Mindhunter Deconstructed Its Protagonist in Its Final Episodes

David Fincher and the team behind Mindhunter weren't certain that their show would be coming to a close at the end of its second season. When Fincher spoke publicly in 2023 about the end of the series — thus confirming at last that Season 3 wasn't just really, really delayed — he talked about how expensive the show was for Netflix relative to the viewership numbers it pulled in. That awareness, plus the fact that Season 2 only got a nine-episode order, down from Season 1's 10, suggests the writing was on the wall back in 2019.

But if Mindhunter was going to end after Season 2, Fincher, his writers, and director Carl Franklin, who helmed these final four episodes we're focusing on in this last Rewatch, sent out the show on a powerful note. Ford (Jonathan Groff) and Tench's (Holt McCallany) relocation to Atlanta creates a kind of limited series within the season, and while Tench is still trying in vain to get through to his troubled kid and Wendy (Anna Torv) is unfortunately stranded in a cul-de-sac relationship storyline that keeps her out of the mix (truly the worst thing about a generally excellent set of episodes), it's Holden who bears the weight of the Atlanta case. It ends up being a story arc that tests his ability to apply his groundbreaking theories in a way that might actually serve the public good.

The Atlanta child murders case wasn't Holden's first time in Georgia in a Bureau capacity. In Season 1, he'd helped the police work a confession out of a man who'd killed a 12-year-old girl, then celebrated with the local cops and ended up in the Atlanta Journal Constitution sounding like some prophet of the future of criminal profiling. So when he returned and met with the mothers of the missing and dead children — when he was in fact dragged to that meeting by Tanya the hotel clerk (Sierra Aylina McClain) and begged for his help — there was a sense that Holden might be able to play the savior. He could touch down in this “backwards” Southern city, bless the local cops with the gift of his profiling method, and find the serial killer who nobody could find.

What's great about this set of episodes isn't just that Holden gets put in his place — though he does, and it's glorious. Camille Bell (June Carryl), the mother of one of the dead children, could not be less impressed by this young, white hotshot from Quantico. Her implacable facial expressions and the reflection off her giant round eyeglasses only underline what a formidable force this woman is. And she has to be, since she's mobilizing Atlanta's Black population into action to demand justice — even just attention from the police and media — for their missing and dead children. She's seen too much to accept easy promises from Holden.

It's good to see Holden's confidence shaken by his time in Atlanta. His confidence was a boon to him and his team as they were building up the Behavioral Science Unit. That's an entire field of study that might never have gotten off the ground if not for Holden's drive and self-confidence. His zeal to get into the heads of serial killers like Kemper and Manson was often distasteful, but it helped the BSU come up with investigation models that work. The conclusions he comes to in Atlanta aren't wrong, after all. His insistence that the killer is likely a Black man in his 20s turns out to be correct when the police arrest Wayne Williams (Christopher Livingston). But raw data and accurate predictive models are only half the battle, and the Atlanta arc is all about Holden being smacked in the face with the other half of the battle.

The other half of the battle involves both politics and people. On an intellectual level, Holden knows all about the history of racism in the South, the terror that the Klan has inflicted upon the Black population, the Black community's distrust of the police, even the police being overrun with actual Klan members. But he expects to be able to brush all that aside with the blinding light of his conclusions and accurate profiling. He doesn't come close to doing that. He doesn't know how to maneuver around the politics of the first Black mayor of a major Southern city, who is trying to keep Atlanta from exploding into a race war while also attracting business to a city whose tax base is already beginning to suffer from white flight. These are issues beyond Holden's pay grade, but they affect every corner of his investigation.

Worse, Holden never manages to understand just how incendiary it is to insist that the perpetrator of these murders must be a Black male, because the profile says that serial killers very rarely kill outside their own race. Or to brush off any attempt to investigate the Klan for the murders so he can seek out this Black perpetrator. For a Black community who feels the murders of their children have been ignored by the people in power, this notion is an insult and a wound.

There's also the fact that the arrest of Wayne Williams for two of the 30 murders left much to be desired. In all of Holden's scenes with Camille, she talked about how her community not only needed to see justice done but needed to be able to heal and feel like they were seen. Even with Williams' arrest, the politically expedient way in which his trial on two murder counts was meant to paper over around 30 deaths doesn't do much to heal a community that remained devastated.

It's a bold way to end a season that Fincher knew may well have been the show's last. This final arc was a powerful look at a period in the history of American crime where even our fascination with serial killers was not enough to draw attention to the murders of Black children. Peppered throughout Season 2 are scenes where Holden, Tench, and Wendy are called upon by Ted Gunn (Michael Cerveris) to glad-hand the people in power in Washington. Each time, these Congressmen or Justice Department officials would go wide-eyed as they were regaled with stories about celebrity criminals like Richard Speck and Charles Manson. None of that attention was spared for the man (or men) who were killing children in Atlanta. Mindhunter's powerful final act was to shine a light on not just these killings but the selective way that the criminal justice apparatus in this country decides whose deaths are worth solving.

Had Mindhunter continued, it would have been interesting to see how much Ford might have been changed by his experience in Atlanta. Perhaps we'd have seen a man with a bit more weariness about the compromises he'll need to endure in order for his work to have a positive effect. Maybe he'd have been a bit less giddy about his next serial killer interview. Unfortunately we'll never know.

Joe Reid is the senior writer at Primetimer and co-host of the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast. His work has appeared in Decider, NPR, HuffPost, The Atlantic, Slate, Polygon, Vanity Fair, Vulture, The A.V. Club and more.