I’m four episodes deep into Mindhunter on Netflix. I’m enjoying it, but I’m ultimately left unfulfilled in most every episode. Which I find to be rather frustrating.
Mindhunter presents itself as a drama/history of the FBI’s nascent Behavioral Science Unit, famous in real life for its involvement in solving cases like those against Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy, and for its fictional appearances in book and film classics like The Silence of the Lambs.
The show follows the typical approach of getting putting two dissimilar cops (feds) together, and hurling unsolved crimes at them. Normally in a cop show, this is where the detective heroes would solve the clues and find the answers. Not this show. They typically can’t really seem to make much head way.
Then to make matters just a bit worse, they don’t even really wrap up the unsolved crimes. The detectives (who are on the road for work) just pack up and leave, and that thread is left out there, unresolved. And then the show ends when a thematically selected track plays over the last thirty seconds before the credits roll.
That might be how things fall in the real world with crimes that go cold. No resolution. A slightly sick, unfulfilled feeling. But damn, it’s not enjoyable to see in an hour long series. Especially because it seems like the show goes out of its way to cut stories off before any resolution is found.
I hope that they have more success as the show goes on.