I just finished both the shows 2nd season as well as The Boys 1st season. Both really, really good. As far as Mindhunter, I get some of the negative comments but overall, I thought this season was outstanding. I liked all the loose ends left hanging for the Atlanta case and as it's been mentioned, Holt McCallany is the shows MVP. Watching the slow breakdown of Tench's family in the last few episodes was heartbreaking. My two critiques of this season - the lesbian angle and really the entire Wendy Carr character arc was left kind of twisting in the wind by the last episode. And Ford really needed more nuance to his character this season. He needs to be more than a uber-passive Fox Mulder type to sustain interest going forward. The wait for season 3 is gonna be brutal.
one thing i'm enjoying is that everyone's praises and critiques are pretty similar. isn't that a definition of a pretty good or compelling show? i mean no one's all-out pissed off like in the GOT final season thread...
Just finished the Manson episode; here are my thoughts on S2 so far: 1. Yellowface. Yuck is it distracting and ugly. 2. The woman Wendy is based on is not gay; she's married with two children, and is still on the staff of Boston College's Nursing School. I'm indifferent to the "wokeness" of the producers' decision on that change, but the Wendy/Kay storyline is doing nothing for me (and would still be superfluous if "Kay" were "Ken"). 3. The dead toddler crime is based on a true story (complete with the cross), but this subplot is even more heavy-handed than Wendy/Kay. I've never liked it when shows throw the protagonists into the exact same situations that they're supposed to be dealing with externally (example: Scully's abduction/cancer/William plot line) and fast-forwarding Brian from non-speaking possibly autistic adoptee to kid who breaks into mom's lockbox and is a facilitator to his hoodlum friends' toddler killing is just too much. 4. I would totally watch an Ed Kemper mini-series starring Cameron Britton. Britton is amazing, and I'm sure the showrunners were thrilled that Kemper and Manson were in the same facility at the time so that they could feature him again. Kemper really did (still does?) audiobook recordings for the blind. Among his "hundreds of titles": a novelization of Star Wars . Oh, and Flowers In The Attic, which is about incest and familial abuse. 5. The explanations about the politics at play in the Atlanta cases were really stomach-churning. 6. Manson really did sit on the back of his chair when Agent Douglas interviewed him. Power-play or compensation for being 5'2"? Probably both.
Just finished season 2. The good: Well written Tench lines. He said the perfect, coolest things. I tried to imagine the coolest response and Tench's was always better. Which shifted to poorer comments as his personal life got more difficult. So well done. The bad: Repeated motifs. Ford is liked by the new boss. Wendy feels unappreciated. Ford thinks his profile is right. The victim's mothers scepticism. Many others like that repeated too many times. We get the point after one or two hints. The ugly: Introducing another possibility regarding the photos and coverup as an aside at the last minute. Approaching this other possibility and secret lives more than just as a red herring would have added more depth to the story. Overall it was still very enjoyable, but could have been a classic.
I didn't find a problem with Ford's boss actually approving of his methodology or his quirkiness. He recognized Ford as being very good at what he does, but realized a guy like him needed checks and balances. It moved away from the tired old motif of the boss or 'upstairs guy' constantly disapproving of the work of his subordinates, chewing their butts out, and the program always on the verge being sacked. I could have done without the whole Wendy Carr plot line. Frankly, I found it really boring. As far as Tench's plot line, maybe it was contrived a bit, but they did go to the trouble to at least establish early on that Brian was making some friends. It wasn't like he was just an isolated mute kid that all of a sudden morphs into this different kid that would help other hoodlum kids break into a house with no real explanation. Personally, as I mentioned above somewhat back, I didn't dislike the Tench plot as it showed how harried, demanding, and stressful the job these guys had and then to pile on an unstable home life onto it could make things almost impossible. Now, the fact that Tench's son might be a budding serial killer or at his stage, oppositional defiant, might have been a bit much. Lastly, it is true that Charles Manson was quite short, but the estimates of him being 5'2" are probably not accurate. Many reports I've read have him at about 5'6" or a bit under that, but he was taller than 5'2". To a guy like Kemper, who is 6'9" hell yeah he'd appear short.
This is pretty much how I feel about this season, except I don't think it is good. Mediocre, I am disappointed. It seems they are trying to drag it as long as possible without having a good plot.
I was recently watching the latest season Line Of Duty and thinking how disappointing it was that the new Mindhunter season significantly reduced the amount of time spent on interviews. Line Of Duty is famous for the interviews and will have 1/2 an episode of just interviews. I’d prefer Mindhunter did this as well. Then I saw that there’s a Netflix series called Criminal with Dave Tennant premiering September 20th that takes place almost entirely in police interview rooms. Perhaps this is why Mindhunter changed directions to not have 2 shows that similar.
I think the idea was to take the knowledge gleaned in S1's interviews and apply it to a high-visibility* case in S2, and showing the resistance to BSU/Ford's theories from APD and victims' advocacy groups, as well as the fact that even though a profile may turn out to be correct, it sometimes doesn't narrow down the suspect field too much ("a black guy in Atlanta in his 20s/30s - yeah that's a lot of help!"). * I've read lots of comments around the 'net of people not being aware of this case as it was happening; trust me it was all over the news.
The BTK angle is certainly going to play out in a major way when they finally get to it. Those cold-open bits are hooks for us to get involved in an ever increasing way with this character. Will it go down in season 3? Stay tuned...
I’d bet BTK is dealt with in the last season of the series. The timeline works out to be in that ballpark.
Not nullified, because Holden was right all along about who the killer was, just as he was right about everything else in Season 1 until Kemper proved that it's not merely an exercise in psychology. Of course Holden came away with "the vapors" from that encounter. Holden is so right that he's still wrong. Even after being hugged by the arms of death, the fieldwork done to catch the Atlanta child murders served to bring out Holden's empathy, yet he remains detached despite it all. As empathetic to the murders as Holden appeared to be (and I'm not saying he's callous), he has two inward reactions: one that is an empathy like smiling when a camera is pointed our way, because it's simply what we are conditioned to do. The other is what Holden is afraid of: the empathy that brings him too close to the killer's emotions, which may look more like himself in the mirror. This is what Kemper brought out of him. So, it might it boil down to if you believe that Williams did it or not. If you believe that Williams did it, like I do, it validifies the entire premise of the show. Holden wins. The mothers may not have won. The city didn't win. But Holden did. Holden did, the architect of the whole BSU.
Dang, I see that my last post was the last post in this thread. That's such a shame for such a fine show. I just wanted to put my thoughts down more clearly (for what it's worth). I believe the second season avoided the sophomore slump that's so prevalent these days. This is a very good sign. All of the interviews, all of the early sweat and tears, in both the 1st and 2nd seasons, really laid a path for the Atlanta child murders, where we see them in action for the first time in a current investigation. In the first half of the second season it all leads up to Atlanta. There are elements of foreshadowing in every interview that's conducted. It was no different in the first season. To some, this method of leading the audience might ring false, or overtly contrived. I didn't...and only because this approach is a hallmark for many detective/police series going back to the 1940s (perhaps the '30s, too?). It's not as if everything aligns itself in real life like this in many modern films I've seen, either. It may just be a necessary contrivance so that the audience isn't bored to tears and/or we watch them just sitting around the office making coffee. It's like the bit with Tench's son. Yeah, okay, I saw right away that it was shoehorned in, but only to serve a larger theme. i.e. is this what a young serial killer looks like? (maybe not a serial killer, but some type of social deviant.) Speaking of deviants, of course there were the lesbian themes, in a time where openly gay people were not exactly embraced by society. Indeed, we're talking a form of "deviance" as it was seen at the time. At the time, we're also noting the deviance of the BTK killer, outside of killer people. The guy is into autoerotica. Oh, and let's not forget that killer Paul Bateson pegged Agent Smith as a queer. He didn't come out and say, but his eyes did, which clearly left Smith vulnerable. One thing that I had to remind myself of - and it's interesting to keep this perspective - is that Agent Tench is a psychologist. So, that Season 2 was Tench-centric, keep in mind that behind all his early '60s facade, he's still operating in within the realm of psychology, albeit from an earlier time. So, I came in expecting a slump, but left feeling that the second season was a logical extension of the first. It wasn't going to follow the same beats, but it was all the better for "deviating" from that path. It ended by justifying Holden's instincts. It was a perfect ending. Now, how are they going to top Seasons 1 and 2?
On last episode of Season 2 now. Over all and enjoyable show. I had no idea it was based on real events until I looked up Ed Kemper. I guess reality is stranger than fiction so I became more interested in the show and so far it is great. Looking forward to more seasons.
A hi-fi tech digression here, but last night I went down a bit of a prop rabbit hole wondering about the reel-to-reel tape recorder featured in the opening credits — was it a Nagra? — and stumbled on a film forum in which the prop maker jumped in and discussed how he customized and refurbished a vintage Sony TC-5550-2 to look immaculately new according to David Fincher’s visual specs: That’s one of my builds. I did that for David. He actually had two other shops try to do the build before one of the shops (a friend of fine) told the prop master that they needed someone anal about details. So, I got the call. The reels were a bitch! David literally wanted a 5 thou chamfer on all the edges. I even had to upgrade my head blaster to use medial typically used in the finishing of medical devices to give him what he wanted. I scratch built 40% of an existing machine. We found two out there and one extra in a museum. It was a challenge... which ultimately David was extremely happy and the prop was used to create the title sequence for the show. Ended up remachining a great deal of the other 60% of parts to remove dings and deep scratches. I color matched an original by mixing a custom set of gun coating colors. The silk screening was a bitch to deal with. David wanted extreme close ups. Prop master was pretty cool to work for. The guy calls me one night and two hours later had me on a plane headed for Pittsburg so I could have a 7am meeting with them the next morning. Then, at 7:30am was heading back to the airport to sit and wait for a 6pm flight back home. The meeting was that fast. Basically, the meeting went like this. “David wants perfect”. I replied to the prop master.... “I know David is tight with Pitt. I accomplish this, I want in on World War Z 2”. Lol I’m still waiting for a call. Lol The reels I made from scratch. Look close at the center hub in the title clip and you’ll notice “KCP”. ���� I did not have a real reel to copy. I used whatever reference I could find. Your link you provided is close to what I was shooting for. We ran metal specifically for the title sequence. Also, metal reels were used during that time period. A museum piece I looked at for interrogations had metal reels on it. I cnc machined the reels out of flat aluminum. The center hubs I CADed and printed the parts and imbedded screw fasteners for the flat heads. So basically it’s a deck that doesn’t exist and never existed in the real world. The Tape Recorder from Netflix MINDHUNTER
I thought there was something off about it but if that's the case why all the bits about him? It has to tie in somehow you would hope.
Oh, I am so bummed-out. Fincher has announced they're shutting down because he's too busy with other projects and will not do a Season 3. Sorry True Crime Stans, Mindhunter Season 3 Has Been Put On An ‘Indefinite Hold’
A bummer for sure, but getting season 3 of "You" is FANTASTIC news ! I just finished Season 2 last night, what a show … I prefer having "You" over Mindhunter. This news comes right on the heels of the announcement that Netflix’s other serial killer series, You, has been renewed for a 3rd season. Sigh, it seems the streaming giant only has room for one show about analyzing the mind and motives of a serial killer at this juncture. At least this leaves the golden-voiced Groff available for more musicals. Anyone else up for a Parade revival with Groffsauce as Leo? I tried finding a thread on the forum about "You", but searching for this is nearly impossible ….
No idea what "You" is so I'll have to check it out. That's too bad about Mindhunter maybe he will reconsider in a year or two.
I came across "You" just a few days ago, it is based on novels, which I don't know nothing about. I loved the first season and now the second season was even better … it is a bit like "Dexter" but in New York (1st season) and without the police procedural background, instead you get a geeky/nerdy bookstore guy and stalker ….. sounds a bit lame, but it isn't at all, fantastic acting, fantastic dialogue, witty, twisting and turning, sometimes brutal - but never too gory - perfect ! Meet Joe Goldberg and Beck ……
