Unmasking the Face of Evil, A Review of the Sophomore Season of Mindhunter

In 2017, in Mindhunter, we saw the fictional, fledgling beginnings of the Behavioral Sciences Unit at Quantico, Virginia during the late 70’s as Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff) and Bill Tench (Holt McCallany) started to interview and analyze various inmates who had had committed multiple murderers in an attempt to understand the underlying pathology and psychology. The question on their mind: what makes a criminal tick? What the hell happened in their life that led them down this particular road? The duo would recuirt psychology professor Wendy Carr (Anna Torv) to help parse the details of some of the most depraved and deviant killers, most notably in the first season the Co-Ed Killer, Ed Kempter (Cameron Britton). Their work brought to the edge of darkness, but if they wanted to stop evil they had to understand it.

The second season of Mindhunter starts off relatively soon after the events in the previous season finale, with Ford hospitalized after a massive panic attack and tensions between Tench and Carr high with the unit under investigation. While Ford gets his act together fairly quickly, the status quo of the season is disrupted by the retirement of Robert Shepard (Cotter Smith) and the appointment of Ted Gunn (Michael Cerveris, who joins his fellow Fringe alum Anna Torv once again in an Observer role) who is much more enthusiastic about the prospects of the BSU.

The first half of the season feels very much in line with the dark atmosphere and suspense of the first seas…