‘Mindhunter’ on Netflix Season 2 Episode 7 Recap: Mother, Mother

If you’ve been reading these reviews of Mindhunter Season 2, you know one of my main (or really only) complaints about this season has been the lack of interesting things for Nancy Tench to do. Not the lack of interesting things done with her—when your little boy crucifies the dead body of another little boy in hopes of bringing him back to life, you’ve got a lot on your plate, to understate the case to an absurd degree. But her reaction has consisted mostly of fretting that everyone else, from his case worker to his father, is doing more harm than good, and only she can see it. My term for this character type is “mama bear,” and my go-to example of the syndrome is Catelyn Stark during the first season of Game of Thrones. (The book version of the character was far livelier and slippier.)

I’m not leveling this complaint anymore, not after this episode. For one thing, Nancy is evincing unspoken feelings at last, when she is clearly but (and this is key) not vocally perturbed that even the goddamn caseworker investigating her child’s welfare after a goddamn killing is as spellbound by hubby Bill’s stories of serial killers as your average small-town cop or D.C. bigwig.

But more importantly, she denies the mother of a victim closure, and we’re made to sit with this decision, and we’re forced to live with it. I can’t tell you how much good it does a show to have this kind of faith in its audience, to let a character do something seemingly unsympathetic and ask you to sympathize anyway.

When the mother of the dead boy comes by with a friend just to talk to Nancy and explain that she realizes young Brian Tench didn’t do anything wrong, your heart goes out to her. When she asks permission to see Brian, to tell him she forgives him, that he didn’t do anything wrong, that he’s A Good Boy, though, Nancy says no. I was stunned, but I wasn’t sure if I was stunned because I agreed with Nancy’s decision (it would likely retraumatize a boy who’s literally stopped talking at this point) or because I disagreed (what a thing to do, to hide your child from a woman who no longer has one).

The grieving mother, though? She understands. She gets it. And she forgives Nancy. Whether for keeping Brian safe or raising a child who failed to keep her own son safe, she forgives her. That word cuts like a knife in that scene, and the moment the mother leaves Nancy breaks down sobbing. We just sit there in her house with her for a moment, watching, allowed to formulate our own thoughts about what we’ve witnessed. There’s not a huge audience for that kind of ambiguity in TV drama anymore. Mindhunter has faith that it’s found one.

The show asks us to withstand similarly divided loyalties when it comes to the investigation of the Atlanta child murders. Given the relative soundness of Holden’s theory that the children’s killer or killers came from their own ethnic group, it makes sense to share his frustration that the parents, the community, and even the police chief are intent on investigating the Ku Klux Klan for the case. On the other hand, can you blame any of them for wanting to turn up the heat on white-nationalist terrorists, whom historically have been no respecter of the innocence of black children?

Holden’s one real ally in wanting to steer clear of the Klan is the mayor, of all people, who gets shouted down in a church, of all places, when he suggests there is no known link between the crimes and the KKK. (Hizzoner is shown beneath a cross in a shot that echoes Ed Kemper sitting below one in the prison chapel earlier in the season; make of that what you will.)

But! There was also no known link between the victims…until the Feds on the case realized some of the children knew each other. In one of the episode’s most low-key shocking scenes, Agent Jim Barney visits the house of one of the victims and discovers he knew seven of the others. My notes on this read, in bold and all caps, JESUS, HOW DID THEY MISS THIS? Maybe it’s best to leave no stone unturned?

But! Nancy’s material throughout the season shows us that parents do not always know what’s best for their children, and have their own vital psychological interests to protect as well. Are we to see aspects of Nancy’s decision not to allow the mother of the dead child to see Brian in Camille’s insistence that the Klan is at fault rather than a more home-grown predator?

It’s not that Holden and Camille are explicitly at loggerheads during the events of the episode. On the contrary, Holden persuades her to persuade her fellow parents to allow him to use a planned memorial march as bait, hoping to draw the killer out by turning the sites of his crimes into sites of remembrance. If Holden, Bill, and Wendy (who’s having troubles on the homefront of her own) are correct, the killer won’t be able to resist reclaiming these sacred sites as his own by revisiting them.

Which brings us to the strangest segment of the episode: Holden’s race against time to erect a cross, a particularly meaningful bait item (which Bill, not incidentally, recognizes from his own son’s ordeal), at one of the memorial sites before the parade can reach it. Absurd Bureau bureaucracy prevents them from just buying a couple of crosses, so they wind up scrambling to assemble the ones sent to them from the home office, forcing Holden to literally run through the march, cross in hand. With a string section screeching along like something out of the soundtrack for The Shining and grainy film effects straight from the Abraham Zapruder collection, the sequence is the most ostentatiously filmic in the show’s history, that’s for sure. What’s less certain is why.

After we rule out historical mimicry—anyone filming the march for the news would have done so on video—what does that leave? Is it to raise the prospect that Holden is on the verge of a panic attack, so things are starting to look and feel strange and unnerving to him? Possible, though the attack never materializes, and isn’t hinted at in Jonathan Groff’s performance either. Is it to raise the grim specter of mistaken identity—that people marching in the memory of children they believe were slain by the Ku Klux Klan will see a white guy carrying a cross and a gun as he runs right through them and assume the worst?

Perhaps it’s both. Perhaps it’s neither. I’d say that lack of clarity means the device didn’t work, whatever it was for, but then again here we are talking about the filmmaking on a show in which the filmmaking is usually invisible. To bring it back to Game of Thrones, ambiguity is a sword without a hilt.

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 7 on Netflix