I marathon-ed out Mindhunter over the last few days on Netflix. I couldn’t remember the damn name, and for the first few episodes, kept calling it Brainminder, which sounds like a Tupperware product for zombies. Anyway.
It’s a David Fincher-produced thing – he also directed four episodes. Set in 1977, early days of FBI profiling, a couple of agents are both working active cases and going to prisons to interview notorious “sequence killers” to find out what makes them tick. The big selling point is the spot-on portrayal of Ed Kemper, which has already been discussed to death in every other article about the series. Agreed, but I won’t bore you with the story that he now narrates audio books for the blind in prison.
I liked that this was set in 1977, but it doesn’t burn insane cycles saying “hey look, it’s 1977!” That was one of my criticisms of the one-and-done Scorsese-produced Vinyl, which spent way too much time and money depicting a gritty, punk, New York. Mindhunter has the old cars and the rotary phones and reel-to-reel tape recorders, but they aren’t the main character of the series. This reminded me a bit of Fincher’s work with Zodiac, which I ultimately didn’t love, but I appreciated that the focus wasn’t to make the background the character.
I did like Mindhunter’s character development, which was sort of atypical. There’s the “new guy” Holden Ford, and the “old guy” Bill Tench, a common trope for crime fiction. But it’s not a “the old guy is dumb and the new guy tells him how modern life now works” or “the kid is a newbie, and the old guy lays it all out for him.” It’s very non-binary in that both of the characters have some advanced insights and key knowledge, but also have their own shortcomings. It does both of the tropes, but mixes them together in a more realistic way, with the two characters playing off of each other. There’s also the two sides of the institution, the new, groundbreaking professor, and the FBI old guard, and those are a little less nuanced, especially the FBI, but they do feed in little bits of development, especially with Wendy Carr, the psych professor.
The finale — I won’t go into details, but I read from multiple people that it threw them, and it didn’t bother me. It was no Twin Peaks on the WTF scale of the finale, and it didn’t bother me. But I’m not everyone, so who knows.
It will be interesting to see where the show goes in a Season 2. They were vaguely following the antics of a killer more or less modeled after Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer. They were mostly just setting it up, though. Maybe the next season will get into that more.
Standard disclaimer applies to any of these VOD shows: it’s great, I watch it in two or three sittings, and then I have to wait six months or a year to get my next fix. I sometimes wish they could crank out five seasons at once, but obviously that’s not an option. (Unless I find out about it three or four years after it happens.)