Based on the actual book, they took liberties. Dramatic effect and all of that. About the best you get out of John Douglas’s book is that they had to fight a lot harder for the unit and being able to do what they did, and that it affected them personally quite a bit. He understandably doesn’t go into detail talking trash about anyone but the subjects.
… was extremely attractive. I agree.
I didn’t get a Tom Cruise vibe from the character but rather I felt he played it too softly. Too aloof and interested in the behaviors and psychology. In interviews I’ve seen of John Douglas he appears more of a mix between the two characters. Maybe that’s just the experience that he got along the way, and maybe they played him fairly straight as a character but I just didn’t think that was the case.
Season 2 has already been filmed but no specific release date has been announced other than “2019.” Also, it’s supposed to be 8 instead of 10 episodes this season.
There’s a lot that I liked about season two…and also some real issues. I was fascinated by the chase for Wayne Williams, and all the various ways that touched the black community in Atlanta, local law enforcement, etc.
And I’m also fascinated by Dr. Carr having to live a closeted life outside of academia.
The overall story arc is great, the acting and dialogue are very good.
But man there are some big ol’ warts on season 2.
I mean, I am happy to experience how pressure-packed being in this behavioral unit could be during early days. And I think there is absolutely a GREAT story to tell about how that may have negatively impacted personal and family relationships. And with some adept writing, you could get a great story out of Bill Tench trying to somehow manage his work responsibilities and his responsibilities to his wife and son.
But instead, they pull a maneuver that feels lifted from bad soap opera writing by making Tench’s adopted son some kind of serial killer in waiting. It’s utter nonsense stuff (in real life, Robert Ressler’s son seems to have had a perfectly normal life and is a Lt. Col in the military), and feels like a lazy way to get around having to do the heavily lifting of characterization and tension-filled dialogue that might have naturally arisen from such on-the-job pressures.
I also thought the episodic TV nature of the show was apparent in the way the show seemed to forget that Dr. Carr was a major character in the final few episodes, and the way the show all but ignored Agent Ford’s personal life throughout the season.
Yeah, I was really disappointed by this. It was super dumb and immediately put me out of the story because I knew the real-life people had no such melodramatic nonsense. It’s pure soap opera hogwash.
I agree completely. This plot line destroyed the season for me. I don’t understand why this made it into the final scripts. It’s a real shame because up until that point Mindhunter was some high quality stuff.
I’m 5 episodes in, and I’ve been mostly enjoying it so far. That said, the plot point mentioned by triggercut, Telefrog and draxen is a major stinker for me, too.
It really ruined the Manson interview in episode 5. Should have been one of the high points of the season, but I just rolling my eyes so hard all the way through it because the “criminal magically gets under the cop’s skin until he snaps” is such a trite thing I could really have done without. Ugh.
If you are interested in the Atlanta Child Murders, there is an excellent podcast called “Atlanta Monster” that goes very deep into it. It includes a number of interviews they had with Wayne Williams and also one with John Douglas (Holden Ford on the show). It’s frustrating and fascinating - frustrating because there are allegations that they never seem to follow up with, plus it seems to wander about some, and fascinating because of how it all plays out, plus hearing Williams 40 years later. Early on it seems that they are heading towards Williams might be innocent but by the end, I’m pretty convinced he committed a number of the murders. Very much worth your listening.
Yeah, it’s a good podcast that’s somewhat marred in later episodes by the forays into “What if there was a conspiracy!!!” nonsense…that it eventually kind of debunks anyway.
While I agree with the general read on that plot line (and I also felt this plot line took up more time than I’d have preferred), I disagree with that characterization. I think the show went out of its way to indicate that Brian wasn’t a sociopath or potential serial killer, but just somebody suffering from trauma (and in modern terms, clearly on the autism spectrum). He was clearly deeply disturbed by what he saw, and they emphasized that the weird crucifixion thing was a misguided attempt to fix what had happened.
The biggest tell, I think, was the sequence where he wets his bed. In the previous episode, when exchanging files on one of the other killers (BTK?), Tench’s co-worker says dismissively “back then, we were still looking at whether they wet the bed.” when describing old outdated techniques. This juxtaposition seems very deliberate, highlighting that this shouldn’t be read as a potential sociopath tell. Clearly, Tench was worried about that (as per his exchange with Manson), but I think there’s supposed to be dramatic irony that the audience shouldn’t suspect his son, even if Tench starts to, because his expectations are being warped.
The narratives around the Atlanta murders was more frustrating to me by the end. That storyline became a weird, not very-well written police procedural. They had no less than 3 separate scenes where they were shocked that multiple victims knew each other. Every victim’s mother they talked to said “you’re the first police who have talked to me”. They had to have a recruit go through pedophile records. What was the Task Force doing all this time, if not those things? They keep chiding Holden for not doing “real police work”, but the rest of the narrative indicates that nobody else is really doing anything either.
I get the narratives of racist neglect and bureaucratic inefficiency, but I’m not sure what the point of those narratives are in the context of the show. I think that they may have been limited by the real-life story of those murders, but for narrative purposes, they needed to do a better job of showing that it was the result of near misses and bad luck, or showing the limitations of their process, or the difficulty in getting people to adopt their methods. As it is, it just felt like total incompetence. Even their profiling didn’t really reveal any great missed insights. The hotel clerk’s critique at the end was spot on: “a young black man is what every cop looks for, for every crime”. It really feels like they were hamstrung by the real world history.
