‘Mindhunter’ Season 2 Episode 2 Recap: Guest Starring the Son of Sam

In Mindhunter Season 2 Episode 2, we pay a visit to a Mr. David Berkowitz. This enterprising young man brought the largest city in America to its knees and sent cryptic communiqués to the press and police before finally getting caught over a parking ticket. He’s one of the most famous serial killers of all time, known to one and all as the Son of Sam. And he’s damn lucky that’s the self-applied nickname that stuck, as opposed to alternate choices like “The Wicked King of Wicker” or—well, let’s hear it from Bill Tench.

Oliver Cooper guest stars as Berkowitz in the latest of Mindhunter‘s series of serial-killer cameos. His waxen features and schlubby, slouching posture in the role are perfect for illustrating the disconnect from these creeps’ delusions of grandeur and their often pathetic reality. Indeed, by fluffing up his ego, FBI Agents Bill Tench and Holden Ford are able to gain insight not only into their current quarry, Son of Sam wannabe BTK, but into Sam himself, getting him to admit that his demonic-possession story is bullshit. With a smirk, even!

It’s enough to make you fantasize about a version of Mindhunter that’s just these sit-down face-to-face interviews, like In Treatment with the Boston Strangler.

So yeah, I’m enjoying myself with this show, if “enjoying” is the right word.

It should be noted here, since as best I can tell it’s not being noted anywhere else, that creator Joe Penhall is nowhere to be found in the writing credits this season. During the show’s first go-round, he served as showrunner and wrote or cowrote seven episodes out of ten, taking the sole writer’s credit for the pilot and its follow-up. Now? He’s listed as “Consultant,” just like John Douglas, the FBI agent upon whom Holden is based and who co-wrote the book the show is based on and named after. I mean, I hate to jump to conclusions, but it’s hard to feel like the major uptick in quality, and the total lack of dialogue that makes you wonder if its writer has ever heard human beings speak to one another, is related to Penhall’s absence.

What this means in practice is that the show has largely shed its prestige-TV skin, A-list director David Fincher notwithstanding. Now it’s a police procedural pretty much straight-up, with about the same amount of interpersonal drama as your average SVU. A couple scenes of Bill Tench’s home life (he’s getting a bit paranoid about unlocked doors, and as it turns out his paranoia may be justified because a dead body was discovered in a house his real-estate agent wife is selling), a possible love connection between Dr. Wendy Carr and a comely bartender, a brief glimpse of BTK getting banished by his wife to sleeping on the sofa and reading about sexual deviance, and you’re out.

Personally, I don’t mind. When the characters get together and vomit forth exposition and jargon in huge gushes, do I get the uncomfortable feeling that I’m watching Criminal Minds with better production values? Yeah, kind of. But the key difference is that while a serial-killer drama set in the present is able to assert its theories about such criminals as fact, the characters on Mindhunter are making it up as they go along. That element of uncertainty draws gives a you-are-there feel to the infodumps, which the characters have to make sense of just as the audience does.

Sometimes, the characters get it wrong. Throughout the episode, Bill and later Holden make all kinds of assertions about BTK that wind up not being true: that he can’t hold a job, or if he can it’s menial work at best; that he can’t maintain a romantic relationship; that he doesn’t have a family; that he doesn’t attend church. Only when they pay attention to the lone survivor’s description of a neat, clean, calm killer do they come close to the frightening truth: On the outside, BTK is just as much of a normie as his victims were. The devil is in the details, as they say.

In fact, details are what distinguish the show at this point. Sometimes that means chronicling how communities cope with the killers in their midst—how women in Wichita check to make sure their phone lines haven’t been cut when they come home, or how women in New York changed their hairstyles to avoid becoming one of the Son of Sam’s preferred targets, or more specifically how the aforementioned lone survivor, who suffered three bullets to the head and face, prefers not to be looked at directly when Bill interviews him.

That last point, of course, creates an interesting staging for the interview scene: Bill in the foreground and in focus, tilting his head slightly to the left, with the survivor out of focus in the back seat of the car they’re sitting in. That kind of detail—making things look and sound interesting just as filmmaking—can also be found in abundance at this point.

The music cues, for example, have gotten more organic and less obvious than they were in the first season. Eddie Rabbitt’s “I Love a Rainy Night” as the era-appropriate soundtrack to a raucous bar, or Willie Nelson as a Wichita cop’s go-to choice for long drives? This makes a lot more sense than the cockamamie selections from Season One, like when Holden’s then-girlfriend goes to what I think is supposed to be a show by the Stooges or the MC5 but plays Peter Frampton when it’s time to get frisky in her apartment. (And I still can’t get over them using “Psycho Killer” in a show about psycho killers. Sorry, this stuff matters to me!)

And when you’ve gotten the details right, character work becomes much easier to do with light sketches rather than bold strokes. When Holden and Bill drive up to visit the Son of Sam, there’s only the slightest hitch in Holden’s voice when he notes that Berkowitz targeted the passenger seat because that’s traditionally where women sit—it’s where Holden himself is sitting. During the interview, there’s a flicker of concern across Bill’s face when Holden jumps in, but only a flicker, which soon dissipates when he realizes his partner seems in control of his emotions. Wendy’s not as hands-on in the research at this point, but Fincher is still able to tell a whole story about her interest in a pretty bartender just by the way her eyes focus as they exchange glances.

In short, this is an improvement across the board from the shaky, weirdly overrated Season One. The procedural material is strong, the filmmaking is sound, the character work slight but deft. That’s how a show improves, when a show improves: In the words of Bill Tench, “It happens everywhere.”

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Stream Mindhunter Season 2 Episode 2 on Netflix