special” is a prison in disguise.