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Considering all the stuff with BTK I had assumed we were going to get some pretty significant time-jumps between seasons, I was actually surprised season 2 kicks off basically a week after the end of season 1.
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Aug 19, 2019 05:54
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Sierra Nevadan posted:Is Ted's wife the most annoying since Skyler White? Yes she was absolutely the worst part of the season She also looks a lot like a grown up Millie Bobby Brown.
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Aug 19, 2019 07:26
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There’s a lot of deviant and distressing stuff in this show, but I don’t know if I’ve ever heard anything as disturbing as people casually skipping the character development in a TV drama.
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Aug 19, 2019 12:05
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Comrade Fakename posted:There’s a lot of deviant and distressing stuff in this show, but I don’t know if I’ve ever heard anything as disturbing as people casually skipping the character development in a TV drama. it's not good development. you can have character development in a show that only focused on the profiling and crime stuff.
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Aug 19, 2019 12:25
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I gotta say, Carr's final line to her girlfriend before they broke up in the last episode (I think, might have been the penultimate one) was loving brutal. "You're not who you think you are. You're not free. You're not special. You're a bartender who takes life advice from magazines you find in bus stops. I wish you happiness." and then just walks away. loving hell.
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Aug 19, 2019 12:49
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I liked the stuff with Tench's family. I understand people might not like the amount of it, but I think it was fine. I never skipped it because skipping scenes in things you watch leads to saying dumb things like "All the family stuff was bad and I skipped most of it" which is a contradictory statement. Either you watched it all and didn't like it and have a valid opinion or you didn't watch it all and your opinion on that aspect doesn't carry much water. I liked how the storyline with his son mirrored a lot of aspects of his job and it gave Bill a different perspective on things than he had before. Also those of you comparing Bill's wife to Skylar in Breaking Bad I don't even know what to say. She doesn't even have that much to do other than worry about her child. I mean how is worrying about an obviously disturbed child at all annoying? X-O fucked around with this message at 13:09 on Aug 19, 2019 |
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Aug 19, 2019 13:07
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his family stuff was already bad in season 1 and it doesn't get better in 2. i wouldn't have blamed anyone for just zipping through it from the start.
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Aug 19, 2019 13:09
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If you skip the personal drama then you'll have absolutely no idea why the characters act the way they do during the serial killer interviews.
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Aug 19, 2019 13:10
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Also you'd miss the scene where Tench takes his kid to the ice-cream shop and actually talks to him, which I thought was really good.
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Aug 19, 2019 13:32
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Ehud posted:If you skip the personal drama then you'll have absolutely no idea why the characters act the way they do during the serial killer interviews. Yeah, pretty much. It's bad to skip that stuff because it's deeply critical emotional context. The Manson interview would be utterly bewildering and bizarre if you had been skipping over all of Bill's personal stuff up to that point, for example. Even the things Manson says wouldn't make sense because when you create an episode (or any film or piece of writing) you shape it as a whole thing. poo poo, I mean especially with anything that David Fincher has worked on (going alllll the way back to when he was making music videos) pacing, rhythm, and timing have always been a key part of his style or signature. Whenever I try to skip anything in his stuff, it just ends up really not working because the characters very often have oblique discussions about prior scenes in the episode and just missing a minute or two usually makes me want to go back to 5 minutes earlier just to get back in the flow of the episode. Maybe it's just me, but I rarely feel like the pace of the show has ever dragged. Yeah, it's been slow and deliberate, but always steady. It's been mentioned before in many reviews and probably still is being mentioned, but Mindhunter has always reminded me a great deal of the film Zodiac, and Season 2 sticks with that - in a good way. It just seems like the stylistic touchstone they''re working with. The aforementioned pacing, color palette, camerawork, general time period, the deliberateness of the storytelling, and obviously the subject matter. I mean, I know it's been said before quite a bit, but this season (at least as much Season 1, if not moreso) really feels like Zodiac: The TV series. And I don't mean to say that it's a bad thing at all! I just think it's worth nothing again how similar it still feels. kaworu fucked around with this message at 13:55 on Aug 19, 2019 |
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Aug 19, 2019 13:50
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kaworu posted:I mean, I know it's been said before quite a bit, but this season (at least as much Season 1, if not moreso) really feels like Zodiac: The TV series. And I don't mean to say that it's a bad thing at all! I just think it's worth nothing again how similar it still feels. Yeah I said that during the first season as well. Zodiac is one of my favorite movies and this scratches the same itch.
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Aug 19, 2019 14:03
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the show drags immensely during the personal life segments. and this isn't about slow developing shows being bad - the best show on tv is better call saul.
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Aug 19, 2019 14:12
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X-O posted:I liked the stuff with Tench's family. I understand people might not like the amount of it, but I think it was fine. I never skipped it because skipping scenes in things you watch leads to saying dumb things like "All the family stuff was bad and I skipped most of it" which is a contradictory statement. Either you watched it all and didn't like it and have a valid opinion or you didn't watch it all and your opinion on that aspect doesn't carry much water. The stuff with Bill's kid also feeds into the low-key uncertainty about the work they're doing. Because if everything they're saying about serial killers is correct, and it's rooted in childhood, then he's raising a monster. On the other hand, since this kid is not from an abusive horrible neglectful background but is developing these disturbing behaviours, it at least suggests that many of their ideas may be fundamentally wrong. That subtext is there in a lot of the conversations and you wouldn't really get it without the plotline with Bill's kid. To me the season was really asking the question 'does this poo poo even work' and the answer is 'uhhhhh maybe, kinda', with Bill's family stuff as a component of that. The other out of work stuff (although Holden had hardly any) are at least telling the story that all of these people are pretty messed up samples of humanity themselves, and kind of unable to figure out their own poo poo at the same time as their lives are devoted to figuring out other people's poo poo. The guy playing Kemper is amazing obviously and his scenes have been great but I'm not sure what they get out of 'more scenes with Kemper' at this point, in terms of story.
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Aug 19, 2019 14:36
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Well, pacing is kind of a tricky thing, and largely a matter of taste and perspective. A scene that drags for one person might be a scene that actually allows itself the time needed for the actors to realistically explore and express what's needed, for another person. After I went through a phase of watching John Cassevetes films, I seriously couldn't watch MCU/Avengers films and such for months, it was like watching a landscape go by while driving 20mph versus driving 2,000mph. There is a VERY extreme amount of whiplash and it takes adjustment. Which isn't to say I dislike MCU films - I adore many of them. It's just that sometimes, you need to be in the right mood or frame of mind to watch slower-paced stuff like Mindhunter. It's OK if it happens to be a bit slower-paced than other TV dramas, too. Don't take this as me just defending the show reflexively; there are lots of things in Season 2 (and season 1) which I did not like. I just think the slow pacing and the time the show gives itself to really tell the story and let us get to know these people is fantastic, and something I love about it. I don't mean to be rude, but if you want to watch cops arrest killers and rapists with fast pacing and minimal personal bullshit, there are a TON of seasons of SVU out there.
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Aug 19, 2019 14:37
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lmao yeah go watch svu because that's how they do interviews and solve crimes. they don't just wrap it up in half an hour. https://twitter.com/leslieleeiii/status/1162798674981871618 https://twitter.com/leslieleeiii/status/1162806494615748608 the entire point about bitching about the personal life bullshit is because they handle the crime stuff so well. otherwise i would've you know just watched svu or criminal minds or what have you. Groovelord Neato fucked around with this message at 14:52 on Aug 19, 2019 |
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Aug 19, 2019 14:50
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Those are terrible tweets, if they're yours you should be ashamed. If not then you still should be because you posted them.
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Aug 19, 2019 14:52
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wrong twice in such a short post. impressive. why would i post my own tweets dummy.
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Aug 19, 2019 14:52
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Groovelord Neato posted:wrong twice in such a short post. impressive. Because posting their own tweets seems like the kind of thing a person would do to make a stupid point.
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Aug 19, 2019 14:57
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I really liked the scene where Holden thinks he's going on a date with the black hotel receptionist and tries to smalltalk with her. "I like....music and..reading ""
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Aug 19, 2019 15:04
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That was a great scene. I also liked his scene with her after they made the arrest. It was a really good season because I hadn't read up on the Atlanta child murders, so going in kinda blind was fun.
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Aug 19, 2019 17:28
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Holden almost creaming himself when Manson enters the room
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Aug 19, 2019 17:50
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Jerusalem posted:I gotta say, Carr's final line to her girlfriend before they broke up in the last episode (I think, might have been the penultimate one) was loving brutal. I might be reading too much into this. But were they trying to show a parrallel between Wendy and Wayne Williams? The show obviously tries to show parts of their personal lives that mimic real serial killers. Wendy and Wayne are both in the closet. They both feel like they are smarter than everyone. Almost a feeling of superiority. Wendy makes this clear when she sort of mocks her girlfriend for reading those magazines. There also seemed to be a resentment both had toward certain people. Wayne felt that it was irresponsible black youth that caused his failure to be taken seriously. I got the feeling at the end that Wendy blamed her inability to get more respect in the Bureau on irresponsible women. Wayne used that anger and killed black youths in Atlanta. Wendy used that anger and verbally obliterated her girlfriend. Again, probably reading into it too much. But the fact the personal life stuff went on while everyone else was focused on Atlanta seemed to mean something.
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Aug 19, 2019 21:17
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I personally think it was more her lashing out after the realization that she was again allowing herself to be manipulated like she did with her ex in season 1 and to a lesser extent in the interview with the guy in the boiler room (that was such a ridiculous location). When she goes to the house and opens herself up entirely and asks her to move in with her, only to suddenly be exposed to a whole other side of her and realize this women is not the romantic image she'd created of her she got mad at herself and projected that disgust and self-loathing onto the other person.
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Aug 20, 2019 03:15
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my favourite understated bit this season was holden boring the poo poo out of the other fbi guys because he didn't get that they were only interested in hearing about the hosed up stuff the killers had done sexpig by night posted:Oh poo poo I forgot she's based on Burgess! Yea they better cover her absolutely ghoulish role in that poo poo. It'd be good storytelling to have the 'rational voice' in the team slowly slide into the hysteria and maybe even parallel it with Holden's own paranoia elements and all. tbh she was already a piece of poo poo in season 1 for saying they shouldn't hire jim because having a black guy would ruin their interview data
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Aug 20, 2019 11:13
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Jerusalem posted:I personally think it was more her lashing out after the realization that she was again allowing herself to be manipulated like she did with her ex in season 1 and to a lesser extent in the interview with the guy in the boiler room (that was such a ridiculous location). When she goes to the house and opens herself up entirely and asks her to move in with her, only to suddenly be exposed to a whole other side of her and realize this women is not the romantic image she'd created of her she got mad at herself and projected that disgust and self-loathing onto the other person. How is she being manipulated? If anything Carr is less open and honest than her girlfriend. Also, Carr is even more awkward around women than Holden: "I have.....a spare room "
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Aug 20, 2019 12:31
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Alhazred posted:How is she being manipulated? If anything Carr is less open and honest than her girlfriend. Also, Carr is even more awkward around women than Holden: "I have.....a spare room Sorry, I should have said she felt she was being manipulated. Working in the basement, reading those transcripts, interviewing these hosed-up guys herself, it's skewed her perspective. Her girlfriend acts differently with her ex-husband and her son than she does with her and she takes the difference as a sign of being lied to/manipulated and freaks out (to be fair, hearing herself referred to as "nobody" by your significant other would be pretty disheartening no matter what the context) and then lashes out.
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Aug 20, 2019 13:02
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Jerusalem posted:Sorry, I should have said she felt she was being manipulated. Working in the basement, reading those transcripts, interviewing these hosed-up guys herself, it's skewed her perspective. Her girlfriend acts differently with her ex-husband and her son than she does with her and she takes the difference as a sign of being lied to/manipulated and freaks out (to be fair, hearing herself referred to as "nobody" by your significant other would be pretty disheartening no matter what the context) and then lashes out. Good point, and then I think it also feeds into her uncertainty about this whole project that has been simmering since the first season. She thought she would be directing a scientific research project, instead the agents listen to her sometimes and follow her procedures occasionally. This season, people keep saying 'wow, I can't believe you're here working in the basement instead of off being a professor', which although she puts a good face on how much she values it, almost certainly has to raise some internal questions. That 'nobody' comment probably hit very close to home and a lot of the venom from her parting words was probably at least partly stuff she'd been thinking about herself.
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Aug 20, 2019 13:41
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evenworse username posted:
The way they perform their interrogations is so wrong and terrible it's fascinating.
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Aug 20, 2019 15:34
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Season was solid, not genre changing but solid. Everyone's subplot was kind of one note although I did enjoy what they did with Bill's. Anna Torv got did real dirty though.
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Aug 20, 2019 19:55
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This really is such a fascinating season, to me. I almost feel like it's a bit of an inversion of Season 1, at least in terms of how the show judges the methodology used by Holden and Tench. In season 1, especially the first two thirds of it, Holden and Kemp are a lot like how Kemper ironically describes them - Holden is the intrepid young agent with new, exciting, progressive ideas. Bill is the grizzled veteran who keeps the young upstart tethered to reality, and together they revolutionize how criminology looks at people who commit multiple murders... for the better.. right? Which is more or less where Season 2 picks up. Shepard's tirade at Holden at the end of the first episode is pretty great, and it kinda sums up the strengths and flaws of how Shepard and Holden both approach their jobs. Pretty great moment - "I survived a war, the streets of Baltimore, Hoover... And in the end I get taken down by you." He also makes an interesting point about how truly oblivious Holden is to the big picture, politics, and the ways in which he and his work are used as political tools by the system. I'm sure he sincerely believed that the reason why his profile of the Atlanta murderer was bought into and used in the investigation had nothing to do with racial politics. I kinda hope he changed his mind about that, in the end. I do like how intensely critical this show is of its characters, though - and it's truly not afraid to go really far in portraying all three of them as miserable human beings whose relationships have either been destroyed by their work already or are in the process of being destroyed. I mean, I think the obvious implication with Bill and his family and his son is that he and his job are like, the poison eating away at the family. Was anyone else aware of how Bill and his wife were just calmly lying with straight faces about how Bill never brings his work home with him, and Brian has never been exposed to it. We know that's untrue because of the horrifying scene where they come home, and the babysitter has discovered that Brian has an especially awful and grisly color photograph of the crime Bill and Holden hear about in the very first episode - I went back to check. It was a woman and a small boy who had been tied up and both bled to death from perforated rectums via a broomstick  And Bill's son had a goddamn color Polaroid of the mother from that crime scene under his bed. His response was something like, "Oh gosh, I know I really should find the key for that file cabinet..." And as far as I know that was never spoken of again, but I definitely think we were meant to remember that it happened, especially when they were lying and saying that Brian doesn't know anything about his dad's job beyond that he "catches bad guys." As a kid who was born in 1985 and grew up during this time period more or less, I can attest that it was normal (at least in my family) to sweep deeply serious issues under the rug and pretend it's not a problem and that everything is fine until one person reaches their breaking point and cannot stand the emotional and psychological neglect and has to get the gently caress out. Happened in my family. I could also deeply relate to Wendy's girlfriend a hell of a lot more than Wendy, to be honest. My mother is a lesbian, and I was that exact kid. Half the time at my dad's, half the time at my mom's, and there would always be awkward moments like that when my dad (who got immediately got re-married to his girlfriend of the prior 7 years) would be hugely disapproving that my mother was dating different women - seriously, that level of hypocrisy. And of course, my brother and I were just little kids and didn't understand what was really going on - thankfully. But the upshot was that for quite a while our mother would have to lie about things she should NEVER have had to hide in any sort of reasonable or fair world. It's just very, very difficult to be a queer single mother with a divorced husband who will never, ever be out of your life, and it have to cope and deal with that. It is not easy or simple, and while Wendy had plenty of cause to be upset, she's also enough of an adult to be able to take a step back and look at things with objectivity and compassion, and forgive her. That's usually what decent people do, in situations like that. Instead, she lashed out and purposely wounded her and shot her down without flinching - in an ice-cold and unemotional way. I found that difficult to watch, to be honest.. Seeing people get hurt like that. I also wanted to comment on how great the BTK interludes are. It's an eloquent way to remind everyone of the deeply inherent flaws in Holden's methodology - even though he has the right idea about a lot of things.
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Aug 20, 2019 21:32
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evenworse username posted:Good point, and then I think it also feeds into her uncertainty about this whole project that has been simmering since the first season. She thought she would be directing a scientific research project, instead the agents listen to her sometimes and follow her procedures occasionally. This season, people keep saying 'wow, I can't believe you're here working in the basement instead of off being a professor', which although she puts a good face on how much she values it, almost certainly has to raise some internal questions. That 'nobody' comment probably hit very close to home and a lot of the venom from her parting words was probably at least partly stuff she'd been thinking about herself. iirc Carr's girlfriend had actually told her at some point midseason that she wasn't always 100% honest with her husband and had to make concessions in order to keep access to her son, so I think you're right that we're meant to think the cold-blooded, savage dumping of her gf was about more than just personal authenticity
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Aug 20, 2019 21:44
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So I wasn't expecting this season to be as good as it was, and it surprised me in lots of ways, but that Charles Manson scene was such a tour-de-force that it convinced me that Dewey Crowe might have been a good Boyd Crowder.
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Aug 20, 2019 23:28
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exmarx posted:my favourite understated bit this season was holden boring the poo poo out of the other fbi guys because he didn't get that they were only interested in hearing about the hosed up stuff the killers had done That was so good, especially because Holden was so oblivious to it too. That, and all the times where Tench is reluctantly persuaded to talk about his job thinking people would be put off, only to find people crowding round him fascinated by all these horrific stories.
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Aug 21, 2019 08:34
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I was expecting a very inconvenient panic attack from Holden towards the final episodes but I guess he's cured now?
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Aug 21, 2019 16:18
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The impression I get from reading some stuff on Atlanta is that there were probably at least a few unrelated murders mixed in there, but Wayne Williams most definitely committed a good portion of them. Each thing on it's own maybe doesn't prove anything but it piles up and I have a hard time thinking it could be coincidence that this guy who was going across the bridge at 3am when a splash was heard(and a body was later found) was also passing around flyers advertising for young men around the same age as the victims, and this man also had DNA that couldn't exclude him as a suspect AND had a dog who's DNA couldn't excluded as the same dog that left the hair found on a few of the victims. Throw in the fact that the murders abruptly stopped when he was arrested and yea, I think there's just too much there to say he may have been innocent.
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Aug 21, 2019 16:34
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Those loving IKEA crosses.
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Aug 21, 2019 17:59
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Sheng-Ji Yang posted:probably the best argument it was him is that they immediately stopped with his arrest Oh they super did not. This city eats children, it's terrible. I think he probably did do some of them but I don't think he did all of them. It's really terrifying the more you look into the whole thing. The police just stopped tacking missing black children on to the case. Anyone interested in more should check out season 1 of the podcast "Monster" by Stuff You Should Know. There was a ton of pressure coming down all the way from the Vice President to close the case so they did just that. Edit: yeah you're right, it was season 1, my bad. Croatoan fucked around with this message at 19:25 on Aug 21, 2019 |
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Aug 21, 2019 18:01
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They straight out says that he didn't commit all of them and that some suspects were covered up.
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Aug 21, 2019 18:20
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Oh for sure, it's definitely one of those cases where the bodycount was so high that the cops were able to just tack murders onto the list for Williams and then act like they were closed so they didn't have to investigate any further. There were definitely murderers who went free because police didn't want to look at anyone other than Williams. Still, I think the case against him for some of the murders was very convincing.
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Aug 21, 2019 18:36
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Croatoan posted:Oh they super did not. This city eats children, it's terrible. I think he probably did do some of them but I don't think he did all of them. It's really terrifying the more you look into the whole thing. The police just stopped tacking missing black children on to the case. Anyone interested in more should check out season 2 of the podcast "Monster" by Stuff You Should Know. There was a ton of pressure coming down all the way from the Vice President to close the case so they did just that. Yeah I think Wayne Williams probably at least did commit the two murders that he was sentenced for. And I think there was something maybe to the kids as well. Just listening to the podcast and the interviews with both him and even some people who claimed he tried to get them into his car paints a picture of a really shady guy up to no good if nothing else when it comes to the younger kids. I think the fiber and blood evidence (which isn't even touched on in Mindhunter) points to him for the murders they got him on. But I definitely don't think all of the murders that fall under the umbrella of the Atlanta Child Murders were done by one person or even by people that were working together. I think there's probably multiple people including but the racists brothers and the pedo ring they mention. Also Atlanta Monster was season one of the podcast, it's great. Season two is Zodiac. X-O fucked around with this message at 19:22 on Aug 21, 2019 |
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Aug 21, 2019 19:19
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