#wish i could assign pronouns like variables in python

[clockworkprism]

Ok that could be a great premise for a show though. Starts out a serial killer procedural with hints of something deeper. Main character is a fresh agent excited to be doing good. Over time it's revealed that the overarching plot is not a big bad serial killer, but corruption within the FBI being covered up with fake serial killers. Season 2 the agent thinks they catch the corrupt agents only to find out they weren't corrupt at all they were enacting orders. Season 3 the agent is desperately trying to prevent a terrorist attack by fascists but their superiors are obsessed with potential communists so instead they fake some serial killings to draw attention to the fascist group.

Serial killer horror almost always falls flat with me, not only because by default it has to frame the police (usually the literal FBI) as an unquestionable force of good, but because I know just enough about IRL serial killers (thanks 3 years of my life I wasted "studying" criminology) to know they are unanimously deeply uninteresting and pathetic people. The most common type of serial killer is a guy who kills vulnerable people (sex workers, substance users, racialized women and girls, queer people) because he can and gets away with it for a while because he's targeting people whose lives are explicitly devalued by the society he lives in. That's it. There's no secret pattern that needs to be uncovered, no cryptic messages that need to be decoded, and definitely no "Satanic" shit. The handful of times there is weird "occult" stuff involved it's literally just untreated mental illness and/or fascist mysticism/religiosity. There's genuinely nothing interesting or scary about these people, just a bitter and depressing distillation of the thousands of routine violences needed to maintain the status quo.