Series Review: Mindhunter, a gem that was cut short

Before entertaining you with my deeper analysis of this series and giving you even more reason to submerge yourself into this experience of binging this amazing series, here is the basic info you might already have seen. It doesn’t do the story fully justice, but they are the facts.

The Basic Information without flavour. Don't worry, the review is spiced up after this highlighted section

Rotton Tomatoes Synopsis

Catching a criminal often requires the authorities to get inside the villain's mind to figure out how he thinks. That's the job of FBI agents Holden Ford and Bill Tench. They attempt to understand and catch serial killers by studying their damaged psyches. Along the way, the agents pioneer the development of modern serial-killer profiling. The crime drama has a strong pedigree behind the camera, with Oscar-nominated director David Fincher and Oscar-winning actress Charlize Theron among the show's executive producers.

 Mindhunter Info

Creator                          Joe Penhall

Executive Producer       David Fincher, 

Genre                            Crime, Drama, Mystery & Thriller

Starring

Jonathan Groff starring as Holden Ford

Holt McCallany starring as Bill Tench

Anna Torv starring as Dr. Wendy Carr

Now that the boring facts are out of the way, if you haven't seen the series yet, this is going to blow your mind.

Overview|Why you should watch this

If you’re reading this, the chances are good that you’re familiar with my kind of perspective on anything strange, dark, and mysterious. I’m no psychologist, but anything related to psychology is part of the material that I consume as my guilty pleasure. Another element that caught my attention in this series was that a great deal of the plot revolves around interviewing serial killers, which is right up my alley. Not so much that I’m interested in killings, but the psychology of how this abnormal behavior became normal in the mind of the killer.

What made it great|This story has layers

The story has several layers which are introduced timely since the story’s pilot. At first, you have a young FBI freshman, Holden Ford, who launches our interest into the library of knowledge about the FBI’s take on profiling criminal behavior. He does this by teaching at an FBI training school. He finds that there are gaps between their theoretical knowledge and reality.

Protagonist (Main Character)

As an introvert, he meets a girl who shows some interest in him, maybe romantically, but that isn’t as important as her challenging his take on criminal psychology. Their relationship becomes physical, with him exploring pleasures he didn’t know about, but their intellectual relationship runs dry, followed by them breaking up. That breakup scene was just as entertaining on its own. I liked that it suited the theme of the story like a glove. Both including the audience saw that there wasn’t much keeping them together, but neither of them wanted to initiate the breakup, most probably respecting the other’s feelings.

The Experienced Partner

At the same time, the young FBI agent meets an older agent, Bill Tench, who’s got plenty of experience in their teaching similar principles. The only difference is that he also does this as a “community project” at police stations across the country. He too found gaps in the education material and found Holden’s ideas refreshing. Bill already has a family, but with an adopted son whose behavior seems to be challenging from the start. The son seems to have some sort of challenging social behavior, leaning to possible Asperger's mixed with some psychopathy. He doesn’t speak or react when being spoken to, and when he does react, he will do so without looking up. This family intensifies Bill’s struggle to balance work and family responsibilities.

The two FBI agents start going on road trips to conduct their “community service” but clash about their teaching material constantly. Somehow, Holden goes steam up against all tradition by suggesting interviewing serial killers. The aim is to understand how a serial killer thinks to be more effective in the field. Suddenly, another layer was added which made the story even more interesting. Bill endorses the idea with an iconic line, “how do we get in front of crazy if we don’t know what crazy looks like.” Or at least I feel that this was an iconic line which was a pivotal marker in the story.

Each serial killer had their own list of odd behaviors that could be traced back to their upbringing, usually being neglected or mistreated by their mothers but also more often than not, the absence of a father figure.

The Interesting Character for Depth

Another layer is introduced by Dr. Wendy Carr. She not only starts her role in the team as a learned psychological professional at a university, but she also exerts another form of psychology purposely. She identifies as bisexual but doesn’t reveal it to the rest of the team. She knows that the team would have no problem with that, especially since they’re colleagues. One cannot help but wonder whether it is because she knows that she is attractive and wants to keep using that in her favor to manipulate the male team members. It appears that she struggles with this while another possibility presents itself: she could be questioning her sexual preference.

Indepth look at the details|The Serial Killers

Some of the brilliance you'll meet is Edmund Kemper. One of my favorites because not only is he recognizable, but also because he was captured out of free will. He could have stayed away from being arrested, but he was tormented by the police not making progress on finding him, so he gave himself up. He delivers an eye-opening line in the second season which I feel is a brilliant revelation into the mind of a serial killer. Spoiler – he says that all the data up to that point that was used to capture serial killers was based upon interviews with serial killers who were caught. Not all serial killers are as reckless to be caught, so to understand the mind of a serial killer better, they need to speak to serial killers who don't get caught.

Among other popular killers, they also interview the BTK killer as well as Charles Manson. I’m South African, and even I know of them. To me, the interesting part of interviewing these criminals is rooted in my fascination with what circumstances caused this behavior to be experienced as normal.

Why It Was Cancelled |The sudden ending

Although there are rumors of a season 3 on the way, at the time of publishing it hasn't been confirmed yet, with no solid proof that it is more than just a rumor.

I feel the story had huge potential to go on for another season before running out of interesting material, but probably due to bringing the series to an end after the second season, it does feel as if the story lost direction for a while. Some of the storyline got attention to play it out to the end, but the sudden ending feels unnatural. 

I do think that some of it could have been caused by a loss of interest to make something great when it has basically already been shut down. I would love to see this story continue, doesn’t matter in what form.

Also, one should also recognise that some scenes was a bit racy. Fun, I admit, seeing Holden being treated on a journey of sex exploration with an attractive girlfriend which could be ranked way higher on the attractive scale than him. Some scenes, according to me had the right amount of gore, but to more sensitive people it could have been a bit much. Such a pity, but oh well, bad things happen to good situations too.