‘Mindhunter’ Season 2 Episode 5 Recap: Charlie Manson’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

Ed Kemper! Tex Watson! Charles Manson! Yes, all the stars are here on this installment of Mindhunter. To the show’s credit, it doesn’t feel overcrowded. All the killers, and all the storylines without one, feel like they belong and move the story and themes forward. If you’ve written a line as chilling as Ed Kemper saying “Seems to me everything you know about serial killers has been gleaned from the ones who’ve been caught,” writing anything else that’s even coherent is a substantial achievement if you ask me.

That line, which actually made me gasp “Jesus Christ” out loud, comes when Bill and Holden are being kept waiting for their eagerly anticipated audience with Charles Manson. (“Like a fucking king” is how Bill describes Manson’s insistence on making a grand entrance.) The pair shake hands and catch up with their old interview subject Ed Kemper (Cameron Britten, magnificent in the role as always) in much the same way they did with, say, FBI Agent Jim Barney earlier in the season—like former colleagues, happy to see each other. Ed is particularly grateful to Holden for visiting him in the hospital during the incident that triggered his first panic attack: “Really meant a lot to me. That’s what friends are for.”

Ed’s got nothing but negative things to say about Manson, whom he calls “the charlatan” and feels is a phony. Ed can describe in detail the “elation, the incredible release” of killing someone, as he does when he talks to Bill and Holden about why he revisited the scenes of his crimes; Manson, he says, has never killed anyone himself, and is therefore a huge phony. “It’s a taxing lifestyle,” you see, and Manson is stealing valor by claiming that lifestyle as his own.

Manson himself is played by actor Damon Herriman, in effect reprising his role from Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. And indeed, he enters the room where he is to be interviewed like a visiting Pope. Freed of his shackles, he perches on the back of his chair instead of sitting in it properly. Anything to keep squares like Holden and especially Bill on their toes.

Charlie’s contention is that whatever the members of his “Family” did, they came up with on their own; the Tate-LaBianca murders were copycat killings they staged to help exonerate members of the Family who’d been busted for another killing already. Once they got caught? Helter Skelter, race war, “Death to Pigs,” all that stuff was strung together into a bullshit narrative by the district attorney who prosecuted him. In the end, he says, the responsibility lies with the parents, literal and metaphorical, who shaped his followers during their years in the normal world.

One such follower, Tex Watson (Christopher Backus), is singled out by Manson for being someone he wouldn’t dare cross. But when Holden visits Watson, he finds him every bit the clean-cut, devoutly Christian, All-American boy he ostensibly once was before he hooked up with Manson, and now is once again. Soft spoken and willing to take responsibility for his actions, Watson nevertheless says Manson groomed him and the other Family members to be the killers they became.

What’s the truth of the matter? Back at Quantico, Bill—who angrily stormed out of Manson’s interview, his rage triggered because the words hit too close to home—feels Manson clearly called the shots. Wendy and Holden lean more toward Manson’s explanation, arguing that it’s easier to believe a cult leader played along with his overzealous followers than to believe the entire elaborate Helter Skelter mythology.

As the group bounces the idea back and forth (they are, of course, oblivious to the subtext of Bill’s objections), Wendy comes up with a synthesis approach to the Manson Family. As she puts it, Manson’s prime concern wasn’t the Helter Skelter race war per se, it was exerting control over his followers. He likely poured a lot of violent ideas into their drug-addled brains, unlocking violent tendencies that may have already been present. This led them to start “working towards the Manson,” if I may borrow a phrase the historian Ian Kershaw uses to describe the controlled chaos of the Third Reich. (Charlie’s got a swastika tattooed on his forehead after all.)

So if it’s true that followers like Tex got extremely proactive in this respect and came up with the idea of the Tate-LaBianca murders themselves, Charlie would have no choice but to endorse them, or even make it sound to his followers like it was his idea to begin with. Anything less would be ceding authority, and authority was always his goal.

All of this comes out in the context of Bill’s distress over his own son’s role in the death of another child. His motivation in wanting to pin the ultimate blame on Manson instead of his “children” is clear, almost to a fault. But the presence of other equally forceful arguments at the table, and the conflicting information received from Manson and Watson, prevent him from coming across as overwritten in his recalcitrance. It’s a clear case of Mindhunter‘s personal and historical stories weaving together, allowing each to bring out something in the other we wouldn’t have access to alone.

If there’s a throughline for this episode, it’s what Wendy refers to in bed with her girlfriend as the “authentic self.” Obviously Bill and Holden are trying to figure out the authentic selves of their quarry. But beyond that, Wendy allows her coworkers to believe that her story of falling for an older woman was just that, a story. She also has to navigate dating an out lesbian who’s still closeted to her son, who lives with his father. Wendy herself is closeted to her coworkers, but she refuses to play along with a grotesque bean-counter from the Justice Department who crudely hits on her at a party at Director Gunn’s house.

For his part, Bill has to cooperate with child welfare authorities who are now involved in his family life to determine how much help his son needs, but he instructs his wife Nancy never to believe that these people are their friends. He’s miserable at both a meeting with a counselor and Gunn’s party, but he can shake that misery and play the good ol’ boy telling war stories about Manson and Speck and the rest of the gang if that’s what his audience wants to hear.

And even BTK gets in on the act, in a cold open that shows him burying his fetish gear in the backyard. His authentic self won’t stay buried forever.

If you couldn’t tell, I’m finding all of this rather compelling this time around. Without that weird clipped dialogue from last season dragging it down, Mindhunter is able to live its authentic self: a smart period crime drama asking questions about human behavior that its characters don’t have the answers to.

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 5 on Netflix