The first season of Mindhunter was about two FBI special agents Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff) and Billy Tench (Holt McCallany) studying the behavioral portraits of famous killers and discovering the very concept of “serial killer”, which means that this person commits all his murders in a certain pattern. They are assisted in this work by psychology professor Wendy Carr (Anna Torv).
Ford and Tench’s boss Shepard (Cotter Smith) doesn’t approve of the work of special agents, but still allocates them a small basement.
Season 2 finds Holden Ford in the hospital: In the season 1 finale, after experiencing severe emotional stress while meeting killer Edmund Kemper (Cameron Britton) in the hospital, Holden suffers a panic attack, which he believes to be a heart attack.
In the hospital, Holden is brought to his senses, and he returns to his work again. There it turns out that their boss Shepard has been retired and a director of public relations from Washington named Gunn (Michael Cerveris) has been sent in his place. Gunn is extremely interested in the work of the behavioral response department and assures Tench that he will firstly expand the department, and secondly, will provide all possible assistance to their work.
At the same time, Gann is not embarrassed by a certain scandal that happened earlier due to the fact that Holden shared his purely personal circumstances with the criminal during the next interview – they tried to hide this from the authorities in the department, but the truth came out. Gann believes that Ford has a very developed intuition, and his unconventional methods lead to excellent results. However, it is clear that Ford needs to be watched and controlled – Gunn asks Billy Tench and Wendy Carr to do this.
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The first season mainly focused on the creation of the department and Ford and Tench’s numerous interviews with known serial killers, which greatly helped them in compiling behavioral profiles of such people. Despite the slowness of the narrative, the series kept in great suspense and watching how Ford and Tench work was extremely exciting, especially since it was all based on real events: the script was created based on the book “Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s elite team of investigators “John Douglas and Mark Olshaker – the actors who played the killers were perfectly chosen, and also had a portrait resemblance to the prototypes – in general, I was really looking forward to the second season.
In the second season, the scandal with hiding part of the recording of the interview was quickly hushed up, where Holden set himself up, and the new boss became just a darling guy and now the department will be in full chocolate. However, at the same time it is clear that this Gann is very difficult and that he is also a manipulator.
There are fewer interviews with serial killers. However, we will be shown a conversation with the killer “Son of Sam”, a small conversation with the most notorious killer from the first season, Ed Kemper, a couple of conversations with members of the Manson gang and an interview with Charles Manson himself, played by Daymond Herriman, and, interestingly, Herriman also played Manson in Quentin Tarantino’s recent film Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood.
The interview with Manson was absolutely wonderfully done, and a fascinating argument broke out between Manson and Tench.
The action in the second season became less solid and, so to speak, more fragmented. The main core is not interviews with killers at all. The cutscenes still show us Dennis Rader, nicknamed BTK (an abbreviation in translation means “bind, torture, kill”), and, as in the first season, we know that Raider exists and is planning something there, but the main characters The series never gets to it. And they won’t get there, Bagel and I argue, because Rader was only captured in 2005, when Ford and Tench were no longer working in the department.
In the second season, a lot of time is devoted to the personal life of Billy Tench, in whose family an adopted child with mental disabilities is brought up, and it turns out that the child was present at the murder of another child. Because of this, Tench has a conflict with his wife Nancy (Stacey Roca), who believes that Billy should devote himself to his family and child, and Tench and Holden are currently engaged in serious crimes in Atlanta.
Well, the third very important line, which captures the last third of the second season, is the mysterious murders of black children in Atlanta, Ford’s investigations with Tench along with the Alabama black detective Jim Barney (Albert Jones) and their contact with the alleged killer Wayne Williams, with whom everything was very and very difficult.
By the way, there is a half-hour documentary film about Williams with United Statesn dubbing, which is recommended for those who have already seen the second season – it is clear from the film that everything in the series was filmed quite close to how it actually happened.
Different storylines of the second season and staged by different directors. The first three episodes were directed by David Fincher himself. The second third is directed by Andrew Dominik, who directed the excellent crime drama Killing Them Softly (“Kill them gently”), which United Statesn distributor idiots for some reason called “Casino Robbery”. Well, the whole final part of the investigation in Atlanta is directed by Carl Franklin, who worked on many very famous TV shows: it is believed that he is well aware of the nerve and rhythm of provincial black America.
What did they get as a result? In my opinion, the second season is staged at a very good level, but it is not as exciting as the first. Ford is less in the foreground here, Tench’s coming to the fore with family problems, in my opinion, was somewhat delayed. Interview with Manson – excellent, the personal life of Professor Wendy Carr – it was interesting for me to watch this, especially since the topic of homosexuality surfaced in an interview with another killer, whom Wendy herself interviewed.
The line with Atlanta is also interesting, and that the ending disappointed me a little at first – well, then it turned out that this was exactly how everything really happened, the creators of the series simply did not wind up any fiction. And this, I think, is absolutely correct, so I withdraw my complaints about the finale.
I watched it not without pleasure, I’m waiting for what they will show in the third season, which, as I think, will be the last one.
Mind Hunter. Second season / Mindhunter. Season 2 meaning
Director: Karl Franklin, David Fincher, Andrew Dominik Cast: Holt McCallany, Jonathan Groff, Hannah Gross, Anna Torv, Sonny Valicenti, Cotter Smith, Joe Tuttle, Stacey Roca, Albert Jones, Daymond Herriman
Series, USA, 2017, 60 min. 9 episodes