The Most Frustrating Loose End That Mindhunter Left Dangling

After establishing the Behavioral Science Unit at the end of Season 1 and prioritizing it with the arrival of Ted Gunn (Michael Cerveris) in early Season 2, Mindhunter got to the business of pulling its team apart. At the midpoint of Season 2, Wendy Carr (Anna Torv) is exploring more of a personal life, dating a sexy bartender and nudging closer to coming out to her colleagues. Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff) is drawn into the case of the child abductions and murders in Atlanta, and Bill Tench (Holt McCallany) is dealing with a nightmare at home.

The first season showed signs that Brian, the adopted child of Bill and his wife Nancy (Stacey Roca), was dealing with behavioral problems. He was introverted, to the point of not speaking much. Despite shunning his father in most contexts, Brian was drawn to the crime-scene photos Bill brought home for work. Up until this point, both Bill and Nancy were probably thinking at worst they'd have to see a therapist to get Brian to come out of his shell. And then the toddler showed up dead in the basement of the house Nancy was selling. At first this just seemed to be something added to the story to set the thematic scenery for Tench. A sign that the world is seeming more dangerous and depraved since Tench began wading into the world of multiple murderers and interacting with the David Berkowitzes and Richard Specks that haunt its dark corners. The connections to Nancy as the real estate agent trying to sell the house felt like a cosmic coincidence. But then Brian confessed to being a bystander — or more likely an accomplice — to the crime, along with the older boys he'd been hanging around with. Most upsettingly, it was Brian’s idea to tie the child's dead body to a cross, he says in order that the baby might return to life.

It's a horrifying turn of events, one which — like Ford's time spent investigating the Atlanta Child Murders, which will take center stage in the next and final batch of Mindhunter episodes — puts the BSU's interviews with hideous murderers into perspective. Suddenly, the case files Tench is researching, the debates he has with Holden and Wendy over the killers they're interviewing, it all hits him closer to home. After Wendy and Gregg interview Elmer Wayne Henley — who was a teenager when he helped the older Dean Corll rape and murder 28 young boys in Houston, before murdering Corll himself — and discuss the case with Tench and Ford, Tench noticeably bristles at the suggestion that someone might be just as liable for a murder even though never did the actual killing. This comes up again later when Tench and Ford finally land their Charles Manson interview. Manson also never killed anyone on his own but is serving life in prison for being the mastermind behind the Tate-LaBianca murders.

The question that neither Bill nor Nancy dares ask — though we in the audience sure do — is whether Brian is exhibiting the same kind of patterns and tendencies that Bill has been investigating at the Bureau. Is Brian a serial killer in the making? Do the silence, the wet beds, his mom's hyper-neurotic parenting all add up to something unspeakable in Bill's own kid?

Mindhunter was never a case-of-the-week procedural, though Tench and Ford often helped local police solve cases. Nor was it a show that built itself up to a "Big Bad" villain that had to be taken down, though the cold opens featuring the BTK killer certainly pointed to some kind of a reckoning with that man. The similarities that Mindhunter shared with David Fincher's other great story of the slow pursuit of serial killers, Zodiac, successfully conditioned much of the audience to veer away from expecting big payoffs. After all, the whole point of Zodiac was that the investigators never caught him and instead were consumed by the search for him all their lives. So when Mindhunter was canceled after two seasons, the fact that the scenes with BTK never came to a head didn't feel like we'd been robbed of some great payoff, even if the investigation into him would surely have been compelling.

The biggest loss when Mindhunter got canceled was that we never saw where the storyline was going with the Tench family. It was an arc that was thick with possibility. Even just in these few episodes, Tench is tied in knots over what's happening with Brian. Because of his job, he knows too much about this kind of behavior to be able to rationalize it away like Nancy tries to. At the same time, he can't truly believe his own son is the same kind of person as the scum that he's been sneering at throughout these interviews. Tench shares what's been happening with Wendy, whose analytical-but-human reaction is probably exactly what he needed, but he's unwilling to tell Ford about it (lest Ford request to interview Brian, probably). This is bound to affect Bill's performance at work, if he's going to take every case of a killer who arranged the body post-mortem too personally.

The upcoming four-episode stretch that closes Mindhunter focuses heavily on the Atlanta case, and while Bill and Nancy continue to work through this traumatic event, it's definitely on the back burner. It remains a loose end that will forever twist in the wind. Honestly, David Fincher probably doesn't mind that so much, considering how many loose ends are left at the end of Zodiac. It's the unknown that drives us mad sometimes, and when that unknown element is your own child, it's outright terrifying. And in a stretch of episodes that has featured Charles Manson, Ed Kemper, and the BTK killer sketching out murder scenes in the public library, that's really saying something.

Up next: The FBI dives into the Atlanta child murders, Holden Ford sees the limits of his research when it comes to keeping a community safe, and Mindhunter ends its two-season run.

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.