Tiger King season 2, episode 3 recap – “Bounty Hunting”

By Jonathon Wilson
Published: November 17, 2021
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Tiger King season 2, episode 3 recap - "Bounty Hunting"
3.5

Summary

“Bounty Hunting” chronicles the desperate search for Don Lewis’s body while Carole tries to reinvent her public image.

This recap of Tiger King season 2, episode 3, “Bounty Hunting”, contains spoilers.


The previous episode of Tiger King Season 2 was titled “The Carole Diaries”, but it’s really this one, “Bounty Hunting”, that truly delves into the bizarre archive of videos that Carole Baskin uploaded to the internet, in which she drily reads out from years’ worth of personal journals. Curiously, and I think this speaks to the arrogance of a woman who refers to herself as a tiger and smugly announces that she always wins regardless of the opponent, she acts like these diaries are some kind of smoking gun testimony, as though they’re not just random s**t she’s written down that could be completely fabricated. Ironically, and amusingly, it’s these diaries that poke a substantial number of holes in Carole’s version of events when it comes to Don’s disappearance since what she was writing didn’t necessarily correlate with what other people were seeing and hearing.

Tiger King season 2, episode 3 recap

Following on from the last-minute development in the previous episode that Don and Carole’s former housekeeper Sandra Wittkopp alleged her signature had been forged on Don’s will, “Bounty Hunters” takes a brief look at that accusation and its implications. Sandra was the notary on a document that stood to benefit Carole exclusively, and her signature was identical in each instance — something that is virtually impossible unless it has been traced. So, you know, weird. Then there are some discrepancies regarding the timeline of Don’s disappearance. Carole states in her journals that, during the most crucial unaccounted-for period, she was at a convenience store getting tiger milk. Unluckily for her, though, the store was closed, her car broke down, and she just… sat around until 3 am, several hours after she supposedly left for a store that was only a few miles away. I’m not exactly Ripper Jack, but something isn’t adding up here.

Kenny Farr’s ex-wife Trish also thinks he was complicit in Don’s disappearance, which matches up with Sandra’s claim. He’d been missing all the previous day, absent from work, and had a load of guns in the back of Don’s truck, supposedly given to him by Carole. Apparently, Don was all about guns, as well as airplanes, money, and sex, which is hilarious given he looks like someone’s granddad, but nevertheless, it implies that he never would have given the firearms away, nor would he have allowed Carole to do so either. Unless, of course, she had used one of them to shoot him dead and was disposing of the evidence.

“Bounty Hunters” takes its title from Tim Bengston, a bounty hunter Carole supposedly hired to canvass prisons in Mexico and Costa Rica to see if Don had gotten himself incarcerated. Tim, though, whose voice we hear over the phone, claims never to have left Tampa, and to simply have been going through the motions of investigation in order to give Carole peace of mind. And Carole didn’t regard Tim highly — she wondered aloud if the tigers didn’t eat him because they knew he was simpleminded, which begs the question of why you would hire someone you think is simpleminded to find your missing husband.

Finding Don becomes finding Don’s body, and suspicions turn to one of his properties in Seffner, Florida, referred to as “The Farm”, which had a lake on it and was once occupied by Kenneth and Trish Farr. Apparently, the police never investigated the place much, but Ripper Jack did, taking some divers out to the gator-infested waters to comb it for human remains. It isn’t exactly a fruitful search, but it’s the thought that counts.

Meanwhile, attention keeps returning to Kenny Farr, who considers him having passed a polygraph to be a watertight alibi. How he passed a polygraph is anyone’s guess, since when he’s asked about being in possession of Don’s guns he claims to have traded them with Don, then to have traded them with Carole, then to not be able to remember, then finally settles on Don again. He won’t cooperate with the police, or Don’s daughter Donna, who tries to visit him with Anne. The idea of this guy being some kind of sneaky criminal mastermind is ludicrous. I wouldn’t trust him to open a tin of beans.

Anyway, Carole’s public image was obviously tarnished by the first season of Tiger King, so efforts were made to present her in a different light, including an appearance on Dancing with the Stars that is an extraordinary thing to behold, but presented an opportunity for John Phillips and Don’s daughters to pull a masterfully petty move in airing a commercial appealing for information about Don’s disappearance — and Carole’s potential involvement — during the broadcast. This is the kind of so-ridiculous-it-must-be-true stuff that is only possible in today’s world of binge-ready streaming, social media, and sensationalism, and it’s the kind of thing Tiger King burns for fuel. It’s such a good documentary series because it’s deliberately structured as a neverending rabbit hole of eccentricity. Just when you think you’ve seen the weirdest development the case has to offer, it introduces a “psychic investigator” by the name of Troy Griffin.

This guy is absolutely hysterical. He claims to have found buried bodies solely using his intuition, and when he’s taken out to the lake at Seffner, he says, entirely without irony, “There’s some bad juju here,” and then literally vomits and starts crying. I shouldn’t laugh, but when this insane charlatan started babbling about finding an empty chicken container — “Did you guys notice I’ve been talking about chicken all day?” — I just dismissed anything involving him immediately.

“Bounty Hunters” ends with a couple of developments. One is that John Phillips is hired by Joe Exotic after the whole Dancing with the Stars commercial debacle, despite him and the family “looking like hostages” during it. And would-be hitman Allen Glover has something to say. Apparently, when Joe hired him to kill Carole Baskin, he instructed him to cut her head off. But Allen states directly to the camera, with tears in his eyes no less, that he never had any intention of killing anyone — that Joe Exotic was framed from start to finish.

You can stream Tiger King season 2, episode 3, “Bounty Hunting”, exclusively on Netflix.

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