When we last left our fledgling Behavioral Sciences Unit at the FBI, they were under investigation by the Office of Professional Responsibility for altering transcripts. Agent Tench (Holt McCallany) threw professor Wendy Carr (Anna Torv) under the bus, while Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff) took responsibility for the whole fiasco, leaving the future of their program in doubt, but jetted off anyway to visit serial killer Ed Kemper (Cameron Britton) solo. Kemper hugged Holden and triggered what appeared to be a heart attack, as Holden realized his addiction to interviewing dangerous psychopaths was leading him down an extremely dark path.

Which is to say, the first new episode of Mindhunter in almost two years has a lot of work to do. It needs to reintroduce the team, reacquaint audiences with their serial-killer-interviewing work, re-explain the various interpersonal conflicts that developed over the course of the first season… and then perform a sort of reset that resolves the OPR investigation, gets everyone’s working relationships back to relative normal, and allows the team to continue functioning and settling back into the rhythms of interviewing bad guys to figure out how to catch other bad guys.

And, to be honest, it’s… shaky! Netflix screened the first three episodes tonight in LA at the ArcLight Hollywood, and I’m glad they showed more than just one, because the first episode had me feeling quite uneasy about the quality of the show. A lot of the table-setting dialogue is just plain clunky. Take an early scene where we see Tench at a neighborhood barbecue, for example, talking to a neighbor about what he does at the FBI, blatantly for the audience’s benefit as much as his neighbor’s.

Ted Gunn, the new FBI chief

Season 2 also features a cast shake-up, as Cotter Smith’s Shepard is forced to retire and is replaced by Assistant Director Ted Gunn (played by Anna Torv’s former Fringe co-star Michael Cerveris). A.D. Gunn is more openly supportive of the BSU, promising in the opening episode to “get them Manson,” expand their offices, and “make the OPR investigation go away.” That’s all well and good, but the first episode features Gunn meeting with each of the three leads in succession, and it’s a blatant device to reintroduce the three main characters to the audience as well as to this new character. He’s there to set the new status quo and to wave away all of the obstacles that the season 1 finale put in their way. This show has always been about process, delighting in showing the minutiae of the way this character meets that one which teaches them this lesson to help with that conflict. There’s none of that here. It’s just… all good!

And then there’s Holden Ford. We come to find out that it was not a heart attack last season; instead, he had a debilitating panic attack, and might possibly be developing a panic disorder. For a show known for its sublime character moments, this development is handled with all the subtlety of a freight train. A line early in episode 2 that has Holden marveling of a serial killer that he “somehow managed to overcome his own panic!” drew a hearty laugh from the screening audience. It’s all very “this is a thing the character will deal with this season,” like Hannah’s sudden-onset OCD in Girls, rather than a natural extension of his character arc.

Ford wakes up in a hospital bed, in the grips of a panic attack.

During a sit-down with Wendy where he asks for her advice on how to deal with his anxiety, she warns him against getting in too deep with the serial killers they are interviewing. “When we empathize with a psychopath, we actually negate the self,” she says, explaining that his sympathy causes him to suppress his own survival instincts, which can have negative, lasting implications. She cautions him to be aware of himself, so that he can catch his anxiety response early and remove stress from his life. As if.

Thankfully, these are just growing pains. Make it through episode one, and you’ll find the second and third episode of Season 2 may as well be from a completely different show. Now that the stage has been re-set, and Mindhunter can get back to the business of being a compelling, chilling, oddly-beautiful show about the darkest parts of humanity, it does so just as well as it ever has.

Episode 2 features Tench and Holden starting to investigate the BTK killer who’s been teased throughout the series. There are some downright frightening, heartbreaking scenes where Tench tours the locations of some of BTK’s killings and interviews a kid who witnessed a BTK murder but got away. The series has always made fantastic use of score-free, tense dialogue scenes, where the ambient soundtrack eventually gets louder and louder as the score creeps in, until it’s almost unbearable. That’s the case here, too, with the witness interview taking up a sizable chunk of the episode’s runtime, but I was more than willing to just sit with it and let the scene breathe, because by the end, I couldn’t breathe myself.

Their investigation into BTK and his obsession with self-mythologization through the media brings them to David Berkowitz, aka the Son of Sam killer who terrorized New York City with a string of apparently-random shootings in 1976. The interview scene is long and fascinating, exactly as tense and funny and unsettling as you would want from a confrontation between our heroes and one of the strangest serial killers of all time. Berkowitz is played by Oliver Cooper, who doesn’t much look like his character in real life; the makeup and facial prosthetics (I assume?) used to turn him into the killer are incredible. He looks just like the original man to an uncomfortable degree, and it makes his performance chilling.