The season picks up right after the end of season one with Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff) shaken after the panic attack he had after visiting Edmund Kemper. He puts himself back together quickly after learning that the Behavioral Sciences Unit he’s heading with Bill Tench (Holt McCallany) and Wendy Carr (Anna Torv) has a new ally in a position of power, Ted Gunn (Michael Cerveris). With more freedom to do their work, the unit dives back into interviewing serial killers in an effort to uncover their motives and pathologies. The opening of the season focuses a lot on ritual, especially as Tench is called in to investigate the BTK Killer (who we see even more of in prologue sequences like last season). Why do killers take souvenirs? Why do they return to the scene of the crime? Why do they write letters and give themselves names? And why do some victims become killers? Early episodes include interviews with people like Tex Watson, who killed on Manson’s orders, and Elmer Wayne Henley, who was almost a victim of Dean Corll’s before becoming his lover and procuring victims for him. How do you profile these men who were more persuaded to become serial killers than fit the Ford model of sexual sadism?
All three of our protagonists get pulled away from their work by different forces. We spend a lot of time in a new relationship with Wendy in a subplot that doesn’t quite pay off like I wished it would, but does offer Torv a chance to do solid character work with a part that’s still underwritten. More effective is the arc of Bill Tench this season, which I won’t remotely spoil but fits in perfectly with the show's overall themes about how difficult it can be to truly know someone’s motives. And this theme echoes in season two’s story of Holden Ford, which tells the investigation of the Atlanta Child Murders in 1981.
From 1979 to 1981, young boys were being murdered in Atlanta. In the show’s version of this case, which is slightly different than the real one, Holden Ford assists with every aspect of the investigation, being drawn into the case by a group of mothers with missing children (John Douglas, the inspiration for Ford, did notoriously profile the case but the quasi-fictional Ford feels far more hands-on than reality). Using what he’s learned, Ford quickly becomes convinced in his profile of the suspect as a young black male, despite evidence that the KKK may be involved. And so the question that lingers from there on out is if he is pushing the investigation to meet his profile or if his methods are actually solving the case. In the real world, Wayne Williams was charged with two murders, and officials closed the investigation, but someone, possibly Williams, possibly not, killed at least 26 other people. There's still a great deal of controversy around the case.
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