Hunters season 1, episode 10 recap – “Eilu v’ Eilu”

This recap of Hunters Season 1, Episode 10, “Eilu v’ Eilu”, contains spoilers. You can check out our thoughts on the previous episode by clicking these words.

Hunters Episode 10, the season finale, was probably never going to bring things to a neat and tidy conclusion. But I, for one, was not expecting the sheer volume of twists and turns and sophomore season setup provided in “Eilu v’ Eilu”, and for once a show’s inconclusive ending felt just about right for me.

It even felt like an ending – for a while, anyway. An opening one-year-earlier flashback to Ruth (Jeannie Berlin) and Meyer (Al Pacino) discussing Jonah (Logan Lerman) felt like it was solidifying their respective arcs; Meyer having had the light of his moral character extinguished by hardship, and Logan learning to embrace his innate goodness even in the face of personal loss and tragedy. Millie’s (Jerrika Hinton) experiences being swept under the rug felt fitting, too, and her appointment by Jewish congresswoman Elizabeth Handelman (Zoé Winters) as the head of a covert Nazi-hunting task force was perfect sequel-bait.

But the lingering matter of Hunters Episode 10 in its early going was that Logan didn’t kill Travis (Greg Austin), which disappoints Meyer, who survived his car wreck with the now-missing Colonel (Lena Olin), and himself and Cheeks (Henry Hunter Hall), since all his comic-book idols had defined themselves by killing a big bad – which he had failed to do. So, “Eilu v’ Eilu” sees him set sights on a new target: the Wolf, the number one entry on many kill lists, including Meyer’s, who Jonah’s research suggests had promised to recite the Kaddish before killing the sadistic doctor of Auschwitz. Believing a cosmetic surgeon (William Sadler) to be the Wolf, Jonah kidnaps him and delivers him to Meyer, though this presents a lot to unpack, so we’ll return to it in a moment.

First, let’s check in with the Nazi villain contingent. Two of our antagonists survive but enjoy very different fates. Biff (Dylan Baker), somewhat surprisingly given his general incompetence, manages to make it into the USSR on a pilfered identity. And Travis, in true psychopath fashion, is able to finagle another Jewish victim so he can recruit his fellow prisoners to Nazism – as chilling a development as this is, it’s so perfect for Travis that I couldn’t help but love it.

But anyway, here’s the skinny with Jonah, Meyer, and the Wolf: Meyer is the Wolf, which Jonah figures out when Meyer kills the cosmetic surgeon without first reciting the Kaddish. The Wolf assumed Meyer’s identity to avoid being killed by the Soviets after the fall of Auschwitz, adorning his body with the right tattoos and scars, living life as a Jew, and undergoing reconstructive surgery to resemble his assumed identity. He never subscribed to the Nazi way of thinking, only their accruing of power, so his ability to assimilate into polite society as the very thing Nazis most revile was less of a stretch for him than finding a new purpose after the war. That purpose became the Nazi-hunting question of this first season, stewardship of which falls to Jonah in “Eilu v’ Eilu” after he kills Meyer – after reciting the Kaddish. The Boy Wonder has finally inherited the cowl.

Roxy (Tiffany Boone), Lonny (Josh Radnor) and Harriet (Kate Mulvany) are happy under Jonah’s leadership and set about hunting eight new high-ranking Nazis hiding in Europe. Harriet’s status as a double-agent gives this mission plenty of legs for a potential follow-up and joins Millie’s promotion as a tantalizing justification for a sophomore outing. But there’s one more reveal still to come, and it’s the biggest one of them all.

Joe (Louis Ozawa) stormed off after hearing the truth about Meyer and was kidnapped. In the closing moments of Hunters Episode 10, we see that he was taken to an Argentine mansion where he’s greeted by the Colonel. We finally learn her real name: Eva. And you know what that means. Enter, then, her husband, Adolf Hitler, alive and well. For all the show’s flaws, perhaps a second season of Hunters wouldn’t be a bad idea after all.