2x04 Episode 4

I love what Andrew Dominik did for this episode. A truly underrated director, in my opinion--not just for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, but also for Killing Them Softly. The breadth and weight of this episode feels to start bringing home concepts that Mindhunter has been hinting at since the pilot.

There's an incredibly skinny tightrope that television shows have to walk when dealing with foreshadowing. Now, you can go the route that most projects do: you pick up on things on a rewatch that you missed the first time (think The Sixth Sense, I guess). This way, the foreshadowing is really slight and subtle. Typically, I feel that filmmakers want the plot twists to surprise you with this kind of thing. They want to blow your mind so that when you see it again you say "how did I MISS that that dude was a ghost??" But you missed it because they didn't want you to know. It's a fine approach and it works extremely well in specific types of stories.

Mindhunter represents a different kind of foreshadowing, the kind that feels a bit more literary. Things are insinuated more heavily (although not heavy handed, that's the tricky part) so that when the "twist" hits there's a sense of fulfillment to a plant that was set up earlier and you sort of expect that outcome already. Both approaches have their moments when they work exceptionally well and I am not saying that one is better than the other. What I am saying is that I am so glad that Mindhunter understands itself well enough to use the latter approach and I am so thankful that the show is skilled enough to pull it off. It puts the characters under the microscope, but it also asks the viewer a question. The same question as another film that uses this type of foreshadowing extremely well, The Prestige: are you watching closely?