‘Mindhunter’ Episode 5 Recap: Half Glazed, Half Cake

Mindhunter is a show more concerned with what we don’t know than what we do.

“Psychopaths are extremely skilled at imitating human emotions,” Dr. Carr tells Holden about halfway through the series’ fifth episode. “It’s how they manipulate other people or how they gain power over their environment.”

What an unnerving thing to think about, especially coming from a show that might as well invent its own “Unnerving AF” section for Netflix, the fact that even the signals of human behavior designed to bring our guard down—crying, hand holding, sweet nothings whispered in our ear—are so easily, skillfully faked. Discerning crocodile tears from crocodile teeth is also what makes the job of agents like Holden and Bill damn near impossible. It’s a frustration best summed up by the final line of Mindhunter Episode 5; after an hour mostly focused on the Beverly Jean Shaw murder—one that saw countless evidence pile up, multiple suspects emerge, and even included a direct eyewitness account of the crime scene—Bill asks a suspect’s wife who exactly killed the 22-year-old girl. “I don’t know,” she replies. Cut to credits.

So, how best to parse a case this baffling? “Follow your instincts,” Carr tells Holden, who reacts to this advice, like he reacts to everything, by widening his eyes just slightly and gazing into the middle distance. But in Altoona, Pennsylvania, instincts are pretty much all Holden can rely on. He and Bill safely narrow down the suspect list to two names: Beverly’s fiance Benjamin “Benji” Barnwright (Joseph Cross) and his brother-in-law Frank Janderman (Jesse C. Boyd). Like Ed Kemper and Monte Rissell before them, these two men practicality operate on opposite ends of the personality spectrum. Benji is field-mouse frail, offering the FBI agents donuts, prone to weeping fits that seem—to Holden at least—to be masking something. Frank, on the other hand, might be more familiar to anyone who’s ever seen a father fly into a rage at a Little League game. He is very aware during his interview of what makes him sound like a “pussy,” physically abusive to his wife, Rose, and upfront about a psych-ward stay in his past from the time he broke a girl’s nose with a wrench. Frank Janderman is, for all purposes, an asshole, but he isn’t trying to not be an asshole for anyone’s benefit.

It’s hard not to notice how closely Beverly Jean Shaw’s gradually revealed backstory mirrors that of Laura Palmer from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. She’s the resident beloved blonde who wouldn’t hurt a fly; no Altoona local has a single bad word to say about Beverly, until it comes out that she might have been just a little wilder than her reputation let on. Benji Barnwright, a virgin until he met Beverly, saw his relationship with the murdered girl as a wholesome commitment; but she was [1970’s gasp!] going to bars alone, flirting, sleeping with people outside of Benji’s self-defined engagement. Her “experience,” Dr. Carr theorizes, was just as likely to be a threat to Benji as a source of excitement.

Writer Jennifer Haley uses this idea to highlight the fact that it isn’t only the psychopaths who have some, let’s say, wonky ideas about women. In one scene, Holden, Bill, and detective Ocasek theorize over beers at a bar, using a woman sitting alone at a nearby table as a hypothetical. “Say she is looking for someone, does that make her easy?” Holden asks.

“Is she looking for a husband or a one-night stand?” Ocasek replies, almost as if one option is more deserving of being left at a garbage dump than the other.

Later, because Holden has yet to present sufficient evidence that he is not a robot who never downloaded healthy relationship programming, he pressures Debbie to tell him how many people she slept with in college. “Just curious,” he says, his body language shouting several thousand words other than “curious” through a megaphone.

It’s a moment that sticks to the back of your mind by the time Rose revealed that, yes, Beverly died in Benji’s home. And while Rose Janderman can’t say for sure whether it was her husband or her brother who struck the fatal blow, she does describe a disturbing, bloody scene, contrasted with the way her husband simply said Benji “got mad at Beverly Jean.”

All signs point to Dr. Carr’s theory of Benji’s sexual inadequacy-induced anger, and it makes you wonder how many people like him—the timid town puppydog—sit at kitchen tables saying “just curious” before their curiosity turns into something much more.

Vinnie Mancuso writes about TV for a living, somehow, for Decider, The A.V. Club, Collider, and the Observer. You can also find his pop culture opinions on Twitter (@VinnieMancuso1) or being shouted out a Jersey City window between 4 and 6 a.m.

Watch Mindhunter Episode 5 on Netflix